Tag: video on demand

Comcast And AT&T: Gobble, Gobble, Gobble

Comcast wishes to become a vertically integrated behemoth. They will dictate programming and technology because their fingers are in every pie.

Even today they double dip, charging Netflix for services I’m already paying for. That’s what monopolies do! How can you say no to the company that stands between you and your customers?

New Haven Comcast officeComcast is in the process of swallowing Time-Warner. AT&T has just announced they’re purchasing DirecTV. Maybe I just haven’t looked closely enough, but where is the benefit to citizens?

The biggest trend in American business over the past few decades has been consolidation. Much of it is subject to regulatory approval. It should be subject to regulatory scrutiny. That part seems sorely lacking.

Comcast wishes to become a vertically integrated behemoth. They will dictate programming and technology because their fingers are in every pie.

Even today they double dip, charging Netflix for services I’m already paying for. That’s what monopolies do! How can you say no to the company that stands between you and your customers?

Comcast as every incentive to do more of the same, protecting their legacy businesses through the terms they offer consumers.

Will programming and distribution deals be structured, as many are now, to protect Comcast’s cable TV business? Why do I even ask?

There was a time in America when bigger was better. Charles Erwin Wilson, nominee for Secretary of Defense in the early 1950’s famously tried to hold onto his GM stock while in office&#185.

Because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.

att_logoAnd maybe, sixty years ago, it was. Employment scaled up as company’s did.

Is there anyone who actually believes the Comcast or AT&T acquisitions will have a positive outcome for America? More choice? More employment? More investment? Better technology?

“This compelling and complementary combination will bring significant benefits to all consumers, shareholders and DIRECTV employees,” said Mike White, president and CEO of DIRECTV. “U.S. consumers will have access to a more competitive bundle; shareholders will benefit from the enhanced value of the combined company; and employees will have the advantage of being part of a stronger, more competitive company, well positioned to meet the evolving video and broadband needs of the 21st century marketplace.” – AT&T press release

The important part is there in the last sentence:

a stronger, more competitive company, well positioned

We’re already dealing with companies treading very close to the anti-trust line. Take the bundling of cable TV services, where I have to buy loads of channels I don’t want to get the ones I do.

Typically, the “tied” product may be a less desirable one that the buyer might not purchase unless required to do so, or may prefer to get from a different seller. If the seller offering the tied products has sufficient market power in the “tying” product, these arrangements can violate the antitrust laws. – Federal Trade Commission

The system is being gamed and these mergers and acquisitions will only make things worse. It’s time to put a stop to it.

&#185 – He sold his stock before his appointment, but after his confirmation hearing.

Why TV As We Know It Is Doomed

old televisionGrowing up in Queens we had seven TV channels to watch. In the general scheme of things the Fox family had it good. Most folks could only get three or four. Some got fewer.

In the early 50s the world came to a halt when Milton Berle was on. If you didn’t watch Uncle Miltie Tuesday at 8:00 PM, you were out of luck!

Dependence on schedule began to change with the VCR in the late 70s. Enter time shifting, plus you could buy or rent a cassette and watch on-demand.

There was an impact on TV, but not much. VCR technology was good, not great. Programming a VCR complex, as Billy Crystal demonstrated in City Slickers.

DVRs changed that. Schedules began to lose importance. Even live TV could be paused.

Viewers liked and embraced DVRs. Schedules were inconvenient. Video on demand was what they wanted, even if they couldn’t always verbalize that desire.

According to Nielsen, 50.3 million of the nation’s 114.2 million homes with a television have a DVR — nearly half of all homes with a TV set. Although DVR penetration is starting to slow, people are using the devices more. CBS research indicates DVR usage has grown 6% this television season compared with the same period last season. – rbr.com November 2012

In my mind there was always a roadblock preventing us from moving beyond the DVR–bandwidth.

One broadcast station can serve thousands or even millions of consumers. Random access, video-on-demand requires a full individual stream for each screen.

Never in my wildest dreams did I believe there would be enough bandwidth to support this profligate streaming. I don’t feel that way anymore!

It’s true all the major Internet providers have imposed or are considering imposing caps, limiting how much bandwidth you can consume. But a funny thing has happened in the last year. Their grousing has quieted.

Yes, Internet providers want to charge for bandwidth, the way the electric company charges for kilowatt hours. But I no longer hear anyone talking about bandwidth shortages, even as bandwidth skyrockets.

When you can watch any show. any time on any device, will you still need traditional television? Going forward, why will we need any network, cable or broadcast? TV stations are expensive relics with huge institutionalized overhead. That’s not a formula for continued success

They’ve already reacted to reduced audiences by upping their spot load–carrying more commercials per hour. Against on-demand content that seems like a fool’s errand. Unless their business model changes radically, TV is doomed. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

Back in 1999 this Qwest commercial probably made no sense. It’s actually a prediction of the reality I’ve just written about.

I love TV. I will be sad to see it go.

A Quick Glance At The Future

I went out to dinner last night with Noah Finz. He’s our sports director at the station, a very nice and smart guy, but a technophobe.

We got to talking about where technology is going, especially as it concerns communications. I was surprised at how interested he was… or how well he feigned interest.

With that in mind, I thought I’d write a little about where I see things going. Please remember, the past has taught us it’s really tough to accurately predict the future. This is even tougher than weather prediction because this part of the future will not replicate past events. And, remember these predictions are coming from someone who loves technology. I’m trying to hold back my bias.

To me, the key to the future is not in speedier processors nor more memory and storage, though certainly those things will enter the picture. The big deal is bandwidth. It is the 500 pound gorilla in the room.

Bandwidth limitations is why you ‘only’ receive 150 TV channels. Bandwidth bottlenecks are why your computer often waits while it is plucking data off websites or the Real player takes so much time caching those first few seconds of video before it starts to play.

With enough bandwidth, television can become a one to one medium – unlimited video on demand. Any show or any video source can be run when you want it. Desperate Housewives Tuesday at 8:41 AM. Why Not?

Already, even if you’re not in their home market, you can still watch your favorite baseball team play, because nearly all the games are available over the Internet. CPTV, here in Connecticut, sells a package of UCONN women’s basketball games for out-of-towners with high speed Internet access.

The radically changes the paradigm of commercial television. Without a mass audience watching the same commercial at the same time, television begins to lose its unique sales appeal. There will have to be another way to pay for this.

It could be commercials, maybe a subscription, or maybe both. We’re not limited by what we’ve seen in the past. Sending video as a digital stream rather than analog allows for the integration of other info.

This ability to receive the programming you want, when you want it, will turn television into a narrowcast medium rather than its current broadcast model. There is a demand for shows on knitting or cars or computers or… well you get the idea. Those sharply targeted programs&#185 will steal audience from today’s broadcasts.

In the pre-cable days there were a lot of shows that, today, look like they were ‘going through the motions’ to fill the time. I’m afraid we’ll look back at what’s on TV now in the same way, as soon as the floodgates open in this new communications world.

The days of high production cost TV production are limited. Gresham’s economic laws will be seen affecting TV. We’re already seeing some of that as networks run more ‘cheaper to produce’ reality shows and re-run more of primetime TV.

Is there a long term viable business model for shot-on-film hour long dramas? I’m not sure.

Today, local television stations serve two general purposes. They produce and distribute local programming, like news, and they act as a distribution channel for nationally networked and syndicated shows. With video on demand, I can’t see why these program producers will need local stations.

Local stations will be forced to be local stations. Those who don’t will be marginalized out of profitability. This has happened in radio over the last 40 years.

That doesn’t mean the economic model of local TV is gone. It just means stations will have to better understand how to produce more content for local consumption. I also think they’ll have to shift their focus from producing programming to fill their air time to being producers of programming for anyone who will distribute it.

Today’s TV stations will have to turn out video streams the way Chinese companies, like Twinhead, turn out laptops. The majority of Twinhead’s products are produced for others with other people’s brands on them. You might be using one now, with no way to tell. Twinhead’s expertise is production… as is today’s TV stations.

A newspaper in Wilmington, DE is already producing video webcasts of local news. The New York Times is expanding their multimedia content online. I think, in the mature model, newspapers will provide the news and a company with video production expertise will package it for them.

All this is happening and we haven’t even hit our stride as far as bandwidth is concerned. My cable modem at home now brings in data nearly three times as fast as it did a year or two ago. It’s getting to the point where it will soon become faster than my home network can handle!

The price of this bandwidth will do nothing but fall for the foreseeable future. There are many factors at work here.

First, there is the onrush of technology which promises to deliver bandwidth wirelessly. That should add another level of competition for the cable and legacy phone companies.

Next, there is a vast network of ‘dark’ fiber – glass lines that have loads of capacity but have never been used. My guess is, the intercity capacity of unlit fiber is a multiple of what’s currently in use.

The people who really need to be worried are the incumbent wireline phone companies. More bandwidth is their enemy. Already they are facing competition from broadband VOIP companies like Vonage, with cable companies jumping in.

When there are wireless access ‘clouds’ of connectivity over most areas, portable VOIP phones will trump cellular and wired phone networks with cheap and probably unmetered, flat rate, phone service.

It is a very exciting, very different world of telecommunications that’s right around the corner.

&#185 – I am having trouble using the word program here because it describes something that might not be. When content becomes very narrow and the viewer becomes very focused on its content, the formality of a ‘program’ may vanish altogether.

Have I Just Seen the Future of TV?

Helaine and I watched the Philadelphia Eagles game this afternoon. It’s a game that wasn’t on local TV. We don’t have a satellite receiver, nor does my cable company have an out-of-town game package. We watched because a friend, near Philadelphia, fed it to me.

The concept is the important thing here, but first, I have to explain the technical specs. His PC has an ATI All In Wonder 8500DV video card, with a tuner. He downloaded Microsoft’s free Windows Media Encoder, which will serve streaming video. We also temporarily ‘punched a hole’ in his firewall/router, so an arbitrary port we chose would be available to me in Connecticut. I connected with Windows Media Player, directly, without first using my browser.

The video he sent was encoded at a fixed bitrate of 148 Kbps, 15 fps, with 320×240 resolution. We tried a higher bitrate first, but his connection wouldn’t keep up and the video was unacceptably choppy. Next time we’ll play around with the compression parameters to find something custom which works better.

What I saw was sharp when the camera wasn’t moving, pixelated with minimal change or motion, and choppy with heavy motion. I was easily able to read the on screen graphics for time, down, etc. The audio was perfect. Other than the initial point of connection, we never hit a point where I had to wait while the stream was buffered.

This is video on demand in the simplest and most pure sense. It was what I wanted when I wanted it.

Because my friend has limited upstream capacity on his cable modem, what I watched was compromised. But, it was so close to being very good, that I can assume it wouldn’t take much more bandwidth – maybe 250 Kbps – to hit a sweet spot. You’ve got to figure variably compressed video, streamed using Windows Media server or another server allowing a variable bit rate, would give even better video for the same bandwidth.

The fact that the video wasn’t too large on my 1400×1050 laptop screen was fine. Unlike ‘television’, I was watching this up close. In fact, while the game was on, my wife and I were doing other things on the computer, though the game was our primary focus.

It isn’t necessary to have full screen video to have a meaningful streaming experience!

Whenever I read about the promises of VOD or using the Internet for television type programming, I hear about the huge bandwidth necessary for full screen, VHS quality. It’s just not necessary. In fact, full screen might be a detriment.

Computers are viewed differently that TV’s. It’s an immense difference. We’re closer and we’re not adverse to doing multiple tasks on the screen at once. Someone is going to have to step up to the plate with that realization and then VOD over an IP network will be reality.

After the game, I asked my wife if she’d be willing to pay for a live concert, by an artist she really likes (Rick Springfield), at this smallish screen size, but with sharp video and good stereo audio? She said, “yes.”

To me, this makes some events economically feasible that wouldn’t make sense as free TV, basic cable or even pay-per-view. There are undoubtedly other applications, with similar niche audiences.

The current streaming technologies from Microsoft and Real make it easy to integrate advertisements in many different ways, often without stopping or disturbing the actual desired content.

This is the 500 channel universe we’ve heard about. Except, it’s really an infinite channel universe.

Of course, there’s a question of whether there’s enough bandwidth right now to handle it. The answer’s probably no – but – there is a plethora of ‘dark’ fiber, waiting to be powered up. If video is the next killer app for computers, there will be plenty of incentive to unleash enough bandwidth to enable it.

I work for a local TV station, but I don’t consider this our ruin. If we’re smart and aggressive, we’ll be able to sell the content we already produce, and specialized content that demands our localized expertise, in this new venue.