There’s been a flood of video news over the last two weeks, and mostly your friends here at Zatz Not Funny have been too busy to cover the excitement. We promise to do better, but in the meantime, here’s a quick round-up of happenings.
Austin gets Google – It won’t happen until 2014, but Austin is the next city on the list for Google Fiber, and Google Fiber TV. Exact pricing isn’t nailed down yet, but execs say it should stick close to the Kansas City deployments where gigabit Internet service is $70/month, and Internet plus TV rings in at $120 per month.
Vdio launches – The founders of Rdio have introduced Vdio, a new streaming VOD service. It’s no Netflix killer, however, as Vdio comes without a monthly subscription option. Like Amazon VOD or iTunes, everything you want to watch through Vdio requires an individual paid transaction. For now, you also have to be an existing Rdio subscriber.
Simple.TV gets funding – The folks at Simple.TV have branched out from their Kickstarter roots and raised a very official-sounding sum of $5.7 million. Dave says that “by incorporating just a single OTA tuner and requiring owners supply their own USB storage, [Simple.TV] remains the province of geeks.” But the company apparently has bigger plans for its DVR streamer. The founder says the company wants to add cable and OTT content, and extend the software to third-party hardware.
Cablevision goes outside the home – This headline definitely got obscured by other news. Cablevision has started to offer a very, very small amount of its pay-TV content to subscribers on mobile devices outside of their home Wi-Fi networks. Don’t put away your Slingbox yet, however. So far the only video available on the go is content Cablevision actually owns, including News 12, News 12 Traffic & Weather, and MSG Varsity channels.
AT&T plans new streaming service (maybe) – AT&T sent out a survey to U-verse subscribers last month asking how they’d feel about a new streaming video service that would come in at a “significantly lower price than traditional pay TV services.” Such an offering would include a Wi-Fi router and 6-Mbps Internet, and there would be no usage-based pricing for data. Hmm. Color me skeptical. Even if AT&T does go through with something like this, I’d be shocked if the company could come up with a compelling content bundle at a compelling price.