Industry Archives - Page 9 of 145

Verizon Jumps on Data Bundling Bandwagon

ESPN is considering it. AT&T has discussed it. And now Verizon is jumping on the bandwagon. At a financial conference yesterday, Verizon EVP and CFO Fran Shammo stated explicitly that we’re likely to see content and wireless data delivery bundled together from certain content providers. In other words, a network like ESPN would cover the … Read more

Microsoft: A 10-Year TV Timeline Before the Xbox One

Microsoft Xbox One as TV

Microsoft has been a frenemy to the pay-TV industry for a long, long time. So now that the company is taking over TV interfaces with its Xbox One HDMI pass-through feature, I thought it worth looking back over the company’s (sometimes torturous) history with pay-TV providers. (Note: Nothing on Media Center PCs or WebTV here. That’s another story.)

Timeline

2003 – Microsoft TV Foundation Edition Launches in June at the National Show
Microsoft’s software platform for the cable industry includes an interactive program guide that operators can use to create “On-Demand Storefronts”

2004 – Microsoft and Comcast do a deal to bring the Foundation software to subscribers in Washington state
Microsoft gets its big break in the cable industry
Microsoft TV Foundation guide for Comcast
2006 – AT&T launches U-verse IPTV service with Microsoft inside
U-verse is the first major IPTV service in the U.S., and it runs on Microsoft code

2006 – Microsoft announces the Xbox Video Marketplace
New video store cements the Xbox as a Trojan Horse in the living room

2007 – Comcast gives up on Microsoft’s Foundation software
Microsoft’s short (and not sweet) dance with Comcast ends

ESPN Considers the Whispernet Model

There was a big story out last week that a lot of people missed. According to The Wall Street Journal (as reported by electronista), ESPN is weighing the idea of subsidizing users’ wireless data for mobile streaming of ESPN video. That would mean that the sports network would pay for bandwidth used by consumers to watch ESPN … Read more

VOD Gets Fast Forward Back

You know how annoying it is when your on-demand session times out and you have to start a show over from the beginning? Oh, and then you find out fast forwarding has been disabled? Well, fear no more. The cable gods are hard at work fixing the problem. The SCTE, a standards body for the … Read more

The Prettiest Smart TV Interface You’ll Never Get to Buy

Hillcrest Labs stopped working on its HoME interface for smart TVs close to seven years ago. And yet the UI is still better than most you’ll see on the market today. I stopped by the Hillcrest Labs HQ earlier this month, and, as part of the visit, got a full demo walk-through of HoME. The … Read more

Why Aereo Is/Isn’t a Big Deal

Aereo has been super savvy in grabbing headlines of late. If you’re not caught up on the story so far, the start-up TV company has expanded to a few new markets, won another round in court against broadcasters, and left Fox, CBS and others frothing at the mouth and threatening to move free programming over to a paid service model.

The thing about Aereo is, while the conceptual disruption is huge, the impact of the actual service is still vanishingly small.

Aereo is a Big Deal because broadcasters make bundles of cash from retransmission agreements, and the Aereo model creates a workaround for any service provider that wants to distribute free broadcast channels without paying a licensing fee.
Aereo is a Big Deal because, as I wrote recently for Light Reading, it opens up the debate over whether there will continue to be a role for free TV in the Internet era.
Aereo is Not a Big Deal because the service itself has serious limitations. In addition to being available only in a few markets, the service is getting poor marks for video quality.
Aereo is Not a Big Deal because it is only one of several disruptors on the television scene. Start-ups and stalwarts alike are experimenting with new services and pricing models – from Simple.TV, Skitter, and NimbleTV to Dish, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable.

While Dave and Mari Were Napping…

Google Fiber TV

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.

ACA Summit Matthew Polka Ajit Pai — ACA President Matthew Polka with FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai

You know how a lot of consumers are fed up with rising cable bills, excessive program bundling, and limited access to TV shows? It turns out independent cable operators feels the same way.

Over and over and over at today’s American Cable Association Summit – a policy-driven event put on by the independent cable organization – I heard frustration about the state of the pay-TV business from small cable companies who feel outgunned in a market where the content bills just keep going up. Indie operators have two main complaints, and they’re both related. First, they have no leverage in licensing retransmission agreements because content owners can threaten TV blackouts. Second, in some markets, broadcasters are working together to set licensing fees, a practice the cable operators consider to be collusion. According to Wide Open West CEO Colleen Abdoulah, collusion is taking place in 20% of TV markets and is driving up retransmission costs by at least 22%.