Tag video-on-demand

Unbundle Me!

It’s been five years since Congress told cable companies that they needed to start offering programming in “a la carte” mode (in other words, letting subscribers buy the channels they want instead of the “tiers” of programming which have been the standard for years). At the time, the cable companies made some appropriate noises in front of a couple of committees and then went on their merry way ignoring the mandate.

But the one-two punch of technological innovation and economic collapse have caught up with cable companies. Video-on-demand services have gone from being something only a few nerds could use to being on the cusp of mainstream. Even as people were getting pissed off with Netflix’s unwelcome announcement last week about spinning off their DVD rentals, every industry analyst agreed that the move was necessary to allow them to focus on their far-more-valuable streaming video business and that DVDs are in their death throes. Plus none of those pissed off people were banging on Comcast’s door as an alternative to Netflix. “Cord-cutting” (cancelling cable TV and going all-Internet for TV) is still more niche and unlikely to result in mass defections any time soon, but it has taken a bite, too. My long-time blog buddy Solonor took the plunge a couple of months ago and wrote an excellent summary of the experience.

As more and more American households find that they have less and less disposable income, people are discovering that the can live without the Full Monty cable package, too. Though it’s one of the last things people will cut back on, things are getting so tough that the time of reckoning has come for cable, and it’s actually costing them more customers than cord-cutting. Our personal experience is illustrative: we were paying Comcast $189 a month for their phone-internet-TV bundle WITHOUT any pay channels or added tiers and switched to Verizon FiOS and reduced our monthly bill to $82/month for essentially the same service. Given that Verizon’s Internet-only FiOS package is about $60/month and that we would still end up paying for a slate of VOD services (Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc.), we’re pretty much getting the best possible deal.

So earlier this week, the industry made a huge about-face and said that they would develop a la carte offerings as a way to retain customers who can no longer afford such an expensive service. I remain suspicious; last week’s announcement from Comcast that they would offer a low-cost Internet package to people who couldn’t afford the service came with an awful lot of caveats, requirements, and other gotchas. My gut tells me that any initial a la carte offerings will fall under the same sort of weaselly bullshit, but it’s a start, and they may ultimately have no choice given the increased competition.

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They Call It A Medium Because It Isn’t Rare And Is Seldom Well-Done

So I’m still thinking about the possibility of dumping cable television and going all-Internet for our video watching. The poll I posted last week is open until the 15th if you care to add your vote, and the results so far are identical to that 1-in-8 statistic I cited, so it’s clear that the early-adopter penalty is still in effect if I go down that road, but the path seems clearer all the time.

I came across this article in The Economist that considers the difference between the way people say they watch television and the way they actually watch television, and concludes that sixty years of plopping your butt down and watching whatever is on continues to be everyone’s preferred method, regardless of how much you might honestly think you do it differently. The reason, say the various experts in the story, is not our unwillingness to learn how to program the VCR/TiVo/BitTorrent software but rather because we’ve adopted television viewing as the canvas for our interpersonal interaction with family members. The programming isn’t even the point, it’s the opportunity to spend time with the wife and kids. While the implication here is that people won’t change the way the interact with video content, I’m not so sure that’s true. If the delivery mechanism is not the most important element in that system, it shouldn’t take much to make a change to the delivery mechanism, as long as it is not too disruptive of the real desired outcome (the human interaction). Drawing again on the example of our experience with Netflix streaming, on many Saturday mornings, I sit with Charlotte in the living room and spend time with her while she watches cartoons. Last Saturday, we sat together as usual, but instead of watching whatever was on Disney Channel at the moment, Charlotte watched a couple of movies via Netflix, and when she got bored with that we moved on to some things I had recorded on the DVR. We were still watching the television and using the time to be together, but the delivery mechanism had been completely supplanted by the on-demand model.

This BoingBoing post by guest author Craig Engler (who is an executive at the SyFy Channel), argues that prognosticators who say television is being killed by the Internet have several key points wrong, the biggest one being that most (but not all) online video content is still the sole purview of the traditional television model: without the broadcast and cable networks, there is no content, and to this point nobody has developed a business model that can sustain the cost of producing content without the well-established business of ad-supported traditional television. Unlike the Economist article, Engler’s article says that the mechanism is very important, but it’s at a level of remove from the viewer. However, both articles basically make the same point that the overall system is nowhere near as transformed as the people at the top end of the J-curve would like us to think.

But maybe ten years from now, the generational shift alone might swing the balance of that equation. This short article by analyst Henry Blodget links to a much more detailed analysis of the media consumption of children aged 8-18, which paints a picture of a near future with a new generation of young adults so thoroughly media-saturated that they could very well transcend all of the media behaviors that have come before.

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Cutting The Cord

Making the rounds this week is a report from media analyst consulting firm Yankee Group that says 1 in 8 cable TV customers will cancel or downgrade their service in 2010 due to the increasing availability of video content online and/or the seemingly endless increases in cable service prices.

Here’s a little poll for those of you stopping by. Please feel free to add your vote. Poll remains active until midnight of May 15:


The idea that someday people would be able to get all of their television programming completely on demand from some video service in the ether has been talked about for the last fifteen years, but has really only been viable for the last couple of years, since it took most of that time for all of the necessary elements to converge — bandwidth, service providers, ubiquity of network access, quality of video streaming, etc. Like a lot of other disruptive technologies, it needed some sort of Gladwellian “tipping point” to cross over from something only being done by a small niche market of early adopters to being “the next big thing”, and it seems that the tipping point isn’t so much the tech as it is the economy. Who wants to pay a couple of hundred dollars a month for a bajillion channels they never watch, when they can get almost anything they want free or for a lot less? That appeals to just about everyone, not just me and my web-savvy buddies.

I had been fence-sitting about going cable-free for a long time. I’ve followed the development of the various online content services and the associated developments like set-top boxes for several years, but every time I thought I might be ready to pull the trigger, my inner geezer convinced me that sticking with things the way they were was just fine. However, a few weeks ago we started using Netflix’s instant streaming using our Nintendo Wii, and the experience has been so positive that it may be the necessary shove I needed. To be sure, there are still just enough hoops to jump through that I think the 1-in-8 rate isn’t going to go much higher, but that’s still a pretty remarkable number.

I know that most of my friends and family are a lot further behind on the adoption curve than I am, so I am interested to see what you all might have to say. Thanks in advance for taking a moment to answer the poll.

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Follow-Ups

Here are some follow-ups to various things I’ve posted about:

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Linkapalooza: Sci/Tech

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and All The Ships At Sea…FLASH!

  • At NewTeeVee.com, Chris Albrecht offers a catch-all summary of the various Video-On-Demand set-top boxes on the market. The transition from DVRs to VOD is already moving very rapidly; there are 11 different products on this list. Given the consistent resistance to DVRs from the broadcast television networks and their continued efforts to thwart people from skipping commercials, subscription-based VOD should see very easy acceptance from both the consumers AND the content providers. However, the lure of subscription-based VOD really threatens the continued existence of local television stations, who could find themselves without network affiliations down the road and have nothing to put on the air.
  • One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floorthis blogger at PhysicsWorld.com has found a recent paper that outlines a method for forming diamonds by growing crystals in tequila . (via) Apparently the process, which is called chemical vapor deposition, is well-established, but the scientists who wrote the paper say that tequila is an excellent choice of ethanol because of its wide commercial production and low cost. And, yes, the two men who wrote the paper ARE from Mexico. So, fellas, when your GF starts hinting around for that rock, just buy her a bottle of Jose Cuervo and tell her to hit the laboratory
  • Engadget links to this article at Laptop Magazine which offers the first hands-on review of the Garmin Nuviphone I have been ga-ga over since I first read about it six months ago. It’s only a tantalizing taste, though, because most of the device’s functionality wasn’t available in the prototype the blogger got to play with. That doesn’t bode well for the original plan to launch the Nuviphone in the U.S. in Q3, but maybe they can still get it out the door in time for Christmas sales. If this materializes with all the features they promise, I would gladly forget all about the new iPhones.
  • Remember VeriChip? I wrote about them last September when they announced a plan to implant RFID tags into Alzheimer’s patients in Florida. Well, CASPIAN, the anti-RFID consumer watchdog group, has released a scorching report that takes the company to task for covering up research that showed a link between implanted RFID chips and cancer, lying and deceiving investors about their products and profitability. The company is going down in flames and trying to save what it can by selling off the implant chip business, but this new publicity from the report sure won’t make that any easier. A link to the full report from CASPIAN is in the Wired article in the first link, or at CASPIAN’s own website.
  • Are you ready for indestructible paper? This ScienceNOW article describes a new process for making paper that breaks up the cellulose fibers from wood pulp into substantially smaller lengths that present papermaking processes do, creating nanofibers that, when combined with a substance called carboxymethanol, have a tensile strength eight times greater than that of ordinary paper and more than double the strength of cast iron. Let’s see Dick Cheney shove THAT in his Vice Presidential Paper Shredder.
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Copper-Heads

Engadget reported yesterday that cable provider Cox has disabled the ability to fast-forward through commercials inside video-on-demand programming from ABC and ESPN (both of which are owned by Disney, BTW).

As the Engadget post recognizes, it’s now merely a matter of time before this spreads to anything that you might choose to download and watch through your cable-provided DVR. And don’t be smug if you’re not a Cox customer, because the others will be right behind them.

Meanwhile, if you recall the brief post I had recently about “channel bonding”, I was wailing over the unlikelihood of faster broadband.

But Engadget also reported yesterday that Comcast has demoed the exact same technology. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts only went so far as to say that the modems might be available in this country in a “couple of years”, so I guess we’ll all have to hold our breaths just a little longer.

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