Can cable TV keep its ‘teflon’ coat afloat?
Cable TV. Its been resilient during the recession. Almost like Teflon. Will online video providers emerge as direct competitors or complements to the $69.8 billion U.S. TV subscription market? If over 88% of all the full-length TV program episodes available in the $10/mo subscription service are already freely accessible on Hulu.com. For clips, it’s almost 98%, then why would I buy a subscription to Hulu +? “Online video is not a substitute” for multichannel video programming, Comcast recently wrote in a filing to the FCC responding to complaints from competitors this month. “In addition, several impediments – technological, pricing related, and rights related – make it highly unlikely that online video will become a substitute” for such service “in the foreseeable future,” it continued.
So is cable really safe? Today, Google announced that it will jump into the pay-per-view market, via YouTube. Newer film titles would cost about $5–a bit more than the $.99 to $3.99 YouTube charges for the older films currently available in its fledgling pay-per-view catalog. Presumably, there will be some sort of integration with Google’s forthcoming Google TV platform, though details are scant. If the company does manage to roll such a service out, we’ll soon see YouTube going head-to-head with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu–and in a big way.
Yes, Google’s got reach and numbers. Yes, they could market this probably better than most. But the cable TV business has been in this market for years. And they are terrible at marketing the service and always have been. Part of the problem has been a rights issue with Hollywood (the old ‘day and date’ issue with DVD releases). Day and date issue won’t go away either, in part because Red Box is putting too much $$ into the studios pockets and it a hedge against Netflix. However, Netflix is also putting a lot of $$ in the same pockets. And, most of us still prefer the large flat screen TV over a laptop screen any day. But one of the most fervent and least discussed impediments happens to be pay TV. The likes of HBO and they swing a very big stick. HBO gets rights to movies, and BIG titles, for many, many years. Its the ‘pay-tv’ window that keeps coming back and back and back. You see HBO has 41+ million, HBO and Cinemax U.S. subscribers (as of December 31, 2009). At an average subscription fee of $12.00 per month, that $492,000,000 million dollars PER MONTH in subscription fees. Yes, part of that goes to the cable ops for carriage, but thats still a BIG number. So, when HBO goes shopping for films and locks up movies, it does so for years. AND, those rights prevent many forms of PPV exposure, both online and terrestrial.
Which bring me back to cable TV as a whole. I recently disconnected 3 out of 4 HD boxes in my home and got rid of my last ‘extra’ tier. I have kids in the home, so luckily Nick Jr. and Disney for Kids is carried on plain the old basic tier (are you listening cable operators?). Had those two channels been on a tier that I would have to pay for, guess what? I would be buying that tier. Other than that, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox are the most valuable channels to me. Why? I can’t rent tonight’s Network Television programs. I might be able to see some of them online but I’m back to my computer screen for that. The Emmy’s, Football, Baseball, The Academy Awards, local news and network news and other programs of this sort we all get for free – today. And its all delivered over cable TV.
Until I am able to transmit an online URL to my flat screen TV, Hulu +, Netflix, Google TV, Apple TV and the rest are not compelling enough to pay…$5.00 a movie or $ 10.00 a month on top of my basic cable subscription. So, yes, cable TV is fairly resistant to the recession and ‘online’ competition today. My guess is that Steve Jobs will announce a ‘rental’ service for Apple TV. And yes, others will come. But for today, cable is king.
And please don’t move Disney for Kids and Nick Jr. to another tier!
Google TV
This speaks for itself in case you have NOT seen it. Not sure if I need 5,785,912,012 new channels, but it is coming.
What is ‘Real-Time’ search? And why should I care?
So you’ve heard of real-time search yet? If you haven’t, you will in the next 30-60 days. Its the newest iteration of search and its actually quite different in that you can compare and contrast the 2 ‘search’ methods like a river and an ocean. RTS (real-time search) is like a blast of information that you first retrieve in real time and then this information gets crawled and categorized on the web for permanent storage and retrieval by you or I. Similar to a financial stock trade, RTS happens in realtime, without the information being stored, processed or archived or categorized. Then once the information gets handed off to traders who need it ASAP, it gets archived for retrieval later. So, the same set of data is retrieved in RT as can be found later archived on the web – river and the ocean ( a great metaphor – Thanks to Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta).
So Google amasses data, stores it, catagorizes the information for future retrival and serves it up upon your request. RTS happens before this – it happens the instant its published on the web. So retriving, storing and ranking data is not part of RTS. That’s traditional search as we know it. So the value to this new search algoythym is that there is no lag time for the latest information. Its just there and it DOES give us a great deal of value. Using the plane that went down in the Hudson River a bit ago as an example. The very 1st report and photo came froma twitter feed, not a website that spouts news, i.e. CNN, etc. The final few moments of the Lakers playoff games and score where captured in RT on twitter. The final score reported on the cover of Yahoo a mere 15 minutes after the games end. American Idol winner? So this information is helpful (but not essential) to know ASAP. So, being able to search social media ‘chatter’ (I call it) becomes something very ‘now’ and ‘immediate’. It brings together the traditional web and a users social graph so to speak. Every month, something like 200 million users log-in and chat on Facebook, 46 million users tweet, and many more IM each other or text about something. This ‘something’ is now getting captured and offered up to us in RT. The combo of the two systems is really where it comes all together. RT search is not social search either. You don’t just get RT search because you ‘crawl’ facebook, friendfeed and twitter chatter. RT search is NOT replacing traditional search – its an add on component that will allow us to further monetize the phenomenon known to all of us as the internet. The list below will only grow exponentially in the coming months. The race is on to master RTS.
http://collecta.com/ – the one to beat for right now – collects all feeds below and then some
http://www.oneriot.com/ – searches Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services
http://tweetmeme.com/ – searches twitter and re-tweets popular tweets on twitter
http://search.twitter.com/ – searches twitter directly
http://www.scoopler.com/ – searches Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious
http://blogsearch.google.com/ – search the web and only blogs
http://friendfeed.com/ – filters search results by who my frineds are and what they are saying on twitter, friendfeed
Passed links vs. search..which gets more traffic? The answer might surprise you!
Fred Wilson had an interesting post this week about traffic, social nets and Google. The basic question was this: Has the time come where suggesting a link to your friends in a social network or a blog (Facebook, MySpace, Linked in, etc) actually registers more traffic to that particular page rather than a google search would? Are visits from Facebook greater than visits from Google overall? Is the ‘social ‘ discovery of links and pages on the web more powerful than simple searches? It seems that depending where you are and what you are pointing people to, traffic flows differently. If its on a content site (games, etc) those links and suggestions result in about 25% more traffic than those sites and links having nothing to do with content (i.e. B2B sites). So, if you’ve got good content, it wants to be shared by all.
They ‘tracked the passing-along of links pointing to two campaigns running concurrently for the same product (different micro-sites). One of them had a good offer but so-so content while the other campaign had great (funny) content with no offer. The % of unique visitors generated by the pass-along of links to the good offer was under 10% while the traffic from the pass-along of the links to the good content was over 40%. The campaign with good content also got significantly more traffic overall. What data like this suggests is that the prediction you make in your deck about dollars shifting from media to content is a really good one in my opinion. As marketers compete for the attention and interest of their audience, the best way to do this is through content that’s delivered to them via their social graph. This already happens if the content’s good. There just isn’t enough of it.’
Over the course of the last 6 months or so I realize that I’m getting more and more information from my friends, IM, twitter, email, RSS, and Facebook than I am from searches. And the way I search and what I search for has changed. I’ve gotten most of the links for content from my friends through one messaging tool or another. Yes, I got the link for the workprint of ‘X-Men Origins’ just about the same time I read the story about it. And I never searched for it – it came via a socially passed links. And more to the point, when I looked specifically on google for that link, I had a tough time finding it.
Overall, The most popular mode of sharing is email (25% of visits from passed links come from links shared through email), followed by blogs (18% of visits from passed links come from links shared through blogs), video sharing sites (14% of visits from passed links come from links shared through video sharing sites like YouTube), and forums/message boards (11% of visits from passed links come from links shared through forums and message boards). Social networks account for around 9% of the traffic from shared links. These stats are courtesy of Meteor Solution ( http://www.meteorsolutions.com/)
gPhone update 3
(Courtesy of Bob Cringely):There are two gPhones 
slated for release with the first coming in September and the second probably not appearing until after Christmas. Given that the first is the high-end model and the second is cheaper, Google will probably expect to make as much money as possible on the higher-margin units at Christmas before revealing the budget model even exists. How Apple-like, eh?
Both will include WiFi, which makes me wonder if a VoIP client will be there, too. The high-end phone will look somewhat like a Blackberry Pearl, but the screen flips up and there is a keyboard for texting. No word on pricing for the high-end phone, but the second model is intended to be less than $100 — AFTER Christmas.
The actual manufacturer of these gPhones will be Samsung (rumors to this point had indicated HTC, so this is a change) and Google is still talking with both T-Mobile and Verizon as potential carriers (rumors also said Verizon had passed — not). That means there are both GSM and W-CDMA versions in the works. Given AT&T’s success with the iPhone I can’t imagine Verizon will let the gPhone pass, but it will be interesting to see if Google will be able go with a nonexclusive deal and get both U.S. carriers.
Nice ‘eh?
We are getting closer…GoogleSonic TV sets!
We are swiftly approaching the convergence of the TV and the web. Google 
is helping this transformation by signing a deal with Panasonic today as reported by Duncan Riley at GigaOm to build and sell ‘Google’ TV sets. They are suppose to include access the YouTube, Picasa Web Albums and probably gmail, but this is not confirmed. What is confirmed is the blending of TV and the web. This implications of this deal are clear – once consumers get access to larger pipes (bandwidth) to the home, TV will be delivered over the internet. One year, we will all wake up and there will no longer be any difference between ABC-TV that I’m watching on my computer screen in my office or ABC-TV that I watch on my large flat panel TV in the living room which is framed by and delivered through a browser. I can’t wait!
- _qoptions={ qacct:"p-d7bzz7sxAJLKE" };
