Sshhh!…what’s real reason why Comcast is buying NBC? TV Everywhere of course.
G.E.’s decision to sell NBC Universal reflects the shifts in fortune that are battering the media business, especially network television. The broadcast division of NBC Universal could lose big, a remarkable downturn for a network that had earned roughly $400 million in past years.
Problem: the Internet has fractured audiences and few viable business models have emerged for the distribution of content online.
What the new Comcast venture looks like: Comcast will contribute its own cable channels, which include Versus, the Golf Channel and the E Entertainment channel, and a modest amount of cash, about $5 billion, to a joint venture in which it will own 51 percent. G.E. will retain a 49 percent stake, and would likely reduce its ownership over several years and in theory, Comcast-NBC Universal will be a company separate from Comcast’s cable assets.
Some interesting possibilities could be:
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD.
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD to all active basic cable subscribers that buy HBO and SHOWTIME or purchase at least 1 on-demand film per month.
Buying Netflix: Stream movies through this service coupling subscription on cable with certain consumer benefits through Netflix, i.e. day and date with DVD or perhaps even a scheme to stream films just released in theaters 1 time only to ‘frequent flyers’ or renters of the service, but at a big ticket price on-demand.
But here is the real reason why Comcast is buying NBC: TV Everywhere. “TV Everywhere” model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases and compete. In a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a TV Everywhere world, Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package. Comcast risks becoming a “dumb pipe,” providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself, thus NBC/Uni. More to the point, a consumer COULD elect to turn off his cable basic subscription and turn around and subscribe to TVE thereby allowing him to see his basic cable channels but on his PC, phone etc. Now that Comcast owns content and some of those channels it can monetize the consumer whether or not they subscribe to the cable in the house or not.
In a TV Everywhere world, it will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise and websites with similar content. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content – and right now, that’s Hulu ( and who knows, maybe Clicker ?). If Comcast buys NBC, Comcast will own about 1/3 of Hulu, providing an ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere it has a very passionate and loyal audience.
This online world is a very splintered and exceedingly difficult to measure, especially when you are asked to sell advertising against the content. The real problem is a lack of tools to properly bring the right economy of scale to online which equates to buying media in a traditional way. Therefore, instead of trying to monetize a cable channel online one by one, with TVE, you can monetize the whole package in a similar way that cable already is monetized. Its a structure already understood by the consumer now. Bundle a bunch of cable channels for a small monthly fee and let consumers have access to them everywhere, including home or NOT.
The Internet while very big, does not yet command the equivalent kind of media rates and fees that Cable or Network gets today. No agreed upon means of measurement exists to give advertisers a definitive ‘rate card’ for the internet. There is no Nielsen for the web, (yet, although it was announced yesterday by Nielsen that eventually, there will be). comScore, even though they do a great job with data can’t extrapolate the data to equate to viewers ‘watching a TV set’. Making the comparison when placing an ad on a video online and the same ad on TV impossible to compare TODAY. Hulu streamed 855 million video stream last month. What does that really mean? Did all 855m viewers who watched those streams watch ALL of each stream or were many of them counted as they ‘surfed’ through Hulu clicking on various videos for a few minutes or even seconds – were they counted among the 855m? What does 855m stream equate to in Nielsen ratings/eyeballs? Does anyone really know? Nielsen despite its shortcomings has some measurable statistics for this, but its still not apples to apples.
Furthermore, Hulu still has a long way to go to prove it can monetize its audience as effectively as its parent companies can do with programs viewed on-air. Why? Its uniques are flat. Hulu’s uniques are scarcely better than they were 6 months ago. Unless the unique number jumps in the coming months (which I doubt it will), Hulu will have to meaningfully enhance its value proposition to grow its audience (can you say “Hulu to-the-TV-via-Xbox/Roku/Apple TV/etc?”) says Will Richmond of Videonuze (Nov 30th 2009). He goes on to ask “What happens to Fox’s programs on Hulu should Rupert Murdoch expand his focus beyond his newspapers’ online content going premium? What if Disney decides to launch its own subscription services? What if Google or Microsoft or Netflix (or someone else) decides to open their wallet and make a bigger play in premium online video?” And, these questions become somewhat less mysterious now that Comcast has bought NBC/Universal.TV will NEVER be the same again.
Comcast chart above courtesy of VideoNuze.com
Posted via email from williamsager’s posterous
Virginia Execution of of John Allen Muhammad SHOULD be on PPV
Since we still live in ancient Greece and execute individuals in front of a private audience, we might as well open this up to the privacy of our own homes. So, if you wanted to, you could ‘buy’ on demand the execution. The 
proceeds should go to the families of the victims. Morbid? Perhaps. However, technically do-able and my hunch is that it would be widely subscribed to. Each stream would be individually watermarked across the entire screen with a see-through watermark dissuading further distribution, but not preventing it. OK, what do you think?
What Content Can NOT be Pirated, Is still 100% Free and Millions of People See DAILY?
It’s not the movies. They are all over everywhere. It’s not music. It’s not photo’s or documents. C’mon…Its TELEVISION! What I mean is this: TV isn’t pirated out of the box because the episodes of LOST or V or the last NY Giant football game (sorry, I’m a fan) debut on TV. I can’t find the upcoming episode of V which is on ABC tommorrow -10/10/09 – on any torrent or newsgroup. It may show up AFTER its debut on TV, but never before. There are no ’screener’s’ floating around the newsgroups. This being said, the content on these networks becomes all that much more important. And, I believe because its so accessable, that’s one of the reasons its NOT on the newsgroups or torrents as much as the movies and music are.
-Coming up:
Wal-Mart and Target – The last DVD standing
Are CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX must haves ??
I’ve taken quite a bit of time off from posting any thoughts, but the media business is changing so rapidly that I just had to put a few thoughts down for kicks.
TV Online – It’s NOT on TV and worse, everyone appears to be all the same.
At first, CinemaNow and MovieLink were the 2 places for online consumption of movies at first, then TV shows were added. Well intentioned but clunky and smothered with restrictions on viewing the content, it was accepted only by the most avid online enthusiast with the fastest connections to the Internet. You could download Indiana Jones ( 30-45 days AFTER its DVD release) and by the time you were done, Indi 2 was in the theaters. It was painful. But your yardstick for measuring success was simple – in the number of downloads. 
Then came the notion of streaming video just like youtube was doing (and much illegal content on youtube ) and then came a crop of youtube look-alikes, then joost appeared and a whole slew of joost-alikes came along. Once the social networks hit big, there were social networks built around content, blip TV, veoh’s, revvers, myspaceTV, etc. Somehow, someone felt that if I was online at Facebook or a MySpace member then I must also like to watch a certain genre of films or type of TV show (which is mistake # 1) and that I’d watch it online (mistake # 2). The recommendation engine ‘notion’ applied to me in this way was all wrong! 
Soon, established brands launched their own ‘branded’ version/site of online TV and movie consumption; iTunes, amazon video on demand (downloads) 
, hulu, reeltime, tidaltv, jaman, babelgum, TheWB + and more. Then we have all the set-top ‘boxes’ that arrived, X-Box downloads, Vudu, Roku/Netflix, 
the late Akimbo, TiVo, Comcast, ATT-U-Verse and the list goes on. Now, after all of this ‘launching’ and all of these press releases and all of these disparate systems, I have 2 observations to make. The FIRST is that unfortunately, EVERYONE SEEMS TO HAVE MUCH OF THE SAME MOVIES AND TV SHOWS. There is no real ‘differentiation’ other than the domain. No one ‘programs’ a service anymore. It seems depending on the service and who they have been able to strike a deal with, they simply put every single piece of content up online in mass, categorize each piece with the usual tags like ‘adventure’, ‘sci-fi’, ‘suspense’ etc. Each is advertising not hundreds, but ‘thousands’ of titles…4,500..10,000, 40,000 +. There is no ‘guide’ other than search fields embedded somewhere on each site for the consumer to ‘search’ for his or her movie or show. The SECOND is that despite all of the many services calling themselves ‘online TV’ or ‘ IPTV’, NONE OF THEM ARE ACTUALLY CARRIED ON TELEVISION. Unless you’ve hooked up your PC/MAC to your LCD, your computer bound. With the exception of a few ‘boxes’, most online TV websites require you to watch and pay to watch this content on your computer. I can see watching some of this content for free on my computer, but I have a hard time seeing myself paying for any of it, especially since most of it I can already get on my cable or satellite TV in one form or the other (and I can find it easier with the TV guide on my cable or Direct TV). So, why should I be excited to see ‘Tropic Thunder’ show up online on my 21” PC screen for $ 5.99 ? It will show-up on my 45” LCD TV set anyway on PPV for the same fee, but I can sit on my couch and watch it. 
UGC is easy to understand why its so popular. Most UGC is 2-3 minutes in length, hardly an hour and a half movie.
There are a lot of people online and yes, movies and TV shows are popular. But the reason most of us are online was not to find a movie or TV show. Initially, it was for email and for information and communication. It still is and even more so. It’s simply that our connections are that much bigger today and therefore this allows for the ‘broadcasting’ of video whereas years ago, it just was a ‘pipe’ (sorry, bad joke) dream.
Now, if one day, somehow I can get access to any movie or TV show I can think of sent directly to my TV set, (using the internet as a dumb pipe) regardless of what pay or basic cable service had the film under license… now that’s something I’d pay for or watch with commercials. I’d love to collectively watch some of Hollywood’s grandest and biggest failures that I choose like Michael Cimino’s ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘George Lucas’s Howard the Duck’ , Warren Beatty’s ‘Ishtar’, ‘Under the Volcano’ etc. Or, watch all of the ‘Thin Man’ films (William Powell, Mynra Loy and Asta). Ahh…maybe one day.
Hurricane’s worth watching.
police car chase
There is this urge in all of us to watch others dilemma’s, happenstances and circumstances that are out of our control or for that matter, anyone’s control to see what will happen and when it will happen. If there was a 24/7 car chase channel on TV that did nothing but let us watch the myriads of car chases from TV news helicopters that occur every day on our highways and city streets, it would be a ratings star. We’d use it as TV wallpaper. Leave it on, glance over at the screen once and a while all the time hoping to see some kind of climactic and safe (?) resolution to each chase. Well, there is no ‘Chase Channel’ cable TV or internet channel today but there is a new web site that allows us to better watch and observe a Hurricane. And its got great graphics and data, along with a nice light degree of interactivity. So, instead of only being able to see the giant ‘green swirling’ white clouds repeated 10X backwards and forwards on the evening weather portion of the news, try this site called ‘Stormpulse‘. Here’s a pic/preview. There’s nothing to download, which is even better.
Stormpulse partial screen shot
The coming demise of Cable TV channels
Though Verizon is often associated with its phone networks, the company has been busy building up and promoting its advanced FiOS infrastructure. This high bandwidth service provides one of the most advanced packages of high definition television, high-speed Internet and phone service for customers in areas where it is available. For example, FiOS Internet download speeds currently max out at 50 megabits per second, compare that to traditional cable company speeds which are often 1/10th of that or less.
So, you’ve just gotten FiOS at your house. You now have 50mbps coming into your home. So, you set your TiVo to record from your TV through cable the newest episode of ‘Lost’. Oh, and just this past weekend you also got a brand new 56″ LCD TV and hooked your FiOS into the set so you could launch a browser on your new LCD TV set. Cool. Now you can surf the web on your new LCD. So, you’ve recorded ‘Lost’ on the TiVo and went to bed. The next day you come home and are ready to watch the episode of ‘Lost’ you recorded on your TiVo the night before. You sit down in your living room, turn on your big screen TV and discover that your browser is still open and lo and behold there is last nights ‘Lost’ episode right there on Hulu (or iTunes ). And its free (with a few 30 sec. commercials running ). So, you click play and sit and watch ‘Lost’ with online commercials (about a total of 8 mins of commercials as opposed to 22 mins on standard TV).
Then it hits you. Since your TV viewing habits are time-shifted anyway with TiVo, and now that you have FiOS and have a virtual TV, why should you pay for Cable? I’m mean, nearly all the cable networks and Broadcast nets are beginning to re-broadcast everything online. So why pay for Cable TV when you can view your favorite shows anytime by launching your browser on your big TV?
This merger of the TV and the internet will happen, but ONLY when the pipe into your home blurs the lines between TV and the web. Its happening today and most of us can’t see it yet, but we will. And this will be an issue for cable companies who down the road will be nothing more than a pipe into our homes. The web will carry into our homes what cable TV carries today. Its just a matter of time.
The above scenario is a true one, my in-laws have this today in Florida through FiOS. 
In trouble within 5 yrs and big trouble within 10. Its the pipe.
First there was HBO and Showtime, then came the internet with Kazaa and Limelight, but who was REALLY the first and better than all the rest put together? It was the ‘Z Channel’.
Part 1
Full disclosure first: I used to work for Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable and they used to own and promote the Z Channel, The Country Music Channel, Home Theater Network, Satellite News Channel and The Travel Channel as well as many radio stations. 
In the 1970’s Jerry Harvey programmed movies for the Beverly Canon, a repertory theater in Los Angeles, and made a name for himself when he booked the uncut version of “The Wild Bunch” and its director, Sam Peckinpah, delivered the print in person. Z Channel had been started in 1974 by a cable franchise as one of the country’s first pay-movie channels. In 1980 Harvey wrote to Z’s new owner, Select TV, complaining that their programming was terrible. He was hired. Under Harvey, the Z Channel became a 24-hour mix of films by auteur directors like François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa, little-known European movies, popular fare like “Silver Streak” and “The Empire Strikes Back” , Fast Times At Ridgemont High, The Road Warrior: Mad Max 2, and, late at night, soft-core offerings. Harvey soon found another niche for the channel to fill. After “Heaven’s Gate” was re-edited and shortened in a failed attempt to reverse its course as the biggest flop in movie history, he decided to play Michael Cimino’s four-hour original version. The reassembled movie received admiring reviews, and the Z Channel was regarded as a new kind of salvager.
While working at Westinghouse, I was tasked with launching Z Channel as a satellite national pay TV subscription channel and boy, was I jazzed to get this done. I thought the Z Channel was the nest best thing invented for pay TV next to the folded napkin. The problem was, once the ‘local’ footprint left for a ‘national’ footprint, different rules of the game in Hollywood applied and Z was not given the kind of licensing rights for films that they were granted locally. This made a subscription look more like a poor man’s HBO or SHOWTIME and that would not have worked on a national level.
“The whole idea of a director’s cut being something you could actually market came out of his rescue of ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ ” Mr. Feeney said. “It’s an important measure, because home video, home viewing via pay TV, these things have really revolutionized how we perceive movies.” (Feeney or F.X. – was a brilliant reviewer working for Z Channel at the time).
Harvey went on to do the same kinds of unusual broadcasts with Wolfgang Petersen ’s six-hour “Das Boot,” originally a mini-series in Germany; Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 14-hour “Berlin Alexanderplatz”; and the five-and-a-half-hour version of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900.” (In “Z Channel,” Mr. Payne brags that he still has the “1900″ he recorded on VHS at the time.) Harvey played the cut and uncut versions of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” as a double feature to show the difference in quality.
Harvey also gave us sneak previews of every academy award nominated film each year in January, right after the nominations came out. Those of us who were subscribers in southern California looked forward to that week on Z. Somehow, someway Harvey was able to get a copy from each of the studios months BEFORE the film was released on VHS. A totally unprecedented event in the world of pay TV, this was the ultimate cool factor for a pay TV service at that time. No other Pay TV service was doing this or even thought of it.
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