Technology360

Broadcast TV's Demise More Fiction Than Fact

Dan Rayburn, executive VP for StreamingMedia.com, writes:

... I have over 60 season passes in TiVo. Going through all of them yesterday, more than 90% of the shows I watch are not available online anywhere. And the ones that are, like content from CBS and NBC, do not show up right after they are broadcast and typically take days if not longer to appear on the web. And in the case of something like 60 Minutes, one story alone is chopped up into 10 different video segments on their website and encoded at a pretty low bitrate. And sports, well forget that. No NFL games are available on-demand the next day online and while the MLB games are, it requires a subscription.  ¶  The demise of the TV is overrated and many in the industry keep saying the same thing as if they have to say it just to be cool. I keep hearing people in our space says things like "I don't even need a TV anymore, I'll just watch all my video online". ...

Link: The Business Of Online Video.  --Dennis

BBC iPlayer puts rocky start behind...

Daniel Langendorf writes:

The BBC heavily promoted its iPlayer, an online TV catchup service, on TV, in the press, and online during the holiday season. The effort seems to have paid off. Sort of.   ¶  UK Internet traffic to the iPlayer Website increased “14-fold between the week ending 8 December 2007 and the week ending 5 January,” according to Hitwise, and the service ranked as the 80th most visited Website in the U.K., having peaked at No. 62 on New Year’s Day.  ¶  It appears that the BBC has recovered from its rocky online TV start. When the initial iPlayer was launched, it was not without controversy. The BBC was accused of being corrupt due to the player’s reliance on Microsoft technology and lack of Mac/Linux support. UK ISPs were also critical of the iPlayer’s use of peer-to-peer technology and potentially high bandwidth costs. ...

Link:  last100.  --Dennis

Steve Jobs' Video Dreams

Peter Burrows and Ronald Glover write:

... While Apple's dramatic comeback thanks to digital music and the iPod reads like a Hollywood screenplay, Jobs' efforts in video-land won't follow the same script. Indeed, two years after Apple added video capability to its iPod line and began selling a smattering of shows and movies on the iTunes Music Store, its share in video remains minuscule.  ¶  Jobs is planning a major offensive to try to change all that, with at least some of the details to be announced at Macworld on Jan. 15. Most important, he plans to launch a movie rental service on iTunes for the first time. Apple is in furious negotiations with top studios to make their new releases available for the service, as well as for sale. BusinessWeek has learned that Apple is nearing deals with Warner Bros. ... and Paramount ..., and has already secured deals with Disney ... and 20th Century Fox. Apple is also planning a major upgrade of the slow-selling Apple TV set-top box. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.  --Dennis

Horowitz Assoc.: news video has top online usage

Horowitz Associates has released a study of broadband video consumption on multiple platforms.  It's the first I've seen that gives information about the relative popularity of what people are using.  And it's good news for those of us in public media.  News video segments top the list, moving from 22% to 36% online weekly usage, 2006 to 2007.  That beats "non-professional online videos," which doubled from 15% to 30%.  The report overview says this about motivation:

... While consumption of broadband video has grown, the study shows that television is still the preferred platform for traditional TV content.  The vast majority (70%) of Internet users who watch TV online say do so because they missed the episode on TV.  About two out of ten (18%) of these respondents say they watch TV shows online to watch them a second time (after having watched them on TV), or that they watch TV shows online just when they happen to find them or when someone else tells them about them (20%).  Conversely, one out of ten (13%) Internet users who watch TV shows online say they watch them directly online, and not on regular TV. ...

Link:  Horowitz Associates.  Thanks to Craig Birkmaier on the OpenDTV mail list.  --Dennis

PBCore metadata standard

The PBCore metadata standard is, IMHO, one of the most important and, arguably, the most progressive thing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has ever funded.  It's a necessary tool to enable public media to transition to the digital age -- assuming, of course, that public media's managers can find their way to the digital age. 

Marcia Brooks is directing the project from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH in Boston and she's written a great article on it for the December 17th issue Current, the public broadcasting newspaper.  Current seems to delay posting its articles online for some reason, so the the Public Television Digital Archive has posted a copy of Get going in metadata today with this amazing free kit! online [PDF].  Nice job, Marcia, and thanks to Nan Rubin for posting this important overview.

Update 29 December 2007:  I see that the PDF has also been posted at the PBCore web site.

Update, 4 January 2008:
An HTML version is now posted at Current.  --Dennis

MovieBeam closes. Bad news for Vudu, AppleTV?

Steve O'Hear writes:

... MovieBeam, an early attempt at creating a consumer facing set-top box and accompanying movie service, has closed its doors after fours years in business.  ¶  Originally founded by The Walt Disney Company and later sold to U.S. video rental chain Movie Gallery, MovieBeam was designed to bypass Cable and Satelite providers by beaming movies wireless into the home. The set-top box came with dozens of movies already stored and ready for rental (at $5 a pop), with forty new titles refreshed each month. In total the device could store around a hundred movies at any one time. ...

Link:  last100.

O'Hear thinks this may be bad news for other new entrants in the set-top box market.  I don't doubt that set-top box fatigue (what David Liroff calls the "topple factor") is at work here.  But MovieBeam also faced impending delivery problems.  It was distributing movies over the small amount of ancillary data capacity of analog television stations, including many public television stations.  Those analog transmitters are going away in 13½ months.  While the replacement digital system has much more capacity, it will also, IMHO, come with much greater support costs due to the fragile reception issues inherent in the ATSC digital standard.  I wouldn't be surprised if that figured in MovieBeam's decision also.

But even without the set-top box, video downloading is a problematic business.  After less than a year, Wal-Mart has announced that it's closing its video download store.  Again, Steve O'Hear writes:

... In a bid to get all of the major studios on board, while at the same time not compete negatively with Wal-Mart’s traditional DVD sales, the service was plagued by high pricing and a ridiculously large dose of DRM (one Windows-PC only). It was doomed from the start. ...

Link:  last100.  --Dennis

Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape

Denise Caruso writes:

Inexpensive broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.  ¶  And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network. ...

Link:  New York Times.  --Dennis

YouTube Dominates Internet Video, with 27.3% Share

Steve Donohue reports:

... YouTube controlled 27.6% of the market, followed by MySpace.com parent Fox Interactive Media, which had 387 videos viewed for a 4.2% share.  ¶  They were followed by Yahoo Web sites (381 million, 4.1%); Viacom Digital (304 million, 3.3%); Time Warner Network (198 million; 2.2%); Microsoft sites (194 million; 2.1%); Disney Online (92 million, 1%); ESPN (89 million, 1%); Comcast (52 million, 0.6%); and CBS Corp. (48 million, 0.5%).  ¶  Nearly 136 million Americans, or approximately three in four U.S Internet users, viewed online video in September, comScore said. ...

Link:  Multichannel News.  --Dennis

The Google Set-Top Box

Erick Schonfeld writes:

Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen).  It even goes way beyond the development of a Google set-top box, which has been hinted at in the past.  In fact, Google may very well want to do to the set-top box what it is trying to do to the mobile phone with its Android operating system—create an open-source hardware platform and attract developers to build applications on top of it. At least that is the unconfirmed rumor I’ve heard from two knowledgeable industry sources. ...

Link:  TechCrunch.  --Dennis

BBC, ITV and Channel 4 form on-demand service

BBC News reports:

The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are to launch a joint on-demand service, which will bring together thousands of hours of television programmes in one place.  ¶  The service is set to go live in 2008 and will offer viewers access to current shows and archive material. ...

... The three broadcasters currently offer their own separate on-demand services.  ¶   The BBC's iPlayer and ITV's catch-up service will continue to exist along the new online "aggregator", which will provide a complement to the established providers.  ¶  However, Channel 4's 4oD will no longer be a standalone service once it is incorporated within the project.  ¶  Programming from all three broadcasters will be available for free download, streaming, rental and purchase via the internet, with expansion on to other platforms planned. ...

Link:  BBC.  U.S. public broadcasters are about to be lapped again.

Updated 29 November 2007:
Also see Ryan Jarrett, Finally some sense - BBC, ITV and Channel 4 catch-up services to unite.  Link:  last100.  --Dennis