It used to take NBC a very long time to get clips from “Saturday Night Live” on the Internet, which is the whole reason that “Lazy Sunday” became a YouTube sensation.*

Fast-forward to today, where NBC and its social media helpers distribute SNL clips in the wee hours of Sunday night, just as soon as the show wraps up. Even more advanced: Now NBC has started showing clips of bits that never made it to TV, period.

Here’s a couple of sketches that never aired on last week’s season finale. But you can see them because they made it to the dress rehearsal, which the show tapes in its entirety.

I think the stand-up satire is pretty great (loved the Bears fan and the Denis Leary guy, in particular). Media omnivore Jason Hirschhorn loved the Jay Pharoah thing.

And that’s what’s great about SNL on the Web in general — it lets everyone pick and choose their favorite bits, Chinese-menu style, and skip the many parts they don’t want to watch. Adding in stuff that was good enough to get staged but not good enough to make the 90-minute broadcast can only be a good thing. If you’re a certain kind of SNL fan, you’ll even get a kick out of dress rehearsal versions of stuff that did air.

I don’t know how long SNL has been putting up un-aired bits on the Web — looks like for all of the past season, at the very least. Perhaps NBC PR will get back to me before the holiday weekend with a more accurate date. But regardless of when they started, I hope they keep it up.

*Which you could argue is one of the reasons Google ended up buying the company for $1.6 billion. Which led to NBC and Fox creating Hulu as an anti-Google/YouTube hedge.

You can make that case, and if you want to hear an entertaining rendition of it, check out Peter Lauria’s live-on-tape report from Times Square here.

But here’s a less-dramatic reading of Ergen’s ambitions: Like everyone else in America, Ergen likes TV, a lot. He just wants to pay less to watch it.

TV programmers have been able to push up the price for their shows, year after year, even as the audience for those shows gets smaller and smaller. Their latest move: Convincing pay-TV operators to pay them “retrans” fees for the four broadcast networks, which are theoretically supposed to be available to anyone in the country, free of charge.

The pay-TV operators have been taking those fees and passing them along to consumers, because it’s easier to do that than anything else.

And in that context, Ergen’s ad-skipping feature makes a lot of sense, because it freaks the networks out, for obvious reasons. So if the courts let it stand, then Ergen finally has real leverage when it comes to fees: If the networks won’t lower them, he’ll torch their ads.

There is another way to negotiate with the programmers: Just don’t carry their stuff at all. And that’s what Ergen is threatening to do with AMC TV, the people who bring us “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” While a bunch of us really love those shows, the majority of pay-TV viewers don’t watch them, so Ergen’s bet is that he can live longer without AMC than it can do without his fees. But he can’t afford to do that with the broadcasters, who still have mass reach.

Still, note that even in that case, Ergen isn’t saying that he doesn’t want to carry “Mad Men,” et al, on his service — he just wants to pay less for it.

“Obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today,” he told investors earlier this month.

My hunch: That’s what he’s saying to NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC, too. He’s just using technology and the courts to deliver the message.

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

The consortium includes Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc. Consumers will be able to access more than 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in the New York area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia. Most of the operators offer the service only as a perk to current broadband subscribers — but Time Warner Cable has offered a pay-as-you-go option for non-customers as well.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But here it is: See, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell are older, healthier, and they go to Broadway shows, not movie matinees. But they’re still rapping about Rachel McAdams.

The best line, of course, is Samberg’s shout-out to Google — a reminder that he’s still waiting for a “fxxxing YouTube check” for the first “Lazy Sunday,” which NBC doesn’t allow on the video site anymore.

But Samberg’s other viral videos are all proudly displayed on a YouTube channel. And while the clip helped build YouTube into a powerhouse that sold to Google for $1.6 billion, it also helped revive SNL and build Samberg’s career. So everybody did just fine.

And here’s the original (which on NBC’s SNL page, at least, came bundled with an ad for… “Sister Act”).

In short, Comcast is moving from a flat cap to usage-based billing.

It is scrapping its 250-gigabytes a month cap and trying a couple different plans in its place. One version will introduce a 300-gig cap and offer additional tiers of service, with bigger caps, along with the ability to buy more chunks of data. Another version also uses a 300-gig cap and the ability to buy incremental blocks of data as needed.

Comcast, which has more than 18 million high-speed data customers, says it will experiment with the two plans in some of its territories.

It also says that in markets where it’s not trying the new plans, it will scrap its data cap entirely until it settles on a new plan.

The move comes as Comcast has taken heat about the way it treats data on some of its proprietary video services, in particular the Xfinity app for Microsoft’s Xbox console.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has argued that because Comcast doesn’t count data delivered via that service against its usage caps, it is violating “net neutrality” principles. Comcast says it’s in the clear because that data isn’t delivered via the public Internet but on its own network, and doesn’t plan on changing its policy.

Comcast executives referenced the debate as they introduced the new plans today. “There has been a little bit of noise along with the Xfinity Xbox plan,” said Comcast EVP David Cohen. But Comcast also insists that only a small handful of its users come close to using the 250-gig cap today. The company says median usage runs around 8 gigabytes to 10GB a month.

Other broadband providers, notably Time Warner Cable, have also moved to usage-based pricing. If you take the companies at their word, they’re doing it because they need to charge more money to provide more bandwidth because “our network is not an infinite resource, and it is expensive to build it,” as Cohen says.

But usage-based pricing is also a useful tool to have available if cable TV users really do stop subscribing in large numbers, and replace their pay TV packages with Web video. That gives the cable (and telco) guys a way to replace the video revenue they lose with more broadband dollars. A bonus for them: Broadband subscriptions are much more profitable than video subscriptions.

[Shutterstock/Janos Levente]

Verizon announced its plans to buy the spectrum last December as part of a broader pact that includes a joint marketing agreement. It has said that, should regulators allow it to complete the deal, it will sell off some other spectrum, but T-Mobile and others have noted that the spectrum Verizon is offering to sell has some serious drawbacks.

T-Mobile and its partners, the Rural Cellular Association and Public Knowledge, plan to announce the new group — the Alliance for Broadband Competition — at a teleconference on Monday. Speakers will include the head of the RCA and Kathleen Ham, T-Mobile’s vice president of regulatory affairs.

Sprint is also a member of the group, though it is not listed as among the participants for Monday’s event.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

The Philadelphia-based company continued to shed video subscribers but said the rate of subscriber defections slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter to 37,000, a 5 percent improvement.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That brings Simulmedia’s total raise to some $27 million over three years. That money is going into Morgan’s take on “targeted” TV advertising, which promises to merge Web-style targeting with traditional TV ads.

There are lots of people chasing targeted TV ads, and to date none of them have gotten very far. Canoe Ventures, a consortium led by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and the rest of the cable industry, just imploded earlier this year.

The TV guys will probably get there, someday. But in the meantime, Morgan is trying a slightly less ambitious version that he says can work now.

Rather than trying to deliver customized ads to every TV viewer based on their individual set-top-box data, Simulmedia uses some set-top-box data (which it gets from providers like DirecTV, TiVo and AT&T) to try to find undervalued ad inventory. So, in theory, it can help an advertiser find a cheaper way to get in front of a specific audience it wants to reach.

If that sounds a bit like Web advertising, that makes sense. Morgan built two pioneering Internet ad companies — 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda, which were acquired by WPP and AOL — before tackling TV.

Simulmedia says it has run 200 campaigns for 24 brands since it pivoted to its current model (it had originally tried using the same technology to target TV advertising for TV programming), and Morgan says he is “very close to profitability.” This is the second time Morgan has funded the company with an inside round: The same group of investors put in about $9 million a year ago.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Five years after investing in Hulu, Providence Equity is getting its return and going home. The private equity group is striking a deal with the rest of Hulu’s owners — Comcast, Disney and News Corp. — that will let it cash out its 10 percent stake.

People familiar with the negotiations tell me that Providence and its fellow investors are pegging Hulu’s value at $2 billion, as Bloomberg reported earlier today. I don’t know if that means Providence will take $200 million, or if it structured a deal that gave it some sort of preferred return over and above its equity stake. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

In any case, the real question to answer now is what this means for Jason Kilar and his management team. Kilar and his employees also have a chunk of equity in the company, but haven’t been able to get their hands on it because there hasn’t been a “liquidity event.”

So now that there has been one, will Kilar take his payout and leave? There have been a lot of folks, myself included, who assumed he was leaving for a long time — especially during 2011, when he angered his media company owners with a “Jerry Maguire” memo questioning the basic business practices of the TV business, and when Hulu briefly went on the sale block.

But come 2012, Kilar was still there. And starting with his appearance at our D: Dive Into Media conference in January, he’s been loudly extolling Hulu’s virtues and its track record, in a variety of public appearances.

When I talked to Kilar a few months ago, I tried to get him to tell me if he was sticking around. Here’s what he said then: “I’m not the kind of guy that dabbles in a lot of things; I tend to go deep. And I’m a big believer in the long term. … It’s highly amusing to read all the stuff that gets written, but all I’d ask … is judge me on my history.”

Which doesn’t really answer the question at all. I’ve asked him and his reps for a more concrete answer today. Not surprisingly, they’re staying quiet.

Here’s that interview again. The part where I confess to being wrong about his exit date is right at the beginning. The part where he won’t talk about his exit date is at the end.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120426/providence-gets-out-of-hulu-what-about-jason-kilar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120424/netflix-says-its-back-to-boom-times-wall-street-isnt-convinced/ http://allthingsd.com/20120424/netflix-says-its-back-to-boom-times-wall-street-isnt-convinced/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:01:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=199399 Netflix says 2012 is going to be great. Wall Street remembers 2011.

And that’s the explanation for last night’s stock swoon, which followed a solid-to-good Q1 earnings report from the video company.

Specifically, Wall Street doesn’t believe Reed Hastings’s prediction that his company will add seven million customers to its U.S. streaming-video service this year. For a couple reasons:

• That’s the same growth rate that Netflix had back in 2010. But back then, Netflix was growing from a much smaller base. At least as important: Back then, it had the subscription streaming-video business more or less to itself. Now it is facing competition from Hulu, Amazon and Comcast, with more — like a Redbox/Verizon service — on the way.
• Hastings says Netflix can pull this off, even though next quarter’s growth will be much slower than Wall Street was expecting. Netflix has a complicated explanation for this, involving “seasonality” and the size of the company’s subscriber base. Short version: Trust us, it will all work out in the end.

These are the kind of arguments that Hastings used to win, because Netflix was one of tech and media’s most amazing growth stories, and Hastings had the aura of a man who could see around corners.

But 2011 changed all that. Now, if Hastings tells Wall Street that he can see the future, he’s going to get plenty of pushback. Yesterday’s conference call was dominated by questions about his 2012 growth predictions. The first one set the tone: “Why are you so confident?”

That one will take about eight months to explain. Let’s see if investors are that patient.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120424/netflix-says-its-back-to-boom-times-wall-street-isnt-convinced/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:35:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196858 The great thing about Saturday Night Live and the Internet is that you don’t have to watch Saturday Night Live anymore. Because of the Internet.

Do whatever you want on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, you can see all of the show online, legally, for free. Your cyber-pals will have already told you which clips you should seek out, and NBC has gotten so good at this that it now hires a “social media marketing” firm to seed the Internet with embeddable highlights.

Easy. Except when it’s not. Periodically, NBC ends up in a position where it can’t use the Internet to distribute its TV show, because someone complained about a copyright issue after the show aired.

And that’s apparently what happened this weekend to this excellent “Game of Thrones” parody, which you can see on Gawker but not NBC or Hulu.  (The clip stays up on Gawker, apparently, because either no one complained or because Gawker hasn’t listened to their complaints; I’ve asked Nick Denton and company for clarification.)

So who griped? Not us, say HBO’s reps, and that makes sense, since the clip is first and foremost a great ad for the pay channel.

“Rights issue,” says NBC, without elaborating. So the best guess here is that someone who owns the rights to the “Game of Thrones” soundtrack complained.

That soundtrack comes from LA-based Varèse Sarabande, which specializes in film scores and soundtracks, and is distributed by Universal Music Group. I’ve asked Universal to confirm that the label complained, so we’ll see. But it’s a pretty good bet, because music rights are almost always the cause of this kind of thing.

That’s because music is particularly difficult to clear, even by byzantine digital media rights standards. Each song is composed of two elements, the recording and the underlying composition, and each one of those elements can have multiple owners and … ugh.

Amazing anything gets cleared, ever. And for a show that gets built on the fly, like SNL does, every week, even more amazing.

So nothing to do here, I guess, but shrug. Things are a lot better than they were way back in 2005, when NBC was befuddled by “Lazy Sunday” and YouTube. And at least Saturday Night Live’s writing staff can still point us to the Gawker clip, which has racked up some 300,000 views in the last couple days.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/mog-heads-to-australia-with-help-from-a-telco/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/mog-heads-to-australia-with-help-from-a-telco/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:52:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196798 Last year, subscription music service MOG got a boost from Facebook. Now it’s hoping for another one, by opening a new territory: The U.S.-based service is announcing plans for an Australian launch.

MOG will open up for business in conjunction with Telstra, an Aussie telco; a partnership will let Telstra subscribers add MOG’s monthly service by checking a box on their billing statement.

These kinds of packages aren’t new, and several services — including Spotify in Sweden, Deezer in France and Rhapsody with Metro PCS in the U.S. — have been able to juice their subscriber numbers using them.

But it’s worth reminding people that the subscription music industry places a whole lot of faith in this model, and that lots of people think the subscription music model won’t really get mass adoption unless big service providers like Comcast and Verizon give it a similar boost.

The problem with that line of thought: Lots of digital media services have been trying to get the Comcasts of the world to add them into their system for a very long time. And with one brief exception — when Comcast and Rhapsody linked up — that hasn’t happened.

Still, they’re all trying quite hard to hammer out new deals.

Speaking of new deals: When is MOG going to close its deals with headphone maker Beats? I wrote about this one three weeks ago, and was told the deal was in progress but not closed. People familiar with the (proposed) transaction tell me that’s still the case. We’ll check back in a few weeks …

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/mog-heads-to-australia-with-help-from-a-telco/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120415/reed-hastings-goes-after-comcast-again-on-facebook-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20120415/reed-hastings-goes-after-comcast-again-on-facebook-again/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:03:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196517 Two weeks after Reed Hastings called out Comcast, using his personal Facebook account to vent at the cable company, the Netflix CEO is at it again.

Today’s blast is similar to last month’s in both form and content.

Hastings is once again accusing Comcast of violating “Net neutrality” principles by favoring its own Web video service over those from Netflix, HBO and Hulu, when it comes to data usage. (Last month Hastings also complained that he couldn’t watch HBO GO on his Xbox, but that’s been resolved.)

Here’s the text (you can also see a screenshot, below):

Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles.
Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.
I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.
When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.
For example, if I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.
The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.
In what way is this neutral?

Reminder: Hastings has all sorts of ways to complain/lobby Comcast and/or regulators (see, for instance, the new Netflix PAC). I continue to find it fascinating that he’s taken to posting on Facebook for this stuff. (Another reminder: Hastings is a Facebook board member).

Last month, I asked Hastings and Netflix PR if they wanted to expand on his comments, but never heard back. I’ll let you know if that changes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120415/reed-hastings-goes-after-comcast-again-on-facebook-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120413/live-on-tape-via-the-internet-wikileaks-the-tv-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20120413/live-on-tape-via-the-internet-wikileaks-the-tv-show/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:10:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196244 Sooner or later, everyone with access to a video camera, a couple chairs and a broadband connection decides they want to get into the Charlie Rose business. Hence “The World Tomorrow,” from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Here’s the promo, released this morning. The first episode, featuring Assange chatting up bird-flipping Super Bowl performer M.I.A., runs April 17. WikiLeaks says you should be able to watch it on the Web and via Russian cable news network RT, which you can get in the U.S. via the Dish Network and on some Comcast and Time Warner Cable systems.

WikiLeaks says Assange has taped 12 of these so far. I hope one of the guests turns out to be Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120413/live-on-tape-via-the-internet-wikileaks-the-tv-show/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120404/maybe-youre-going-to-have-to-pay-for-cable-after-all-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20120404/maybe-youre-going-to-have-to-pay-for-cable-after-all-silicon-valley/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:47:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=193192 Cue up the righteous anger, Silicon Valley. Here comes a clueless effort by a big, dumb TV channel to portray you world-changers as a bunch of vapid schemers. Even worse, it’s from a cable TV channel — the kind you crazy dreamers won’t even watch because you won’t pay to watch TV! Fail! Etc.

Oh. Sorry.

Turns out that Bravo’s upcoming “Silicon Valley” is produced by Randi Zuckerberg, described by a press release as an “Internet guru.” (Weirdly or not, it doesn’t mention that until last summer, she worked at Facebook, or that her brother is her brother.)

So maybe it will be good, after all.

Apologies for the long pre-roll ad that comes before this clip, which is also an ad. The Silicon Valley part kicks in at 1:20:

So, who wants to identify these future “techie superstars”? AllThingsD’s current techie superstar Liz Gannes flagged The Next Web’s Hermione Way for me — she’s the one who sounds like her name might be Hermione — but the rest are unknown to this cranky old New Yorker. Help me out, crowd!

But that’s not all! Bravo is doubling down on techie glamour with a second show, which will follow around Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh and the rest of his LOLcat-ing crew. Working title is … “Huh?” Really. Sadly, no teaser clip here. But I am 100 percent confident that Kara Swisher is watching every minute of both of these.

(PS: There’s an Easter Egg at the end of this preview clip, at least for fans of Gawker’s fameball coverage, circa 2008.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120404/maybe-youre-going-to-have-to-pay-for-cable-after-all-silicon-valley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120404/paramount-google-link-up-for-movie-rentals/ http://allthingsd.com/20120404/paramount-google-link-up-for-movie-rentals/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:00:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=192927 Viacom and Google are locked in a copyright lawsuit that is nearly five years old. But that doesn’t mean the companies can’t do business together.

This morning, for example, Google’s YouTube is announcing a deal to rent movies from Viacom’s Paramount studio. The move will bring some 500 titles to Google, ranging from newish hits like the “Transformers” movies to oldies like “The Godfather” trilogy; users will also be able to rent the movies from Google’s new Google Play hub.

The announcement means that Google, which has been struggling for years to figure out Hollywood, now has rental deals with five of the six big studios: Paramount, Sony, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Disney, and Comcast’s Universal.

The lone holdout is 20th Century Fox, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. All six studios rent their movies via Apple’s iTunes. It’s worth noting that Paramount is one of the few studios that has experimented with direct-to-customer sales and rentals, via its own Web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120404/paramount-google-link-up-for-movie-rentals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/apple-tv-on-the-outside-same-old-tv-on-the-inside/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/apple-tv-on-the-outside-same-old-tv-on-the-inside/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:34:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=192012 Apple might end up making a really great TV set. But if Tim Cook ends up giving you the same TV programming you’re already paying for, at the same price, will you pay a premium for his box?

That’s the scenario Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente sketches out in a new note. He figures that Apple could certainly come up with a cool piece of hardware — he imagines one that looks like a “large-scale iPad” — that would tie together the Internet with Apple’s existing suite of iOS apps and services.

But DiClemente doesn’t think Cook will be able to break open the traditional cable TV bundle. Which means that if you watch TV on Apple TV, it’s going to look a lot like the TV you’re already watching now. And it will cost the same to get that stuff to your set.

DiClemente is a media analyst, not a hardware guy, and his report focuses primarily on the reasons it will be so hard for Apple — or anyone — to truly disrupt the TV programming/distribution business. But here’s some of his speculation about the box, which is similar to other industry guesses:

• He doesn’t think it’s coming in 2012.
• He thinks it will use Apple’s Siri voice control as a “groundbreaking interface.”
• He imagines it could sell for $1,500.
• He thinks it could be “so much more than a TV — including gaming, video communication, content delivery, apps, computing and all the capabilities of the current Apple TV.”

All good, so far. But again, the problem will be when it comes to the TV programming part.

DiClemente argues, convincingly, that TV programmers don’t have any incentive to stop selling the bundles they’re already selling for big dollars (in seven- and 10-year deals).

The “affiliate fees” that cable providers pay for the bundles are now up to $30 billion a year, or about $30 per subscriber per month. And programmers aren’t going to do anything that weakens that revenue stream.

So whether Apple ends up working with the cable providers like Comcast and strikes deals that use Apple TVs in lieu of a cable box, or whether Apple works with the cable programmers like Viacom and uses Apple TVs for a cable-free “over the top” service, the result would be the same: Consumers would have to pay a big monthly fee for a big package of TV channels, most of which they wouldn’t use.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/apple-tv-on-the-outside-same-old-tv-on-the-inside/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120330/reed-hastings-is-just-like-you-he-complains-about-the-cable-guys-on-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120330/reed-hastings-is-just-like-you-he-complains-about-the-cable-guys-on-facebook/#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:13:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=191803 Last fall, Reed Hastings took to Facebook to field his customers’ complaints. Now he’s using Facebook to complain to Comcast.

Here’s a screenshot of the Netflix CEO’s most recent post, where he gripes that Comcast won’t let its subscribers watch HBO Go — the pay channel’s “TV Everywhere” app — via an Xbox 360, and goes on to talk about the way the cable provider enforces its broadband usage cap.

Both of these complaints are the kind of thing that most people don’t care about, but vex a certain kind of technically savvy user. They are important, though, because they underscore some of the tensions between programmers and providers that have made “TV Everywhere” more conceptual than it ought to be, nearly three years after Time Warner and Comcast announced a grand launch plan.

Still, this is one of those stories where the form matters more than the content — it’s just interesting to see the head of a public company handling company business on Facebook. Then again, Hastings happens to be on Facebook’s board of directors.

Also note that Hastings doesn’t just gripe about Comcast on Facebook. Here he is a couple days ago, praising the company’s new Xbox app, and complimenting/wooing Comcast executive Sam Schwartz. And then he gripes, just a tiny bit, about Streampix, Comcast’s sorta-kinda Netflix-killer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120330/reed-hastings-is-just-like-you-he-complains-about-the-cable-guys-on-facebook/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120327/xbox-users-clocking-more-hours-gobbling-media-than-gaming-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20120327/xbox-users-clocking-more-hours-gobbling-media-than-gaming-online/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:33:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=190422 Microsoft’s Xbox is no longer just for hardcore gamers, but rather is beginning to attract a more general audience looking to consume movies, TV and music online.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company said today that for the first time, Xbox Live users are now watching more movies and TV and listening to music than gamers are using it to play online games.

The recent shift is worth noting given the mind-boggling number of hours gamers are willing to spend online destroying opponents on the battlefield or football field.

Microsoft declined to break down the number of hours spent, but as an example, 3.3 million players logged seven million hours on Xbox Live on the first day alone that Activision’s Call of Duty was available back in November.

What’s more, the growth of entertainment is not at the expense of gaming. Online gaming on the Xbox is up over the past year, too. In fact, Xbox Live usage — spanning gaming and entertainment — is up 30 percent year-over-year.

The shift toward entertainment is not completely unexpected, since Microsoft has been investing heavily in turning the console into a more general entertainment device for the living room. Sony’s PlayStation has a similar emphasis and Nintendo’s upcoming console, the Wii U, is expected to support entertainment applications.

In December, Microsoft rolled out a massive software update to the Xbox that allowed users to control the console using the Kinect. As part of the update, it also began to add more than 40 content providers to the console to increase the catalog of live and streamed TV, movies and music.

As previously announced, Xbox today launched voice-controlled TV apps from Comcast and HBO Go in the U.S., and MLB.TV throughout North America. To access these apps, you must be a subscriber, meaning it is not meant as a cable subscription substitute.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120327/xbox-users-clocking-more-hours-gobbling-media-than-gaming-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120322/verizon-comcast-defend-spectrum-purchase-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20120322/verizon-comcast-defend-spectrum-purchase-plan/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:26:23 +0000 Amy Schatz http://allthingsd.com/?p=189141 WASHINGTON—Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. executives defended Verizon’s proposal to buy airwaves from cable companies for $3.6 billion, arguing at a Senate hearing Wednesday that it wouldn’t hurt competition and would improve Verizon’s wireless service.

“It’s critical that this previously unused spectrum be put to good use,” Randall Milch, executive vice president of Verizon Communications, said during a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. Consumers in some markets could begin experiencing capacity problems by 2013 if Verizon doesn’t acquire more airwaves soon, he said.

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