Hulu’s owners, including Walt Disney Co., News Corp., and Comcast Corp., are considering various strategic options for the site including a sale. Other firms that have bid or expressed interest in Hulu include cable operator Time Warner Cable Inc., Guggenheim Partners, Yahoo Inc. and former News Corp. president Peter Chernin’s investment group.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The video network will add the cash to an earlier funding round, where it picked up $6.5 million from Bertelsmann’s Digital Media Investments arm and other investors. And it means that StyleHaul has now essentially received two different investments from Bertelsmann, since Bertelsmann owns a majority stake in RTL.

StyleHaul has now raised close to $17 million; it says it generates 300 million video views a month. Industry sources say RTL had previously talked to YouTube network/tool startup Fullscreen about an investment; Fullscreen ended up taking money from Comcast and the Chernin Group.

StyleHaul CEO Stephanie Horbaczewski said she’ll use the money to keep building out a non-YouTube home for StyleHaul. Like other YouTube networks, StyleHaul is trying to develop revenue streams that aren’t dependent on the world’s largest video site.

Other projects on tap for Horbaczewski include a “shoppable player” that will let viewers click on videos and purchase stuff they see displayed (here’s a cool example of one at Mr. Porter, starring Elijah Wood).

Horbaczewski said she is also working on two scripted series, which will be StyleHaul’s first foray into original video; it also plans on distributing other people’s work, like a long-delayed “Zoolander” cartoon series from Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Digital.

“This is really going to be a content story for us now,” she said.

The network TV guys are really, really good at making the stuff they’re going to cancel in a few months look great right now. But the presentations still drag on, so all of the networks attempt to use a bit of comedy to liven things up during the event.

In the past, NBC has brought on its late-night talent to do live comedy bits, but we didn’t get that today. Instead, it used Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno in a pre-taped video, which references both “Les Miserables” and a video the two men had made a couple months ago, when the network was handing the “The Tonight Show” from Leno to Fallon.

Weirdly, the old video doesn’t seem to be online anymore. And I can’t show you today’s video, because NBC doesn’t usually show the public the stuff it shows to advertisers. Which is a bummer.*

But I do have audio!

It’s not great, because it comes via an iPhone that was parked way back in Radio City’s cheap seats. But if you’re a fan of Fallon, or Leno, or maybe just “Les Mis,” then, well … here you go:

* The one that would be really great to see again would be Alec Baldwin’s awesomely profane Jack Donaghy performance from 2010.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

In any case, it is coming, and at some point some of you who have one are going to want to use it post a YouTube video after you’re done skydiving or showering.

And now you can do so, courtesy of YouTube startup Fullscreen:

Fullscreen, recall, just rounded up money from the Chernin Group and Comcast.

So if you’re paying the country’s biggest cable company for monthly access to TV, take heart in the fact that a tiny slice of your check just made it easier for people with $1,500 gadgets to upload clips of your co-workers eating lunch.

Stick around to the end to hear an exchange Google Glass users are going to hear many times.

DreamWorks Animation is close to a deal to acquire AwesomenessTV, a YouTube network aimed squarely at teens and tweens, according to people familiar with the proposed transaction.

I don’t have a purchase price for Awesomeness, which launched last June and rounded up $3.5 million in funding, most of it from MK Capital. DreamWorks, which announced Q1 earnings earlier today, declined to comment. I haven’t heard back from Awesomeness’s reps.

Conceptually, the deal makes sense. Awesomeness, created by former child star Brian Robbins, was positioned as a next-generation version of Viacom’s Nickelodeon, targeting the kids who make up the core of YouTube’s audience.

YouTube featured Robbins prominently during its “brandcast” presentation for advertisers a year ago. And while many of the video makers who have tried launching “channels” on the site in the last year have struggled, Awesomeness has continued to generate a good buzz.

The channel has nearly 500,000 subscribers. Last month it said it had generated more than 80 million video views, and at the time was planning on a show slated to run on Nickelodeon itself.

DreamWorks, meanwhile, has been spending time talking about its ambitions to create its own cable channel and to expand its online presence. You could see Awesomeness and Robbins fitting nicely into those plans.

If the deal goes through, it will be one of several big media bets on YouTube. Late last year Time Warner put money into YouTube network Maker Studios; Bertelsmann followed with an investment in StyleHaul in March. And Comcast and the Chernin Group are set to announce an investment in Fullscreen, a combination video network and YouTube tools startup.

Here’s an example of what Awesomeness is up to:

So how about Hulu Plus, the subscription service that runs ads in the middle of its TV reruns? Turns out it is doing just fine: Hulu says its paid service now has four million subscribers paying $8 a month.

That’s not nearly as much Netflix, which boast some 30 million subscribers for its ad-free service (also $8 a month). But that seems awfully respectable to me, considering that Hulu Plus has been around (in one form or another) for less than three years.

Maybe even impressive, since much of what Hulu Plus offers are TV shows you can see for free on broadcast TV, or even on “regular” Hulu.com. The main selling point for Hulu Plus, I think, is that you can watch the service on a variety of screens, including phones, tablets and your actual TV, via devices like Apple TV.

The announcement comes as Hulu puts on a show for advertisers in New York, part of the week-long “newfront” presentations the big video websites are hosting. (Yesterday: Yahoo! Tomorrow: YouTube!)

While Hulu is still best known as the place to watch last night’s TV (or in some cases, last week’s TV), it is interested in promoting the stuff it has that you can’t see on TV.

Like Netflix and Amazon, it is investing in its own original programming; unlike Netflix and Amazon, its efforts have gotten much less attention, a fact that steams Hulu’s management team. So if you want to help them out, go ahead and look at the preview reel for “The Awesomes,” an “animated show for adults,” co-created by Seth Meyers of “Saturday Night Live”; it seems to be the new show Hulu is most excited about.

The good news for Andy Forsell, Hulu’s acting CEO, is that advertisers are already receptive to Hulu’s pitches, both for the reruns it airs and the new stuff it is showing. It looks like TV and Hulu is selling it like TV, and many ad guys like that a lot, especially compared to Google’s more … Googley approach with YouTube.

The bad news for Forsell is that he’s acting CEO, because Hulu’s corporate future is completely unsettled. It’s entirely possible, and probably likely, that the site, currently owned by News Corp.,* Disney and Comcast, will have a different ownership structure by the end of the year, and may have a different agenda, as well.

I’m guessing that doesn’t come up during this morning’s presentation. What I don’t know is whether that matters to advertisers or viewers.

*News Corp. also owns this website.

After months of talking in broad strokes about its intent to get into the home security business, AT&T is ready with the full details.

The company says its “Digital Life” service is now available in 15 cities — Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colo.; Chicago; Dallas; Denver; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif.; San Francisco; Seattle; St. Louis and parts of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area.

The company plans to expand to more than 50 cities by the end of this year.

As for pricing, the basic service will start at $30 a month (plus $150 upfront for equipment). For $10 more per month (and an additional $100 in equipment fees), users can add three additional services, including sensors for motion, glass breakage, smoke or carbon monoxide.

For even more, customers can add cameras, water-leak sensors, remote-controlled door locks and other features.

The service is designed to work regardless of which provider a customer has for their home phone or wireless service. Mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone allow customers to keep tabs on the service.

“We know how important security is to our customers, and this was our top priority when we set out to build Digital Life,” AT&T’s Kevin Petersen said in a statement. “People rely on their mobile devices more than ever, so Digital Life offers an easy and convenient way to secure their homes, protect their families and simplify their lives from virtually anywhere.”

AT&T’s pricing and options are designed to compete with similar services offered by security specialists like ADT as well as regional players and other new entrants, such as cable provider Comcast.

Lots of other people, though — including investors and the cable guys — don’t know what to make of Google’s moves.

They have two big questions:

• What is Google actually trying to do here?
• How much is Google willing to spend on whatever they’re doing?

And there are multiple theories to answer those questions, which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive:

• It’s a sandbox for Google. It’s literally trying to figure out what goes into offering that kind of speed, and what happens when customers take advantage of it.
• Google thinks that by offering blazing-fast fiber in a bunch of cities, it will spur the likes of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other incumbents to up their own investments in speed. And that eventually means that more people will have faster Internet, which is presumably good for Google.
• Google really does plan on wiring a big swath of the country. Because, why not? It’s Google. It can afford just about anything.
• During yesterday’s earnings call, analysts again tried to suss out what Google was up to. Both CEO Larry Page and CFO Patrick Pichette did a good job of speaking at length and not saying very much, beyond the notion that it would be good if lots of people had fast Internet.

Here’s one exchange between Bernstein analyst Carlos Kirjner and Page that is pretty representative:

Kirjner: “How do you expect fiber to have a major impact, given that it would take many billions and several years to pass something like 20 million U.S. homes — and after all of that time and money, you would be at best a mid-sized provider (Note: Comcast, the U.S.’s biggest broadband company “passes” — i.e., could provide service to — 53 million homes) in a market that accounts for less than half of your current business?”

Page: “I’m glad you’re very ambitious — the fiber industry’s not big enough for you. So I applaud that. We’d love to find businesses much bigger than our entire business to invest in, but I think that there’s only a small number of such companies that even exist. So I think on fiber, we look at places where we can provide products that we can make a very big difference in people’s lives, and we can make a lot of money and resources doing it. And I think it certainly meets that criteria.”

Does that spell things out for you? Me, neither. But Kirjner seemed to get some value out of it. In a note this morning, he writes:

• That he is now convinced that Google is not experimenting with fiber, but is serious about it.
• But! He also doesn’t think Google is going to embark on a truly massive effort: “Google is playing a very long game and does not aim to change the broadband access and pay-TV world in three or even five years … We remain skeptical that we will see a mass roll out involving billions of capex to build a fiber network passing millions of homes in the next few years, but think they will continue to expand Google Fiber’s footprint.”

Got it? Me, neither. But fascinating to watch.

She has a very specific agenda in mind. Along with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, she’s pushing for immigration reform, and to promote “The Dream is Now,” a documentary about “Dreamers” — young immigrants who live in America and would like to become citizens but can’t.

But Jobs and Guggenheim aren’t relying on TV alone — the documentary itself will run on MSNBC this weekend — to get their message out. At 10 pm ET, when “Rock Center” airs, they plan on releasing a flood of Tweets and Facebook posts promoting their movie, and calling for immigration reform.

To do that, they’re using Thunderclap, a startup designed solely to promote mass social media messaging. It works by getting Twitter and Facebook users to essentially hand over control of their feeds in order to broadcast a single message, at a given time, for a specific campaign.

So far, the “Dream” campaign has signed up more than 700 people to push out its message tonight; Thunderclap says they have a collective “social reach” of 1.2 million people.

Does that sound relatively simple, technically speaking? It is, says Dave Cascino, who launched the company a year ago. But while there are other social media tools that allow people to orchestrate similar mass messaging, as part of a broader set of tools, Thunderclap looks like it’s the only company that focuses solely on the idea.

So far, that seems to be working. Cascino said Thunderclap has been used nearly 2,000 times in the last year. Earlier this week, the White House used the tool to promote gun control legislation. For-profit companies are using it too, like when People Magazine wanted to let people know that Channing Tatum was the Sexiest Man Alive in 2012. (Sorry, Mike Isaac.)

Right now Thunderclap is free, but Cascino said the company plans on rolling out a premium version soon with advanced tools. Thunderclap is owned by De-De, a “product development studio” funded by ad agency Droga5.

Image copyright Laralova

Professor Lyons’s fundamental mistake was to conflate opposition to data caps with opposition to price discrimination more generally. Price discrimination in broadband pricing is a positive phenomenon. It allows ISPs to create different pricing packages that appeal to different types of customers — from those heavy gamers to the grandmother who only checks her email. My organization, Public Knowledge, does not oppose the idea of price discrimination, and I am not aware of any of our allies that do either. But price discrimination does not require using data caps. And the alternative to data caps is not one price for everyone.

How can I be so sure? Because ISPs impose price discrimination today using speed tiers. And it turns out that speed tiers have a number of positive attributes that data caps lack.

Most people understand speed. While they may not know how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, even the emailing grandma knows that a page that does not load very quickly or a video that constantly buffers is because of a slow Internet connection.

Furthermore, customers realize that their connection is too slow while they are using the Internet. When the video buffers or the page is slow they can ponder, at that very moment, if the delay is annoying enough to justify paying for a faster tier. With monthly caps, a user gets an alert and then needs to reconstruct days, weeks, or even a month’s worth of usage to try to determine what they were doing to get them close to the cap. Then they need to decide if it is worth paying extra to be able to do it again in the future.

Finally, speed tiers are a “gentle” signal to consumers. If your Internet connection is not fast enough, the worst thing that happens is that things happen a bit too slowly for your liking. Go over your data cap and you could be on the hook for significant overage fees.

The gentle nature of speed-based tiers fuel a virtuous cycle. Exploration leads to discovery, which leads to decisions to purchase faster tiers. These purchases provide capital to invest in the network, which in turn brings faster service for everyone. This increased speed fuels even more exploration, which starts the cycle all over again.

In contrast, data-based tiers incentivize sticking to what you know, avoiding trying new things that could cost you overage fees. This is a recipe for stagnation.

But what about the idea that caps are set so high that only those crazy early adopters would ever hit them? History tells us that today’s early adopters are tomorrow’s average user. There was a time when all sorts of today’s common Internet activities — VOIP phone calls, streaming videos, uploading and sharing images — were on the cutting edge. There is no clear mechanism that would force caps to increase over time. That means that caps that appear high today will become problems tomorrow. Unless, of course, people are so worried about their cap that they never try anything new.

And this avoidance of new things highlights real competitive concerns. A 300GB cap may sound like a lot (assuming you are the type of person who even knows what a GB is, and what you could do with 300 of them) until you think about making use of it. Using Comcast’s own assumptions, we have calculated that switching from Comcast cable to an all-HD online video competitor would require 648GB per month. And that’s before you use your Internet connection for anything else. When viewed in that context, these caps are not just about targeting individual competitors. Instead, they target competition itself.

Of course, antitrust law has a role in instances where incumbents are using data caps on the Internet service they offer in order to protect their cable service. But it is not the only answer. Antitrust law does a great job when there is evidence of collusion and price fixing, but less of a good job when incumbents take steps to exclude new competitors. And antitrust alone does not have tools to address situations where incumbents move to adopt a pricing strategy that confuses consumers and slows innovation in the wider economy.

Forcing us to decide between data caps and a one-price-fits-all, dilapidated broadband network is a false strategy. There are ways to create a sustainable broadband price structure that fuels network investment and larger innovation in our economy without resorting to a model that encourages consumers to over-buy and under-use data. If Internet pricing really is the next policy frontier, our first step should be to make sure we understand what we are actually debating.

Michael Weinberg is the vice president at Public Knowledge. Michael primarily focuses on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3-D printing.

Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com

Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves in response to Aereo?

Snap consensus judgement from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon.

People I’ve talked to who work in TVland think that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments are just that — comments, not a plan.

It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV.

Near-term, however, people seem to think that both practical and legal restrictions — for instance, deals that Fox and CBS have with the NFL for football broadcast rights — would prevent this from happening. More important: There isn’t any reason to do so right now, since only a handful of people are actually using Aereo to get broadcast TV for free.

All that said, Wall Street seems to like the idea.

Earlier this year, Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger gamed out a scenario where all four broadcasters moved from over-the-air to pay networks, and concluded that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea, at least financially. By Juenger’s thinking, the lost “retransmission fees” and advertising dollars the broadcasters would lose from over-the-air programming would be replaced by even higher “affiliate fees” and advertising dollars they could get on cable.

And Juenger thinks that move might benefit pay TV distributors, too: “There is enough logic here to suggest it wouldn’t be completely crazy for a cable operator to make a pre-emptive offer to broadcast networks in a given market to convert to a cable model.”

In any case, for whatever reason, TV investors are cheering Carey on. Look what happened to shares at Fox owner News Corp. (which also owns this website), ABC owner Disney and CBS this afternoon after 1:30 pm ET, when Carey made his remarks at an industry conference:

The outlier here is NBC owner Comcast, whose shares also moved up after Carey’s remarks, then down again. Perhaps some investors are less comfortable with what this means for America’s biggest pay TV operator.

(Image courtesy of Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com)

Multiple sources say Chernin, via his Chernin Group holding company, has made a formal bid for the site, which is owned by Disney, Comcast and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this site).

Reuters, which first reported Chernin’s interest in Hulu, says he offered $500 million for the site; two years ago, when Hulu’s owners put the site on the block, they were looking for $2 billion.

A source familiar with the bid says Reuters’ $500 million number is low. In any case, it’s likely to be the starting point for a negotiation, which would hinge on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year. (UPDATE: Here’s a bit more clarity: Someone else familiar with the bid suggests that Chernin’s initial bid is for Hulu, along with a limited set of rights to programming from its three owners, but says that the bid could increase if those rights increased. That makes more sense.)

That is, if its owners decide to sell it. Though Hulu’s owners are talking to other would-be buyers, including Ross Levinsohn, the former News Corp. executive who once managed the site, News Corp. and Disney are still discussing scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site (co-owner Comcast gave up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators a few years ago).

If Chernin ended up with Hulu, it’d be an excellent full-circle story, if nothing else. During his News Corp. tenure, Chernin was one of the site’s primary architects and boosters; many people think that his departure from News Corp. was a huge blow for former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar.

Also interesting: Chernin has a big slug of funding from Providence Equity Partners, Hulu’s initial investor, which sold its stake in Hulu last year. If Chernin ended up buying the site, Providence would essentially end up as a Hulu backer again.

Chernin has also mused in the past about what it would take to create an online competitor to HBO, starting from scratch. Perhaps a well-known video property could help him jump start those plans.

Here’s a highlight reel of a chat I had with Chernin at our Asia:D conference in Hong Kong in 2011; we spent some of that time talking about Hulu’s past and then-present.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130405/peter-chernin-wants-hulu-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130404/chernin-comcast-investing-in-youtube-tools-startup-fullscreen/ http://allthingsd.com/20130404/chernin-comcast-investing-in-youtube-tools-startup-fullscreen/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:16:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=309441
Old media companies keep lining up to invest in YouTube. Here’s the latest: The Chernin Group and Comcast are putting money into Fullscreen, a startup that’s supposed to help video makers manage their presence on the world’s largest video site.

Sources say the two companies are part of a $30 million round that gives Los Angeles-based Fullscreen a pre-money valuation of $110 million.

I don’t know if any of the money is coming from secondary sales; I’m told the deal hasn’t closed yet but is supposed to soon.

No comment from Chernin Group, led by former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, or Comcast, which is investing in the round via its Comcast Ventures arm. I haven’t heard back from Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos.

The round follows other recent Big/Old Media bets on YouTube startups, including Time Warner’s investment in Maker Studios and Bertelsmann’s investment in fashion network StyleHaul.

Like those two companies, Fullscreen generates revenue by representing a pool of semi-pro video makers on YouTube. Unlike those “multi channel networks,” though, it also has a software service it sells to content owners who want to navigate Google’s video site; customers include Disney Interactive, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and News Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this website).

Strompolos started Fullscreen a couple years ago; prior to that he had worked at Google and YouTube, where he worked with many of the YouTube content makers he represents now.

You can get a brief sense of what Fullscreen is up to in this video Strompolos made for how-to video maker Howcast; you can see the full series of his clips here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130404/chernin-comcast-investing-in-youtube-tools-startup-fullscreen/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130320/waiting-for-the-cord-cutting-numbers-to-show-up-keep-waiting/ http://allthingsd.com/20130320/waiting-for-the-cord-cutting-numbers-to-show-up-keep-waiting/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:26:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=305427 As long as we’re talking about cord-cutting, or the lack of it, today, here’s a new report that won’t make either the cable guys or Team Kill the Cable Guys happy: Pay TV subscriber ranks grew — but just barely — in 2012.

That also isn’t a surprise, since it fits the no-growth trend we’ve seen from pay TV for several years now.

For the record, SNL Kagan figures that the U.S. pay TV industry — cable, telco and satellite — grew by a teeny-tiny 46,000 subscribers last year.

That’s basically negligible given an installed base of 100 million pay TV households. But it’s not a decline.

And it’s also in line with what we’ve seen from the industry for a while, where subscriptions go up and down each quarter — usually up in Q1 and Q4, and down in Q2 and Q3. And as always, it’s important to note that this is for all the pay TV platforms.

You might read today, for instance, that Kagan says the cable guys — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, etc. — lost 1.66 million customers this year. True! But the telco guys — Verizon and AT&T — and the satellite guys — Dish and DirecTV — added the same number. Hence, no growth.

As always, the real debate is about why there’s no growth. There are three standard answers, which don’t necessarily negate one another:

• 100 million pay TV customers is the size of the U.S. market, period. It’s just not going to get bigger.
• The market would be bigger if the economy was better, and more people were buying homes instead of “doubling up.”
• People are ditching pay TV for the Internet and some combination of Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, etc. And/or the population of “cord-nevers” — college grads who have grown up with Web TV and see no reason to pay for cable — is growing.

The last one is certainly worrisome for the pay TV guys, and the ones who used to boast that they see no evidence of cord-cutting are a lot more muted about it these days.

You’ll occasionally hear a top pay TV executive — like Dish’s Charlie Ergen — talk candidly about the fact that there are lots of kids, like his own, who aren’t paying for TV anymore. But as always, for right now, cord-cutters are like vegans — you may know a lot of them, but the rest of the country still eats a whole lot of Big Macs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130320/waiting-for-the-cord-cutting-numbers-to-show-up-keep-waiting/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130320/how-6-million-cord-cutters-disappeared/ http://allthingsd.com/20130320/how-6-million-cord-cutters-disappeared/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:00:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=305084 Last year, a Deloitte survey reported that a staggering 20 percent of Americans had either cut the cord — stopped subscribing to Comcast, Dish, Verizon, etc., in favor of Apple, Netflux, Hulu, etc. — or were thinking about it.

But that was then! This year’s Deloitte survey reports that a mere 8 percent of Americans are cord-cutters, or would like to be.

If you compare the two reports side by side — and don’t look closely at the wording of the questions — you’d conclude that the cord-cutting population had decreased by about 6 percent of TV households, or six million people.

2012:

2013:

What happened? Clearly, people didn’t get more excited about paying for TV in the last year — based on industry reporting, the total number of subscribers remained about flat, just like it has been for the past few years.

The most likely answer is the one that occurred to me in 2012: That the wording in last year’s survey confused respondents, and that many of them thought the question was about dropping a pay TV channel, like HBO — not cutting the cord altogether.

After I wrote about last year’s numbers, I ended up on the phone with a Deloitte executive who had overseen the research. We went back and forth a little bit, and he allowed that polls like this — and poll questions — are a work in progress.

And this year’s report looks like a tacit acknowledgement of that. Deloitte made the effort to tweak the question, but it looks like it didn’t feel strongly enough about the data to include it in the main “State of Media Democracy” report (though it did furnish it to me upon request, which I appreciate). Perhaps next year it will include it, and show change over time.

Until then, hard to use these numbers to draw a conclusion about cord-cutting, one way or another. Not that it will stop you folks from sounding off in the comments. Have at it!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130320/how-6-million-cord-cutters-disappeared/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130319/letting-go-of-gmail/ http://allthingsd.com/20130319/letting-go-of-gmail/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:05:37 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=305038 Q:

Is there a way to delete a Gmail account?

A:

Yes. First, go to your Google accounts settings page, found at http://tinyurl.com/bm78c8y. Next, click on “Products” at the lower left.

A page will open listing all the different Google products you use. Click the small “Edit” link next to the words “Your Products.” When the next page appears, find the phrase “Delete a Product” at the upper left and click on the link that reads “Remove Gmail Permanently.” Follow the instructions.

Google’s text on this page says “Within two business days of your request, your…mailbox will be closed and all its contents will be permanently deleted.” However, Google warns that: “Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our backup systems for an additional period of time.”

Q:

Is it possible to route Comcast cable channels from the Comcast box through the new Roku 3, which has earphones you plug into its remote? We want to use earphones while on our noisy workout machine.

A:

Roku says the answer is, unfortunately, no. A company official explains: “The earphones are for Roku streaming only. We don’t offer a pass-through of other video inputs,” such as video from your cable box.

Q:

I have a four year old Dell Inspiron running Windows XP. I am planning to buy a new Dell desktop with Windows 7. How can I transfer all my data files (about a hundred) and program files from the old one to the new one without reinstalling all the programs from the original CD. Some programs were downloaded.

A:

Windows 7 includes a utility called Windows Easy Transfer that moves files, email, pictures, and settings, from an older PC to the new one. But it doesn’t transfer programs. You can learn more about it at http://tinyurl.com/n2zoz6. In general, moving programs from one machine to another on Windows is tricky.

However, a company called Laplink makes a product called PCmover that claims to move over both data files and programs. You can learn about it at http://ww2.laplink.com/pcmover/.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130319/letting-go-of-gmail/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/ http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:37:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=302719

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Heads up, cord-cutters: If you want to watch March Madness next year, you’re going to have to pay up.

The last two rounds of next year’s college basketball tournament, including the championship game, are likely to be broadcast on one of Time Warner’s Turner network channels — TBS or TNT — instead of CBS, according to Sports Business Daily and the New York Times.

CBS and Turner share coverage of the tournament, and the switch for the final games was already scheduled for 2016. No one has explained why the two companies are moving the date up by two years, but it fits a pattern we’ve seen for several years: Big-time sports events migrating from free TV to pay TV.

In 2006, Monday Night Football moved from ABC to Disney’s ESPN. If you wanted to watch much of last summer’s Olympics, you needed a pay TV subscription that gave you access to NBC Universal’s cable channels. And as SBJ’s John Ourand notes, the BCS college championships, the NBA conference finals and some baseball playoff games have all moved over to cable, as well.

The free-to-pay move serves the interests of the TV Industrial Complex in several ways: The cable networks, flush with cash from subscriber fees, can afford to pay big bucks for the rights to what is must-see TV for many people. And because it’s must-see TV for many people, it helps raise the overall value of the cable networks (Rupert Murdoch used the same strategy to turn Fox into a legitimate broadcast operation two decades ago).

And moving big-time sports to pay TV helps pay TV, period. Nielsen figures there are five million cord-cutters, or cord-nevers, and that number would presumably be much bigger if you could get sports online without paying for TV.

Which is why I’ve been waiting for Google, or Apple, or Intel, or some other TV outsider to pony up for the rights to a slate of NFL games, or some other sports franchise that millions of people have to watch, no matter where they are. Hasn’t happened yet.

(Note that if Aereo, which distributes broadcast TV over the Web without paying programmers a penny, wins its court case, then expect just about every big broadcast show — not just sports, but everything — to move from broadcast to cable networks owned by the broadcasters. Big if, though.)

Meantime, if you’re serious about college hoops and you’re serious about not paying for TV, you might still have a legal option next year.

Last year, CBS and Turner offered a $4 package that let you watch the games live on Android and iOS devices, and that option has gone away this year. This time around, you can only stream the Turner games if you’re an “authenticated” pay TV subscriber, though you can still stream the CBS games to your PC without registration.

But Turner/CBS are offering app users a free four-hour “preview” this time around. So if you’re willing to do a little planning — and if the option is still available — you could save up your preview time for the championship game, and at least watch that one for free.

That sounds like a lot of work, right? That’s what the pay TV guys are hoping you think …

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130308/heres-a-marissa-mayer-ma-candidate-you-havent-heard-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20130308/heres-a-marissa-mayer-ma-candidate-you-havent-heard-of/#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:22:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=301782 Add this one to the “maybe Marissa Mayer will buy this” pile: Video distributor Grab Media.

The company is on the block, and lots of folks think it is talking to Yahoo about a sale.

Five-year-old Grab Media makes its money by taking video from professional content makers like Reuters, NBC Universal and Hearst, and getting it embedded on thousands of other small sites. It’s very similar to 5Min, which AOL purchased in 2010, and has done very well with since then.

Grab has been able to grow into a decent-sized business. ComScore has it in 11th place in its U.S. “video content” rankings, with 29.9 million unique viewers. That puts it just behind Turner Digital and ahead of Amazon. Google/YouTube, of course, is way ahead of everyone, with 150 million uniques.

Grab CEO Alvin Bowles confirmed that his company has hired investment bank Mesa Global to look for potential buyers, but wouldn’t comment beyond that.

AOL video executive Greg Prosl laid out the case for a Yahoo deal earlier this week on his personal site, and I’m told that Yahoo has indeed talked to Grab about a deal; industry executives I’ve talked to think the company would sell for less than $50 million.

Grab, whose backers include SoftBank Capital, has gone through several incarnations. In 2011, it sold off an earlier version of itself, a unit that focused on video transcoding. Last year, Grab raised $5 million via a combination of internal financing and venture debt, according to a person familiar with the company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130308/heres-a-marissa-mayer-ma-candidate-you-havent-heard-of/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130226/maybe-youll-get-the-pay-tv-you-want-after-all-cablevision-sues-viacom-to-break-up-the-bundle/ http://allthingsd.com/20130226/maybe-youll-get-the-pay-tv-you-want-after-all-cablevision-sues-viacom-to-break-up-the-bundle/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:54:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=298499 Pay TV has a simple model: If you want to watch one channel, you have to pay for dozens — or hundreds — of others, whether you watch them or not. That model drives lots of consumers nuts, but it has looked very, very hard to dislodge.

Now one cable provider says it will try to break up the bundle: Cablevision has sued Viacom for “illegally forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for 14 lesser-watched ancillary networks its customers do not want.”

On the face of it, Cablevision is directly attacking the core bundling principle the industry has used for years, and continues to implement as pay-TV providers and programmers sign new, long-term deals. It is accusing Viacom of an “illegal tying arrangement in violation of the federal antitrust laws,” and if it is successful, the repercussions could be widespread and significant.

But note that the conventional wisdom in the pay-TV industry is that “tying” rules aren’t applicable to cable bundles — people have tried repeatedly to break the bundle using the courts and failed (here’s the most recent attempt, from last year). And the main remedy Cablevision seems to be seeking is to get out of a carriage agreement it signed with Viacom a few months ago, in December 2012.

If that’s the case, the suit would fit into a familiar pattern in the pay-TV business, where programmers and pay-TV providers joust with lawyers and press releases before agreeing to keep the status quo.

That seems to be what Viacom is suggesting with its response:

“At the request of distributors, Viacom and other programmers have long offered discounts to those who agree to provide additional network distribution. Many distributors take advantage of these win-win and pro-consumer arrangements. Reflecting the highly competitive cable programming business, these arrangements have been upheld by a number of federal courts and on appeal. Viacom will vigorously defend this transparent attempt by Cablevision to use the courts to renegotiate our existing two month old agreement.”

All that said, if the case does go all the way through the court system and ends up in Cablevision’s favor, then we might finally see real change in the pay-TV world: You could imagine a scenario where pay-TV providers and their customers end up paying Disney for ESPN, but not ESPN 2 or ESPN3. Or the Disney channel. Or where News Corp. (which owns this website) wouldn’t be able to require Fox News viewers to take the FX channel as well.

It’s also possible that, given all those choices, consumers might end up choosing the bundles anyway, since pay-TV buyers could experience sticker shock when they see the “real” price of unbundled programming. If ESPN is currently getting more than $5 per subscriber when it sells as part of Disney’s bundle, it’s going to have to charge a multiple of that in an on-demand world — or cut its programming costs way, way, way down.

And even that scenario will take years to play out. Which means that, in the meantime, anyone who’s looking to get into the pay-TV business right now — like, say, an Apple — is still going to have work with the bundle. That’s what Google has already worked out as it steps cautiously into the pay-TV world, and that’s what Intel is doing as it prepares its Web TV subscription service.

Here’s Cablevision’s press release:

CABLEVISION FILES FEDERAL ANTITRUST LAWSUIT AGAINST VIACOM FOR ILLEGALLY FORCING PURCHASE OF PROGRAMMING SERVICES

BETHPAGE, NY, February 26, 2013 – Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC) filed an antitrust lawsuit today against Viacom (NYSE: VIA), in federal court in Manhattan, for illegally forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for 14 lesser-watched ancillary networks its customers do not want, such as Palladia, MTV Hits and VH1 Classic, in order to carry must-have networks such as Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central.

Commenting on the lawsuit and Viacom, Cablevision offered the following statement:

“The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong. Viacom effectively forces Cablevision’s customers to pay for and receive little-watched channels in order to get the channels they actually want. Viacom’s abuse of its market power is not only illegal, but also prevents Cablevision from delivering the programming that its customers want and that competes with Viacom’s less popular channels.”

Cablevision’s suit contends that:

[-] Viacom abused its market power over commercially critical networks, including must-have networks such as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and MTV, to coerce Cablevision into carrying the 14 far less popular ancillary channels.

[-] Viacom coerced Cablevision by threatening to impose massive financial penalties unless Cablevision complied with Viacom’s demands.

[-] Viacom’s conduct harms Cablevision and its customers, and impairs competition by making Cablevision pay for and carry networks that many subscribers do not want to watch, while other networks are excluded from distribution, preventing Cablevision from being able to differentiate its services and harming subscribers.

Cablevision’s complaint asserts that Viacom engaged in a “per se” illegal tying arrangement in violation of the federal antitrust laws. Cablevision’s antitrust lawsuit also asserts that Viacom has engaged in unlawful “block booking,” which is a form of tying that conditions the sale of a package of rights on the purchaser’s taking of other rights. Viacom’s conduct also violates the Donnelly Act in New York State Law, which parallels federal anti-trust laws.

The complaint was filed under seal and a public version is not yet available.

Cablevision is seeking a number of remedies including:

[-] Declaratory relief voiding the December 2012 carriage agreement.

[-] A permanent injunction barring Viacom from conditioning carriage of any or all of its Core networks on Cablevision’s licensing any or all of Viacom’s ancillary networks.

[-] To effectuate the permanent relief, a requirement that Viacom permit Cablevision to carry the Core networks and ancillary products on terms pending negotiation of a new, lawful agreement

[-] Treble damages and legal fees.

Viacom’s eight core networks:

MTV
MTV2
Nickelodeon
VH1
Spike
TV Land
Comedy Central
BET

Viacom’s 14 ancillary networks:

Centric
CMT
MTV Hits
MTV Tr3s
Nick Jr.
Nicktoons
Palladia
Teen Nick
VH1 Classic
VH1 Soul
Logo*
CMT Pure Country**
Nick 2**
MTV Jams**

*Optimum East Only
**Optimum West Only

Antitrust Legal Background
[-] Federal antitrust laws protect competition. By protecting competition, antitrust laws secure lower prices, higher quality, and other benefits for consumers.

[-] The antitrust laws prohibit tying, where a powerful firm wields its leverage from a product in one market, called the “tying” product, to compel a customer to take another product, called the “tied” product, when that customer would have preferred instead to take a product that competes with the “tied” product.

[-] The reason antitrust law prohibits such tie-ins is to protect competition and consumers. If powerful firms can leverage their power from one market to another, they can insulate the tied product from competition. Forcing customers such as Cablevision to take Viacom networks instead of competing networks, in turn, hurts consumers because they get less for what they pay for video services.

Cablevision officials indicated that there would be no immediate disruption in programming offerings pending the resolution of this matter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130226/maybe-youll-get-the-pay-tv-you-want-after-all-cablevision-sues-viacom-to-break-up-the-bundle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130226/warning-system-launched-for-movie-music-pirates/ http://allthingsd.com/20130226/warning-system-launched-for-movie-music-pirates/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:04:21 +0000 Christopher S. Stewart and Shalini Ramachandran http://allthingsd.com/?p=298367 Internet service providers have launched a more coordinated effort to deal with subscribers who illegally download movies, TV shows and music.

AT&T Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc, Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. have put into place an alerts system with “six strikes,” with various degrees of penalty for subscribers accused of piracy.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130226/warning-system-launched-for-movie-music-pirates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130215/broadband-speed-as-promised/ http://allthingsd.com/20130215/broadband-speed-as-promised/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:30:40 +0000 Danny Yadron http://allthingsd.com/?p=295560 American Internet users generally receive the download speeds that companies advertise, with fiber and satellite connections frequently outperforming expectations, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission.

The study, conducted last September, found most companies offer download speeds during peak periods that roughly match what they advertise. Verizon Communications Inc.’s fiber connection, the company’s fastest, averaged download speeds that were 118 percent of advertised download rates. Cablevision Systems Corp. came in at 115 percent and Comcast Corp. delivered 103 percent, the report found.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130215/broadband-speed-as-promised/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130212/comcast-to-buy-remainder-of-nbcu-from-ge/ http://allthingsd.com/20130212/comcast-to-buy-remainder-of-nbcu-from-ge/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:34:03 +0000 Tess Stynes and Saabira Chaudhuri http://allthingsd.com/?p=294625 Comcast Corp. is buying General Electric’s 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal for $16.7 billion, taking full control of the television and movie company.

Under the agreement, Comcast also will acquire from GE properties used by NBCUniversal at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and CNBC’s headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for roughly $1.4 billion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130212/comcast-to-buy-remainder-of-nbcu-from-ge/feed/ 0