But while lots of pay-TV operators are happy to keep things the way they are, Ergen keeps trying to blow them up: The Dish Network co-founder and chairman is constantly fighting with the rest of the TV Industrial Complex, in disputes that often end up in court.

His most recent and prominent battle is also the most important one: Dish’s new “Auto Hop” technology lets satellite TV subscribers automatically skip commercials, and that has both advertisers and TV networks in fits, for obvious reasons.

But that’s just one of Ergen’s recent adventures. He has also bought Blockbuster out of bankruptcy in an attempt to take on Netflix, engaged in bruising battles with Cablevision and its AMC Networks spinoff, and rattled his saber against ESPN and its ever-increasing sports fees.

Oh. He’s also talking to Google, and everyone else, about getting into the wireless business.

All of which means the former blackjack and poker player is someone everyone in the media world watches very, very closely, even though he doesn’t say much in public. Which means we’re very excited to interview him at our D: Dive Into Media conference in February.

Ergen will be joining an all-star cast on Feb. 11 and 12 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Here’s who we’ve told you about so far: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen, Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith, Intel media head Erik Huggers and Samsung media head David Eun, Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (and guest), New Republic owner Chris Hughes, and USA Today publisher Larry Kramer.

And there’s more to come! Stay tuned. Meanwhile, we’re getting close to showtime, so make your reservations now.

Weighing in at 7.5 pounds, it is an ambitious, jaw-dropping effort helmed by former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan — he of the “Day in the Life” series of photography books, as well as “America at Home,” “America 24/7” and “24 Hours in Cyberspace.” Smolan’s new book attempts to demystify — largely successfully — the nebulous concept: What is big data?

It was exactly the question that Smolan was asking when he first hit upon the idea for the book while attending the D9 conference in 2011. Hearing the phrase “big data” uttered in so many conversations, he had no idea what it meant. Asking at first yielded unclear answers, yet he persisted, eventually landing on the idea.

Today, the book is landing on the desks of world leaders, dignitaries and other notable people around the world: Among those on the list: President Obama, the Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict XVI and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and also Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey; Daniel Tunkelang, chief data scientist at LinkedIn; and actor Robin Williams. Among the images they’ll see upon opening it is the blended image of 1,400 different shots of New York’s Times Square taken across 15 hours. Big data is about people: What they do, where they go, who they know and so on. The stories about how data, once harnessed, solves problems and in some ways creates new ones, is its overarching theme.

There’s also a smartphone app for iPhone and Android that is launching today. It’s an interactive viewer app from Aurasma that aims to bring the book’s content to life, accessing videos and animations by pointing the camera at images on certain pages flagged within the book. On top of that, there’s a $2.99 iPad app that enables readers to take a deeper dive with some of the stories, using videos, charts and animated infographics.

I talked with Smolan about the book yesterday by phone, after spending more than a few hours perusing an advance copy over the weekend. Here’s a little of what we talked about:

AllThingsD: So where did you get the idea for a book on big data? It’s a phrase that doesn’t necessarily jump out at me as part of the title of a bestseller.

Smolan: I was at D: All Things Digital in 2011, and I kept hearing the phrase big data, and I kept asking people what it meant, because I felt stupid and because it sounded like one of those marketing phrases. The first person I talked to said, “It’s so much information it won’t sit on your personal computer.” Well, that wasn’t very interesting. The next one said, “It’s taking information from one place and overlapping it with information from another, and finding these patterns.” And that wasn’t interesting, either. The third person said, “It’s like watching the planet grow a nervous system.” And that sounded interesting. Basically, we’re seeding the world with low-cost sensors, and we’ve all become sensors with our cellphones. And instead of doing random samplings, we can almost survey every single person on the planet in real time — where they are, what they’re doing, how fast they’re going, what they’re spending money on. The ability to gather that information, process it, visualize it and then respond to it while it’s still happening is something we’ve never had the ability to do before.

Some of the material in the book I’m familiar with. The first image I saw when I opened it was one I recognized from MIT’s Sensable City Lab, and I also recognize big data anecdotes from IBM, like the one where they harnessed medical data to detect infections in premature infants. In this way, it seems it’s a little different from your previous books.

It’s sort of a combination of original photography and curation. I think that putting all the information in one place and weaving it together, with these wonderful essays that I think are just as strong as the pictures. I’ve been getting notes from people like Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey saying that this is the first time they’ve had something that helps them explain how important this is. Amazon called last week to say they sold out of copies of the book on the first day and people were ordering 50 or 60 copies at a time, which has never happened ever to any book I’ve done in 25 years. They were dumbfounded. The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting. A lot of people have never heard about big data and the ones who have, have a lot of trouble explaining it to other people. So I’m hoping that this will become the thing the people who know give to their parents or their family as a way of saying “this is why what I do is important.”

Obviously you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about all this during the last year, and you’ve probably been asked a million times if you think this is all creepy or intrusive in some way. Is it?

I’m an optimist. Every new tool can be used for good or evil. The whole point of doing this project is to start a conversation about it all. The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments. I’d like to broaden the conversation and I hope the book makes some kind of contribution. I’m worried that the only ones profiting from it right now are corporations. As individuals we have very little say about how our data is being used. I’m not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that as an individual, if I’m the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it’s going to be used.

Did you have a particular favorite anecdote or photograph?

I just came back from Australia, and they have this expression down there: Gobsmacked. I think a lot of the pictures in the book convey that feeling. There are some that are funny, some that are just thought-provoking. There’s the case of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) that creates these incredibly detailed satellite maps for governments. They found there were villages in Nigeria, which has the highest rate of polio resurgence in the world. There are villages there that have never shown up on any map, no one in the government knew they were there. ESRI can recognize the shape of huts and pathways. The Gates Foundation has been trying to eradicate polio in places like Nigeria, and they have a very big effort there. They took the satellite maps and handed out 10,000 GPS-enabled cellphones to polio workers. They could see where they were in real time, and make sure they got to each of the houses. We spent a week travelling with the polio workers watching them do their work. I think the idea of using satellites to help cure polio is a pretty interesting concept.

You have a lot of examples where understanding of big data is saving lives, which I think will surprise some people who don’t initially see it as having direct benefits for real people. What are some others?

There’s the case of the recent earthquake in Japan. I heard a fascinating story by Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace Radio about how 43 seconds before the shaking actually began, all the bullet trains and factories in Japan stopped running. It was all automated. That country spent 15 years and half a billion dollars to build the system that automated all of this. Obviously the devastation was horrible, but the system worked. Then I read about a group of engineers in Palo Alto that had created a program called Quake Catcher that uses the accelerometer in your laptop. Its the part in your laptop that detects when it’s been dropped and quickly moves the head on the drive drive before it smashes to the ground. It uses the same acceleromter to detect earthquakes. If it senses vibration and sees the same pattern over a 30-mile area, that’s an earthquake. On one side of the page, you have this huge half-billion dollar project, hardwired, dedicated parts that have to be replaced, lots of engineering time. And on the other you have this free ubiquitous crowdsourced mobile sensor system that has no profit motivation, and no cost. I love it. It’s a delightful story of people doing this to help each other. And the data just underpins it all.

Is there anything in the book that has some practical, everyday value?

Yes. There’s the example of Shwetak Patel, he’s a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Washington. He found a way to detect every device in the home and measure how much power it’s using. Every month we get a bill from the power company and we just pay it, we don’t even ask what it’s about. He’s created a sensor that can be plugged in anywhere in the house that detects the unique digital signature of everything that’s drawing power in the house — your computer, your toaster oven, whatever. I asked him if there was anything he had learned that would surprise the average American. He said it’s the DVR. The average American spends 11 percent of their monthly electrical bill on their DVR. It was designed in such a way that the hard drive never spins down, so even if you record only one show a week, it’s running the entire time and consuming power. So instead of drilling another oil well or burning more coal you could reduce America’s power bill by 5 percent just be redesigning the DVR. So many stories have this sense of delight: The data has been there all along, it’s just that no one was paying attention to it.

You’ve also done iPad and smartphone apps to enhance the book. What can you tell me about that?

I don’t know that anyone has ever done this with a book like this before, but there’s a free app you can download to your smartphone. Some of the pictures in the book have this little yellow key symbol in the corner. When you have the app, and you point the app at the page, it launches the page in the app. There are videos, there are Ted Talks. I think there are 22 or 23 videos. There’s an animated version of a story about pizza delivery guys in Midtown Manhattan. There’s also an iPad app, the profits from which go to charity: water, which is a nonprofit that’s working on bringing safe drinking water to people in developing nations. My goal here is to keep people turning the pages.

What do you want people to be left with in the end?

There’s an essay toward the back of the book called “Data Driven” by Jonathan Harris that has a really interesting thought. It’s that there is a relatively small group of people who are living in cities like San Francisco and New York, are mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, who are having an outsized effect on the rest of the human species. The kinds of societal changes that used to be the result of wars and famines are being brought about through software. …What I like about the essay is that EMC, which funded the book, had no right of review. I told them that this book wasn’t going to be all about cheerleading big data as the solution to all our problems. I said it was also going to sound a cautionary note because I think that right now governments and corporations are the ones having conversations about big data and that the average person isn’t. But it can have an effect on so many things in our lives, from our credit rating to our ability to get hired and our ability to do lots of things. I think it’s really important that we have this conversation now.

Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, found that Fox didn’t demonstrate sufficient damages from the features to justify a preliminary injunction, the companies said. The ruling enables Dish to continue marketing and offering its Hopper DVR along with the ad-skipping feature, dubbed “Auto Hop,” to its 14 million satellite TV customers.

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TV image via Tomislav Pinter

Such a dramatic transformation provides opportunities as well as challenges for today’s incumbents. It also provides compelling opportunities for innovative new entrants, large and small. When all is said and done, consumers will be the winners.

There are approximately 100 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S. who receive multichannel video service from providers such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Dish and Verizon. These subscribers watch an average of almost five hours of live TV per day or approximately 44 billion hours per month. That’s a lot of TV! But video consumption habits are changing. People today want to consume their video content anywhere and anytime, however they choose. They also wish they didn’t have to pay so much for the premium content that they currently pay for and/or don’t actually watch (the average video subscription service costs are approximately $75/month in the US). In addition, consumers have indicated that they might actually be willing to pay for different types or “bundles” of content than studios and programmers either realize or are currently willing to offer. But that’s another article unto itself, in which I’ll provide an overview of what I refer to as the coming “atomization of content.”

All of these changes in video consumption habits and desires — combined with increased broadband penetration and mobile device usage — have led to several evolving dynamics in the pay-TV ecosystem. These include an increase in cord-cutting/cord-shaving (this term refers to a consumer’s decision to completely cancel or significantly reduce their pay-TV package), a dramatic increase in online/Internet TV viewing over the last few years (today, greater than 640 million hours per month) and the creation of a parallel video ecosystem consisting of emerging TV and digital media services platforms as well as OTT/Internet TV Networks.

There are several companies leading the charge on innovation in the pay TV ecosystem. On the digital media services platform front, Roku and Apple TV are the two that have garnered the greatest consumer adoption, with approximately 90 percent combined market share in the US — and each of them has sold several million set-top boxes and a large amount of digital content. However, each one possesses a distinctive value proposition with different price points, content offerings and use cases (a comprehensive review by CNET of both Apple TV and Roku can be found here).

Regarding Internet TV networks, Netflix, Hulu and Google/YouTube have all built significant businesses to date, albeit with different content offerings, business strategies and use cases (combined, they had revenue greater than $4 billion and several hundred million users globally in 2011). Each of these entities, as well as Amazon, has also been quite aggressive at building out online video capabilities, not only by increased licensing of premium streaming video content, but also via the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to creating/producing new video content exclusively for distribution over the Internet.

Other technology behemoths, such as Intel and Microsoft, are also working on their own product and service offerings to participate in and help drive change in the pay TV ecosystem. Intel has had a number of Digital Home initiatives over the last decade, and now it’s intending to launch a pay TV service. The rumors about this effort include claims that Intel will deliver the service via an Intel-designed proprietary set-top box. Microsoft is aiming to have an integrated HW and content services TV offering, using Xbox as its set-top box or gateway in the home, supposedly delivering a wide range of licensed content as well as originally-produced content.

While the big technology incumbents evolve their strategies, a number of young start-up companies are innovating as well. Companies such as DecaTV, Awesomeness TV, Machinima, Filmon and others are essentially growing up as Internet TV networks, channels and/or media companies — each, in large part, developing its own video content focused on specific interest themes and demographic targets. For example, DecaTV is producing original video content for “engaged, affluent and educated women online.” Machinima has emerged as the leading video gaming entertainment network for gamers around the world, showcasing gameplay, original shows, game trailers and news. Awesomeness TV is a new Internet channel focused on teens and tweens, founded by former Nickelodeon and WB producer/director Brian Robbins. Filmon, founded by Alki David, is a global Internet TV network with a host of licensed as well as produced and owned content, and has one of the most extensive international content offerings.

Companies like Maker Studios, SkyChannel, Nimble TV, YapTV, Zeebox and others are innovating on the tools, infrastructure and services side. Maker Studios is essentially a one-stop shop for Internet TV development, production, promotion and distribution. SkyChannel is providing the most comprehensive and straightforward suite of tools for content owners to publish and charge for their content libraries on a multitude of devices, platforms and operating systems. Nimble TV is pioneering true “TV Anywhere” service with elastic cloud DVR capabilities as well as place-shifting (e.g., Slingbox-like) functionality. YapTV and Zeebox are two of the more impressive “Social TV” apps that provide a robust multi-screen, real-time viewing experience to consumers.

With the aforementioned transformations taking place in the pay-TV ecosystem, who will be the winners when all is said and done? Anyone who tells you they know for certain is wrong. What I can tell you is that although the incumbents will be challenged in a number of ways, you should not expect them to disappear anytime soon. They have tremendous resources, a history of competing vigorously in the marketplace and have shown the ability to evolve their existing businesses just enough to remain dominant. However, I do expect that there will be some new and innovative companies that will emerge as next-generation leaders in practically every part of the pay-TV ecosystem. I have my own ideas of which companies may be included in this group, but it will be the consumers who will really win — with increased content choices, more advantageous pricing schemes and the true capacity to watch whatever, wherever and whenever they want.

Daniel Leff is a Venture Partner at Globespan Capital Partners, a technology-focused venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto and Boston. He invests in digital media companies, among other things, and is an investor in and on the board of Roku. He tweets at @dr_daniel_leff.

The company’s new device — simply called Boxee TV, not Boxee Box 2 — still works like the previous Boxee Box in that it connects to your Internet router at home and streams Web apps, like Pandora or Netflix, to your TV. It’s still made by D-Link, Boxee’s manufacturing partner on the first box.

But Boxee TV also includes a DVR service that records TV content from free, over-the-air channels patched through the box’s dual tuner — provided that users are in one of eight markets where the TV can be recorded through Boxee. It’s also supposed to transmit unencrypted cable. So if you have a cable TV subscription, you’ll be able to plug Boxee TV into the wall and watch those channels.

What sets this device apart from other set top boxes, Boxee says, is that the DVR is entirely cloud based. There’s no internal storage on Boxee TV; the content is stored in the user’s cloud account.

The new Boxee TV costs $99, nearly half the price of the original $179 Boxee Box, and ships November 1. Boxee’s DVR service, which uses Amazon’s cloud servers, will cost $15 a month for unlimited cloud storage.

Boxee also said it would no longer make, but will continue to offer maintenance for, the original Boxee Box and its short-lived Live TV dongle.

Boxee’s earlier device options. The company will no longer produce the original Boxee Box.

The start-up, lead by Avner Ronen, has come a long way from its early days, when it first offered a Web app for video viewing on a laptop, then put out a designated set top box, followed by a live TV plug-in “dongle” that combined Web video apps with basic TV channels, to its Cloudee cloud service, all of which has culminated in the full-fledged system it’s unveiling now.

Along the way, Boxee has managed to piss off everyone from cable operators to Hulu to Mark Cuban, but now insists the box is a good thing for cable operators. In fact, Ronen said in an interview with AllThingsD, he’d like to do more work with cable operators, especially smaller ones, to perhaps offer an alternative option to the clunky, subsidized cable boxes consumers normally get with their basic or premium cable packages.

The hybrid device is a bit of a head-scratcher, so here are some basic pros and cons of it, based on an hour-long hands-on with it:

Pros:

• Boxee offers unlimited DVR storage — for a fee, of course. No more deleting never-watched shows because you’ve run out of space and can’t record new episodes.
• Cord-cutters or cord-never-getters can now put Boxee in the same price category as a Roku or Apple TV, and still get a few basic TV channels to boot, plus the DVR, plus Web apps (provided they have monthly Internet service).
• Cord-shavers who want to keep their cable subscriptions for premium content, like Showtime’s “Homeland” or ESPN, now have another inexpensive option for a supplemental or second-TV Web video box.
• Users who have been getting free basic TV through antennae can buy and connect the Boxee to coaxial cable and opt into its $15 a month DVR service.
• In terms of design, Boxee has grown out of its gangly phase and is now a lightweight rectangular box that should fit easily on console shelves.

Cons:

• Boxee has put a lot of emphasis on offering free TV channels — both broadcast and basic cable — through the device, but the number of free TV channels that are available will depend on which markets users are in. This could range anywhere from zero to a handful of channels to a couple dozen. And channels can be encrypted (read: made unavailable) by cable operators at any time, but Boxee says it has been working with cable operators to elude that problem.
• Only about 30 percent of U.S. households across 8 markets will be able to use DVR on Boxee TV.
• Hulu and Hulu Plus still aren’t available on Boxee.
• Boxee also doesn’t support cable authentication apps. So let’s say, for example, you’re still paying for your premium cable subscription — you won’t be able to access HBOGo or Comcast Xfinity through Boxee.
• Boxee TV doesn’t offer a basic Web browser.
• Boxee has ditched that fantastic Qwerty remote, the one that kept you from having to painstakingly search for TV show and movie titles using a set of arrow keys. I asked Avner about this; he said going back to a standard remote kept costs down, and pointed out that users can do most of their searching on Boxee’s compatible Web and mobile apps. But I really liked that little remote.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121016/boxee-looks-to-reinvent-itself-with-cloud-based-dvr-box/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20120924/cablevision-tells-aereo-to-get-off-its-team/ http://allthingsd.com/20120924/cablevision-tells-aereo-to-get-off-its-team/#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:04:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=253495 If Aereo, the start-up that lets you watch Web TV on tablets and phones, wins its court case, it could be a big deal for pay-TV companies.

That’s because Aereo doesn’t pay broadcast networks for their programming, and the cable guys do. But if Aereo doesn’t, then perhaps the cable guys can get off the hook, too.

That, however, could take an awfully long time to play out. In the meantime, here’s a pay-TV company weighing in on the side of the status quo — Cablevision has filed a friend-of-the-court brief that sides with the broadcasters in their fight with Aereo.

In addition to the pay TV/free TV dynamic referenced above, there’s one other reason this one is worth skimming: Aereo’s entire structure is based on a legal victory Cablevision won back in 2009 to operate a cloud-based DVR.

Big tech players like Google and Amazon have used the same ruling to create cloud-based music lockers without licenses from labels. And Aereo is basically making the same argument with its Rube Goldbergesque array of teeny-tiny TV antennas.

Short version:  Cablevision’s lawyers take great pains to argue that their setup is nothing like Aereo’s. The longer version, below, runs 24 pages.

Amicus brief 12-2807 _as filed 9.21.12_


]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120924/cablevision-tells-aereo-to-get-off-its-team/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 23:50:24 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro and Sam Schechner http://allthingsd.com/?p=242508 Apple Inc.’s vision for a new television set-top box includes features designed to simplify accessing and viewing programming and erase the distinction between live and on-demand content, people briefed on Apple’s plans said.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company proposes giving viewers the ability to start any show at any time through a digital-video recorder that would store TV shows on the Internet. Viewers even could start a show minutes after it has begun. Time Warner Cable Inc. offers a limited version of this feature called Start Over.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120816/apples-tv-vision-sharing-full-on-demand-icons/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120703/cable-companies-going-online-its-the-advertising-stupid/ http://allthingsd.com/20120703/cable-companies-going-online-its-the-advertising-stupid/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:54:38 +0000 Jef Graham http://allthingsd.com/?p=226937 Cisco’s $4 billion purchase this past spring of NDS Group — which helps cable companies stream digital programming to multiple devices — is a sign that the Internet is fundamentally transforming the TV industry. Another strong signal: Chip giant Intel’s recently-disclosed whopper of a plan to move into the video-delivery business (we’ll see how that goes). Cable companies are indeed steadily marching toward a more Web-friendly world, in large part because of competition from upstarts like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon. These companies are nipping at cable’s dominance as the best video-delivery game in town.

But there’s another, less-understood force prodding the cable guys to move: Advertising. That’s right, advertising. While competition from Internet video is the proverbial stick behind the cable industry’s push to provide IP-enabled “TV Everywhere” — TV on PCs, smartphones and iPads, in addition to the stationary living-room set — the tantalizing carrot for big companies like Time Warner and Comcast is the potentially lucrative new revenue stream generated by Web advertising that simply isn’t possible with current cable technology.

Consider the decidedly low-tech way cable-TV advertising works today. Right now, most of the ads you see are sold by the big content providers, like NBC and CNN. Everyone viewing the same program, whether it’s “Today” or the NCAA Final Four, is seeing the same ad. By definition, those non-targeted ads aren’t very effective (even though some, such as those sold during the Super Bowl, can be very memorable). The 15 percent or so of ads sold by the local cable companies can be more targeted, but only down to a neighborhood level. Your cable company knows your address and zip code. But usually all this means is that your cable provider can beam you a pitch for a nearby dentist or car dealer as you’re catching your late-night shows. Generally, these local ads stick out like a sore thumb in the middle of your programming.

Imagine a future, though, in which you also frequently watch TV on your iPad or through a browser on your laptop (this is obviously happening now, for you early adopters). In this case, cable companies know much more about you because they can track your IP address as you move around the Web. This is Web Advertising 101: You see much more relevant advertisements as you peruse various Web sites because all of your previous activities (reading, searching, shopping) have been captured by the sites you visit.

Men aren’t seeing ads for women’s shoes, for instance; someone doing Web searches in advance of a trip to Hawaii might see pitches for hotels or rental cars. And since there are now often multiple Internet-enabled devices in a given home, ads can be targeted directly to the device that a particular family member uses most often. Dad would see ads meant just for him on the smartphone he gets from the office, while the kids watching streaming Disney videos on the family iPad would see ads for toys and bikes.

There are important privacy concerns related to some aspects of Web advertising, of course (some argue that Web advertisers know too much about us), but the basic model is unchallenged and quite successful. Online advertising has surged in the last several years: In the first half of 2011 alone, Internet ad revenues in the U.S. soared to nearly $15 billion, up 23 percent from a year earlier, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Just think about the new power cable companies can get from this targeted, or even hyper-targeted, advertising.

Earlier this year, analyst Laura Martin of Needham & Co. predicted that the rollout of TV Everywhere over the next three to five years could add $12 billion in revenue to the U.S. television ecosystem — most of it in advertising. Martin noted that this new revenue would be additive, and not in place of, existing cable-industry revenues, and would dwarf the revenues of video sites like Hulu and YouTube. She added that people watching content on demand, as people generally do on non-TV devices, are more likely to view ads than people who record shows on DVRs. This all means that cable companies can likely increase their share of the advertising pie by going digital. And there’s upside for the consumer, too. I know I’d rather see ads for products I’m likely to buy than the random ads I currently see when watching TV at home. Relevance is a win-win for operators and their subscribers.

At my company, RGB Networks, we are in the business of selling gear to cable companies and other TV service providers to make it easier for them to deliver IP-based TV to multiple devices. We’ve been extremely busy lately, and have seen cable companies take big steps toward embracing the Internet: Early this year, Comcast struck a deal with Disney — which owns ABC, ESPN and other key TV channels — to let subscribers watch those channels on Internet-enabled, non-TV devices, like phones and tablets, outside the home. Charter did a similar deal with Turner Broadcasting. RGB competitors Harmonic and Envivio — which just revived plans to go public — also aim to profit from this trend.

We think 2012 will be a breakthrough year for TV Everywhere — we’re involved in many deployments with large operators around the globe (with the smaller ones beginning to follow suit). And as they have worked through their smaller trials and vetted both the technology and the business model, we now see them going bigger — with more channels and more devices — and turning to targeted advertising to help recoup some of the investment they’ve made in new infrastructure to keep their networks state-of-the-art.

We are not yet at a place where we can simply transfer our at-home, cable-TV lineup to our iPads and watch all the same shows on the go that we can in our living rooms. That will take a lot more negotiation between the cable companies and the content providers. But that’s clearly the way things are going.

And as the technology side of the house has worked through its issues and stands poised for broad deployment, we see the barriers breaking down on the content side as well. We expect to see a similar pattern for targeted advertising — the technology is in place, and the new ad model will follow as the stakeholders work through their negotiations, with everybody coming out a winner.

Jef Graham is the CEO of RGB Networks, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company making network-infrastructure products to allow video providers to deliver content to multiple screens.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120703/cable-companies-going-online-its-the-advertising-stupid/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120608/dish-chief-tv-needs-to-change/ http://allthingsd.com/20120608/dish-chief-tv-needs-to-change/#comments Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:30:11 +0000 Shalini Ramachandran http://allthingsd.com/?p=218176 Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charlie Ergen said a new ad-skipping feature that has infuriated major broadcast TV networks is a “competitively necessary” response to the explosion of cheap Internet video. That Web video threatens the pay-TV ecosystem, he added, and it is partly caused by the TV networks themselves.

In a rare interview, Mr. Ergen for the first time explained publicly his rationale for introducing the ad-skipping service called Auto Hop last month. The reclusive satellite TV pioneer said the broadcast networks, several of which have sued Dish over the ad-skipping feature and have refused to run Dish ads promoting a Dish digital video recorder, have been “more emotional than realistic.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120608/dish-chief-tv-needs-to-change/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120524/litigation-arises-over-dishs-ad-skipping-dvr/ http://allthingsd.com/20120524/litigation-arises-over-dishs-ad-skipping-dvr/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 22:45:49 +0000 Shalini Ramachandran and John Jannarone http://allthingsd.com/?p=212314 Dish Network Corp.’s battle with the major TV broadcasters over the satellite company’s new ad-skipping device has moved into the courts.

On Thursday Dish sued the four major broadcast networks in federal court asking for a “declaratory judgment” that a controversial ad-skipping feature on its new digital video recorder doesn’t infringe copyright.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120524/litigation-arises-over-dishs-ad-skipping-dvr/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120516/dishs-ads-to-end-all-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20120516/dishs-ads-to-end-all-ads/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 00:32:03 +0000 Shalini Ramachandran http://allthingsd.com/?p=209197 Dish Network Corp. plans to promote its new ad-skipping feature with, ironically enough, a television ad — that is, if broadcast TV networks agree to run the spot.

Amid mounting anger about the capability, at least two are resisting. Fox and NBC both said Wednesday they won’t accept ads promoting the satellite-TV operator’s new digital video recorder that contains the ad-skipping capability.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120516/dishs-ads-to-end-all-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120510/dish-network-offers-dvr-that-removes-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20120510/dish-network-offers-dvr-that-removes-ads/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 21:16:19 +0000 Shalini Ramachandran http://allthingsd.com/?p=206783 Dish Network Corp. released a feature on its digital video recorder Thursday that automatically removes commercials from shows aired by major broadcast networks, threatening to seriously undercut billions of dollars in broadcast television advertising.

The feature, dubbed “Auto Hop,” is an advance on existing ad-skipping features on digital video recorders, which have been widely available for several years from cable and satellite operators. For existing DVRs, consumers have to manually press a fast forward button to speed through the commercial breaks. Timing the fast forward can be difficult and viewers can still see scenes from ads.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120510/dish-network-offers-dvr-that-removes-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120216/four-weird-things-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-understanding-of-television/ http://allthingsd.com/20120216/four-weird-things-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-understanding-of-television/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:21:36 +0000 Eric Spiegelman http://allthingsd.com/?p=175090 People seem really intent these days on fusing television with the Internet. On one level this makes no sense. Television technology works just fine and we all understand how to use it. We’re also in the midst of a golden age when it comes to programming; I can’t remember another time when there were this many good shows on. Also, television advertising rates are enormous compared to the Internet. There are people on YouTube who have more subscribers than top network sitcoms have viewers, yet they earn a minuscule fraction of the revenue. Television, as an industry, is strong.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120216/four-weird-things-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-understanding-of-television/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110502/dish-echostar-settle-tivo-patent-fight-for-500-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110502/dish-echostar-settle-tivo-patent-fight-for-500-million/#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 12:25:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32359 Dish and EchoStar are paying TiVo half a billion dollars to settle a long-running patent fight over DVR technology. The two satellite TV companies will pay TiVo $300 million up front, and the remainder over 6 years, to settle suits that started in 2004. The settlement follows an April 20 legal victory for TiVo.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/dish-echostar-settle-tivo-patent-fight-for-500-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110301/tivo-shares-sink-as-it-dials-back-expectations/ http://allthingsd.com/20110301/tivo-shares-sink-as-it-dials-back-expectations/#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:29:42 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37142 Shares in DVR pioneer TiVo moved lower in after-hours trading today after the company posted a loss of $0.30 cents per share–two cents worse than analysts were expecting–and offered a disappointing picture of the current quarter. The fast-forward version: Service and technology revenue, down; subscription rate, down; churn, up; expenses, up; legal fees, substantial.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110301/tivo-shares-sink-as-it-dials-back-expectations/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110226/motorola-sues-tivo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110226/motorola-sues-tivo/#comments Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:31:50 +0000 Joan E. Solsman http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36972 Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. filed a suit against TiVo Inc. in Texas Friday claiming infringement of its patents for digital video recorders.

In the complaint, Motorola says it owns multiple patents related to DVRs, including some from the mid-1990s by a group of engineers whose company was later purchased by a Motorola subsidiary. It claimed TiVo willfully infringed those patents, which were filed more than two years before TiVo’s founding.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110226/motorola-sues-tivo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:49:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27773 Twitter has crossed the threshold from Web novelty into something substantial. Now Dick Costolo’s job is to turn it into a business–one big enough to justify the sky-high valuation investors have given the messaging company.

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.



But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.



The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”



Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]



Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.



Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).



Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”



Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/samsung-teams-up-comcast-time-warner-hulu-to-bring-tv-to-multiple-screens/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/samsung-teams-up-comcast-time-warner-hulu-to-bring-tv-to-multiple-screens/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:13:46 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1363 During Samsung’s keynote at CES tonight, it invited a full cast of characters to demonstrate how it was moving TV from the living room to both tablets and phones.

Between interpretive dance numbers and overly scripted interludes by a boy wearing a strange fur hat, Boo-Keun Yoon, president of Samsung’s Visual Display business, announced partnerships with Comcast, Time Warner and Hulu.

Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts and Time Warner Cable Chairman and CEO Glenn Britt shared the stage to demonstrate some of the features that are available with the help of connected TVs, which Samsung is calling “Smart TV.”

Comcast’s offering starts out pretty mild, with a new interface on the TV that is more enjoyable to browse, like a Web site, rather than a TV guide. The tablet version lets subscribers search listings, access DVR recordings and watch video on demand from thousands of content choices. Some of the more far off stuff was being able to change the TV channel from the tablet, and then watching a movie on a tablet, pausing it and then resuming it on a Samsung Smart TV.

The announcement builds on what MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka reported yesterday. Comcast said it will be launching a live TV service for both iPad and Android tablets, but it will restrict watching live TV to subscribers’ homes.

Britt similarly demonstrated how Time Warner subscribers would be able to access their cable subscriptions on Samsung Smart TVs and the Samsung Galaxy Tab in the home.

Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, also made a brief appearance and–without disclosing too many details–said Hulu Plus will be “coming soon” to Android phones.

Tonight’s presentation demonstrated that while Samsung is always focused on the performance and the appearance of TVs, as shown yesterday by the unveiling of TVs with ultra-thin bevels, it is also interested in improving the software experience via partnerships with operators. Yoon said: “TV will become the focal point of content access and sharing.”

Samsung is using the lingo “Smart TV” to explain the multiple-screen and Internet-connected approach. The live subscription features are expected to be available from both cable operators later this year, but it’s unknown how it will be priced or how functional they will be from the beginning.

Before ending the keynote with another song and dance routine (this time with ladybug umbrellas!), Samsung wrapped things up by detailing two pats on the back: A pitch about how green Samsung’s gadgets are these days, and how Dreamworks has been using Samsung’s 3-D TVs to develop on for 18 months.

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