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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Shutterstock/Janos Levente]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cable operator so far has rolled out the pricing option only in south Texas markets but says it will offer a similar tiered-billing option in other markets in the future. Under the new pricing plan, consumers will get a $5 reduction in their monthly bill if they accept a cap of five gigabytes monthly.

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Google has asked federal regulators for permission to sell pay TV in Kansas City, where it has been working on a broadband/fiber buildout, and the WSJ thinks it could launch in a couple months.

It would be awesome if Google could use this as an opportunity to break up the cable bundle, and let people buy individual channels instead of big expensive blocks of programming they mostly ignore.

But that’s very unlikely to happen, because the cable programmers love the bundle, and don’t have any incentive to break it up (see: Viacom’s Philippe Dauman and ESPN’s John Skipper last month at Dive Into Media). If Google wants cable TV programming, it’s going to have to play by cable TV’s rules.

So what can Google offer that will make someone switch from Time Warner Cable, which dominates the pay TV business in Kansas City?

Very high-speed Internet access, for starters. And perhaps Larry Page will figure it’s worth his while to offer the service at an extremely low margin, because the whole project is a very expensive test, anyway.

Beyond that, here are some guesses/predictions from Bernstein Research analysts Carlos Kirjner and Craig Moffett, who have a pretty good handle on this stuff. They’re the ones who predicted on Tuesday that Google would file for cable licenses “very soon.” This prognostication comes from that same note:

DVR in the Cloud: “We would expect Google to store (and make available to consumers) the content across all or most TV channels it will provide, making available to users not just the live stream but also past content going back several days or weeks, if not longer. With the addition of good search and discovery and user interface capabilities, this would make DVRs obsolete.”

TV Where You Want It: “We would expect Google to offer access to something like ‘Cloud TV,’ described above, including the live TV stream, across multiple devices, such as computers, tablets and handsets.”

A Programming Guide That Doesn’t Suck: “It is not very hard to imagine a much better user interface than the one currently provided by the MSOs and satellite TV providers,” presumably along the lines of what they’ve been showing off with the revamped Google TV.

Again, the big caveat here is that none of this happens unless the cable programmers play along. And while none of the stuff described above seems truly mind-blowing, some of it — like live mobile streaming — will stil require programmers to give Google capabilities they haven’t given to heavyweights like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

And even though the cable programmers often tangle with the cable providers, they’re at least comfortable with them in general. Google, though, still scares the bejesus out of lots of traditional media companies, so I’m not sure how many of them will play along.

One pretty good bet: Google’s foray into cable TV won’t include anything from Viacom, since the cable giant is still suing Google in the YouTube copyright case. So no Snooki for Kansas City.

[Shutterstock/Dwight Smith]

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.

To recap: Lots of people you know, and lots of people who read sites like this one, think people are already ditching cable TV for some combination of iTunes/Netflix/Hulu and/or pirate sites, etc. But cable providers and cable networks say they don’t see any signs of it.

So onward to today’s numbers from Time Warner Cable, which show the second-biggest cable company in the U.S. losing 129,000 video subscribers — about 1 percent of the 11.9 million base.

If you’re in the “it is totally for real” camp, you can jump on this as proof of your thesis, and that’s what this Business Insider post* does, Grim Reaper art and all.

But in order to get really worked up about Time Warner’s losses, you’d have to ignore contrary data points from other video services that show a boost.

For instance, AT&T and Verizon each added about 200,000 subscribers to their pay-TV offerings in the last quarter. Presumably, many of those 400,000 subscribers were already paying for TV from another provider, so those losses have to show up somewhere.

Time Warner Cable notes that AT&T’s service is available in about 25 percent of Time Warner’s footprint, while Verizon, which it says was “aggressive” about marketing last quarter, is available in about 12 percent of Time Warner’s market.

In any case, until we get numbers from all of the pay TV providers, it’s hard to make any calls about cutting/adding in the last quarter. Comcast, the industry’s biggest provider, won’t report until February 15.

And once we do have all of this quarter’s data, we’re still just going to have this quarter’s data. As we’ve seen over the last year or so, sometimes pay TV user numbers go up, and sometimes they go down. We’ve yet to see a clear trend one way or another.

None of this will soothe some of you folks, who will tell me that you, or your friends, or someone you know has cut the cord and is loving life. That doesn’t mean that’s not the case — just that statistically, it has yet to register.

Earlier this month I tried to make an analogy between cord-cutters and vegans, but I’m not sure I hit the mark. So this time we’ll let Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt make a similar argument, in his own words, via Seeking Alpha:

I think there are — remember, the average TV in America is on for some very large number of hours a day, with 6, 7, 8 hours a day, whatever the latest number is. And this activity you’re talking about is kind of sporadic, watching no specific programs. So most people watch a lot of TV and they like these packages of linear networks. And the services we’re talking about are not, at this point, a substitute for that. Having said that, there are people who don’t watch TV very much and they’re quite satisfied with just being able to watch a few shows now and then. And we all know one of those people and I think that affects our perception of what’s really going on in terms of the mass market.

*Per my disclosure, I not only like the guys over at Business Insider, but I have a vested interest in their success.

But here’s a picture of the Union Square Ventures partner watching the New York-Toronto game on his big screen, after all. He was able to get a feed of the game from a pirate aggregator called atdhe, he explained on Twitter. “Worked great for me. #screwcable”

The fact that it’s easy to get pirated TV, delivered over the Internet, isn’t new. It’s certainly not a revelation for Wilson, one of tech’s most prominent and successful venture capitalists, or his 199,000 Twitter followers.

Still, it’s always worth pointing out just how easy it has become. It’s particularly important when it comes to live sports, because that’s supposed to be the one thing that keeps everyone — or many people, at least — paying (a lot) for cable.

I’d be surprised if the Knicks game looked very good on Wilson’s Panasonic — when I tried it on my MacBook, it was pretty blurry.

But it’s better than nothing, which is your only alternative if you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber in New York City right now (the NBA’s League Pass subscription service, which is supposed to give you access to every game in the league, has a regional blackout).

It’s also worth noting that while Wilson is directing his anger at the cable guys, who are easy and deserving targets, the NBA itself is a supporter of ProtectIP and SOPA, which are designed to make sites like atdhe harder to search for on Google, Twitter, etc.

I’m quite sure that Wilson would say he’s not advocating piracy, but simply trying to access something he’s already paying for (or in other cases, grabbing something he isn’t allowed to buy for unfathomable reasons).

Still, I can imagine a Big Media lobbyist using Wilson’s tweets (or, I suppose, this post) to help explain why the legislation should pass. And I’m certain that’s not what Wilson was aiming for.

The two companies say the service will go into a “brief beta trial” and will then be available to all Time Warner Cable subscribers (again, as long as they’re also HBO customers), “in the next month.”

Depending on how you look at it, the agreement either extends the reach of Time Warner’s “TV Everywhere” program, or fills an embarrassing hole. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are two separate companies that split up in 2009, so programming deals between the two aren’t automatic, by any means.

But that explanation didn’t do much to appease Time Warner Cable customers who wanted the service. The cable company has 14 million subscribers, making it the country’s second-biggest cable provider after Comcast.

Time Warner rolled out HBO Go this summer to very positive reviews; Time Warner says users have downloaded five million apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices. Earlier this month, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that HBO Go users watch up to 50 percent more of the channel’s programming.

Greenfield, a very sharp media analyst at BTIG, says that 2012 will be the first time we’ll see a true “virtual” cable-company offering in the U.S., where consumers can subscribe to TV delivered over the Web. This is different than the on-demand services that currently exist, like Netflix and Hulu, which offer up programming that’s already been on TV. This will give you access to “real” TV, in real time.

His summary: “While [quality] will not match what you are accustomed to from your traditional [cable provider] (due to Internet congestion), virtual MSO pricing to the consumer will be substantially lower, subscribers will receive a significantly better user-interface/navigation across a wide-array of IP-enabled devices in the home and service will be accessible anywhere in the US, rather than being stuck in a certain region.”

Who/what/where/when? Greenfield’s prediction post (registration required) doesn’t commit to any of that. But it does sketch out the basic “how” framework:

• The “virtual” cable company will have to cut distribution deals with all or most of the big TV channels/programmers, just like the satellite TV guys did in the ’90s. It’s possible that some of the programmers won’t want to play along, for fear of upsetting their existing deals with the cable guys. But just like in the ’90s, as long as the “virtual” company is paying market rates (and likely higher) for the programming, the cable guys can’t really do much about it. (And if they do, they’ll have a lot of explaining to do in Washington: Note that when the Feds blessed the Comcast/NBC deal this year, they required the company to make its programming available to this kind of competitor.)
• All those deals mean that this won’t be “a la carte” cable, where you can get ESPN but not the Disney channel, or vice versa — these will be all-or-none deals.
• And all of the above means that you won’t be getting these channels for next to nothing. Greenfield figures the pricing will be “substantially lower” than what the cable guys currently charge. But since he assumes that the “virtual” cable guys will have to pay at least $40 a month per subscriber for the programming, it’s going to cost at least that much for consumers — he envisions the new guys selling this stuff at “razor-thin” margins, but not at a loss.
• Getting your TV programming from a “virtual” cable company doesn’t mean you’ll be able to tell Comcast or Time Warner Cable, etc., to pound sand — you’ll still be paying them, or someone, for broadband. Greenfield thinks this could actually be a good thing for the cable guys in the long run, because the margins on broadband are much better than in the TV business. And they’ll probably be able to force many customers to upgrade their broadband subscriptions to a higher tier, so they can stream all of that video.

OK. So who might do this?

Greenfield runs through a laundry list of every potential player, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, even Wal-Mart. I assume that the most logical step would be for someone who’s already in the video business, but with a limited footprint — like Verizon or Dish Network — to try this out.

But over the phone this morning, Greenfield said he thinks the first player will be someone who’s not in there already, but wants to build another platform that gives them direct access to millions of consumers. Start speculating now!

But here’s the upshot: The cable guys, who had been noodling with the idea of getting into the wireless business, are going to let Verizon handle it instead. And Verizon, which has already committed a ton of money to get into the cable TV and broadband business, won’t spend any more.

Call it a virtual merger, or detente, or whatever you like — it’s both sides agreeing to work together by staying out of each other’s way. [UPDATE: Comcast doesn't love with my characterization of the deal. See below]

None of the players involved wants to come out and say that, perhaps with antitrust regulators in mind. And the agreements won’t explicitly prevent any of the companies from competing with each other.

Verizon’s FiOS, for instance, is already available to about 15 percent of Comcast’s TV/broadband subscribers, and Verizon won’t stop selling it there. But Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS footprint last year, after spending $23 billion. And while Verizon hasn’t said it won’t start up again, this tie-up makes it very unlikely.

Comcast, meanwhile, is sort of in the wireless business now. But only a handful of its subscribers — perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 — use its Xfinity Internet2go service. So it’s easy to stop marketing that immediately, and transition that group to Verizon’s services in the near-term.

Meanwhile the companies all agree to co-market each other’s services. And the cable guys have essentially given themselves an option to get back into the wireless business four years from now, where they could rent out Verizon’s spectrum and become “mobile virtual network operators.” But that seems more like an escape hatch/leverage, not a road map.

The deal seems like it has obvious upsides for both companies, but we’re very likely to hear consumer watchdogs tell us that the tie-up stifles competition for crucial communication services. Which is why Comcast is making sure to argue that the deal will “provide more choice, great new innovative products, and better experiences to consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.” It will be interesting to see what Washington thinks of this, especially in light of its AT&T/T-Mobile stance.

UPDATE: Comcast wants to get some of its points across. Fair enough. The following comes from PR rep Jen Khoury:

·SpectrumCo is selling, and Verizon Wireless is buying, 122 spectrum licenses. This helps Verizon Wireless by putting them ahead of the curve on meeting their future spectrum needs as they roll out 4G LTE

·The sales agreements are customary in the wireless industry – similar to DirecTV and AT&T’s agreement to market and sell each other’s services, and they don’t require regulatory approval.

·We’ll be like each other’s Best Buy – each selling the other’s products and services, essentially for a commission.

·Neither Comcast nor Verizon Wireless is acquiring an ownership interest in the other company, and the operations of the two companies will remain independent, and no customers are being transferred.

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Viroel Sima)

Over the past few years, Ronen has flipped back and forth as he positions his company. Initially, he sold Boxee’s software as a way to help nerds watch video without having to pay for cable; then, as he attracted the attention — and ire — of many TV programmers he wanted to work with, he toned that rhetoric down.

Now he’s turned it back up. “This is a cord-cutting device,” he says in person, and the company’s marketing materials drive that home (see the image above).

Ronen claims that 2 million people a month use some combination of his gadget or his software. He says half of them have either cut the cord or never bought one in the first place — that is, they’ve never paid Comcast, Time Warner Cable or anyone else for a video subscription (though they’re almost certainly paying them for broadband).

Pitching yourself as the cord-cutter’s pal is an excellent way to attract attention, but it will make it hard to ever make headway with the big content guys who make a lot of money from cable.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that while Boxee announced it had a deal with Hulu a year ago, the video service’s subscription service has yet to appear on Ronen’s box. (Reminder: Hulu is still owned by a joint venture that includes Disney, Comcast and News Corp., which also owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111116/boxee-sells-live-tv-that-you-already-get-for-free-with-a-big-dose-of-cord-cutting-rhetoric/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111028/ad-sales-are-either-ok-growing-slower-or-soft-pick-your-answer/ http://allthingsd.com/20111028/ad-sales-are-either-ok-growing-slower-or-soft-pick-your-answer/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:52:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=137717 Given that the world’s economy seems to keep teetering on the precipice, it’s no surprise that ad spending might pull back a bit. And we’ve seen predictions to that effect for some time.

Now we’re starting to hear some ad sellers and buyers tell us that things are indeed slowing down this fall. But the stories aren’t consistent, so it’s hard to figure out what to make of them quite yet.

Yesterday, for instance, Time Warner Cable said that its ad sales had been soft last quarter, and that would continue through Q4. But Time Warner Cable’s main business is selling subscriptions to consumers, not eyeballs to marketers. So, hard to tell if that’s a harbinger.

This morning, though, ad giant WPP cut its full-year growth forecasts because of slowdowns in the U.S. and Europe and an “increasingly challenging economic environment.”

But the ad guys aren’t consistent about this stuff. A few hours later, ad holding company Interpublic said that it was hanging on to its 2011 forecast, even though “macro uncertainty remains.”

This is normally the point where digital optimists tell us that even if traditional ad markets get hit, digital will do fine, because marketing dollars are still transitioning from offline to online, and online buys are much more efficient, etc.

And all of that may be true. But I took a quick survey of some digital ad sellers in the past couple days, and heard uneasiness from them, too. The mild version: “Companies are pulling back and being more selective with spend versus spreading it across the board.” The more alarming one: “If you ask around, all you’re getting from anybody is ‘brutal.’ Dollars have dried up.”

Again, this is profoundly anecdotal, so I’m happy to hear from folks with different experiences — my hunch is that Facebook is still moving very quickly, by taking share from a variety of competitors.

More important, no one is yet suggesting that we’re entering the dark days of 2008-2009, when ad spending went negative — so far, people are just talking about not hitting sales goals they made earlier in the year. Hopefully that’s as bad as it gets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111028/ad-sales-are-either-ok-growing-slower-or-soft-pick-your-answer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111027/big-cable-loses-more-subscribers-still-says-it-isnt-seeing-cord-cutting/ http://allthingsd.com/20111027/big-cable-loses-more-subscribers-still-says-it-isnt-seeing-cord-cutting/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:29:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=137312 It’s earnings season, which means it’s time to break out the cord-cutting-is-real-no-it-isn’t debate. As usual: A big cable company — in this case, Time Warner Cable — saw a decrease in video subscribers and continues to insist that it’s not losing people to the Internet, but to the economy.

Here’s the company’s story in an almost-easy-to-understand chart. Pay attention to the parenthetical numbers, which denote subscriber losses. The two to focus on are the video subscribers — down 128,000 for the quarter — and the total subscribers — down 16,000.

And, as usual, there are plausible explanations for the loss which don’t have to include people ditching their TV subscriptions for some kind of Apple TV/Hulu/Netflix combo. The most obvious one is that Time Warner Cable is dealing with competition from telcos like Verizon and satellite guys like DirecTV.

One counter-argument for the cord-cutting crowd: Time Warner Cable’s broadband data subscribers numbers increased — by 89,000 — even as video subs declined. Again, that doesn’t have to be a cord-cutting signal — it’s possible, for instance, to use DirecTV for video and Time Warner for data. But if you’re inclined to think otherwise, that’s what you’re going to do.

Meanwhile, a warning for the advertising business: The company said that “soft advertising” trends it saw last quarter were continuing this quarter.

Cable providers like Time Warner don’t typically have a robust ad sales operation, because it’s a minor point of the business, so you don’t want to make too much of this. But that heads up does sync up with other murmurs about Q4 ads I’ve been hearing from other companies, in other industries, so worth keeping an eye on.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111027/big-cable-loses-more-subscribers-still-says-it-isnt-seeing-cord-cutting/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110902/did-starz-turn-down-300-million-a-year-from-netflix-to-make-the-cable-guys-happy/ http://allthingsd.com/20110902/did-starz-turn-down-300-million-a-year-from-netflix-to-make-the-cable-guys-happy/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:01:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=116555 It wasn’t the money. It was the price.

That’s the real story behind the Netflix/Starz breakup, says the Los Angeles Times. The paper says that Netflix was willing to pay some $300 million a year to renew the deal — more than 10 times what it’s paying now — but that Starz insisted that the video service change its pricing, too:

“Representatives for the cable network owned by John Malone’s Liberty Media were insistent that Netflix create a new “tier” for subscribers who wanted its movies at a higher price than the $7.99 it currently charges for online video. That would have put Netflix more in line with the pricing of cable and satellite companies, a step the video company apparently wasn’t willing to take.”

That is: Starz was willing to sell access to its stuff (and stuff it controls from Disney and Sony), but only if Netflix was willing to make its service less compelling to consumers, via a price hike.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same reason, more or less, that Hulu introduced a pay service last year.

And it’s why Fox (and soon, ABC and others) has started pulling back some of the free TV it puts on the Web: The people who make money from the traditional TV/video business don’t want that business to change. Or at least they want to slow change down as much as they can.

So they’re willing to make real sacrifices to make that happen. The TV networks, for instance, are willing to give up Web advertising dollars by walling off their stuff online. And Starz, theoretically, is willing to give up $300 million a year in order to placate its cable distributors like Time Warner Cable and Comcast.

If that’s really the case, I’m hedging because it’s possible there’s a different backstory at play here (but note the LAT has excellent entertainment-biz reporters, and the spin syncs up with the official commentary from both sides).

A more practical reason to hedge is that even though both sides have pushed back from the bargaining table, there’s still quite a bit of time left before the deal expires in February.

And both sides have very good reasons to come back: That $300 million could have been about a fifth of Starz’s 2012 revenue, says Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney.

And while Netflix says it doesn’t really need Starz’ stuff, because it’s now so diversified, that’s a little hard to stomach — after all, it was willing to pay $300 million a year for it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110902/did-starz-turn-down-300-million-a-year-from-netflix-to-make-the-cable-guys-happy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110814/time-warner-cable-nears-insight-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20110814/time-warner-cable-nears-insight-deal/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:55:02 +0000 Anupreeta Das And Sam Schechner http://allthingsd.com/?p=109649 Time Warner Cable Inc. is nearing a deal to buy Insight Communications Inc., the cable operator controlled by private-equity firm Carlyle Group, for about $3 billion including debt, people familiar with the matter said.

The two parties were negotiating the final agreement Sunday and a deal could be announced as early as Monday, the people said.

The deal would join two of the 10 largest U.S. cable operators by subscribers, continuing consolidation in a business facing competition for TV subscribers from satellite operators and telecommunications companies, as well as Internet-based upstarts.

href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576508940634540716.html?mod=WSJ_qtoverview_wsjlatest”>Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110814/time-warner-cable-nears-insight-deal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110722/big-cable-braces-for-a-lousy-quarter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110722/big-cable-braces-for-a-lousy-quarter/#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:06:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=101828 Time to get the cord-cutting headlines out again. The big cable and satellite companies are about to report their quarterly numbers, and Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett says it will be “dismal” for pay TV growth.

Moffett expects to see the cable guys like Comcast and Time Warner Cable lose a total of more than 300,000 subscribers, while the satellite TV companies may eke out about 70,000 new customers.

Those results could be balanced out by growth from the TV services offered by AT&T and Verizon, who have added 412,000 new subscribers. And overall pay TV numbers could end up positive for the quarter, but Moffett says that’s no sure bet at all: “Our conviction in a positive aggregate number is all but zero.”

Moffett is quite skeptical that pay-TV customers are actually cutting the cord and satisfying their TV needs with Netflix, Hulu, etc. For quite some time he’s been arguing that pay TV growth is a function of new household formations — and since there’s none of the latter, there can’t be any of the former.

Again, note that Reed Hastings and the rest of the Netflixers have been diligently announcing that they don’t believe there’s cord-cutting either — and if there is, they’re certainly not contributing it. But there are a lot of people who will see the next few weeks’ numbers as evidence that cord-cutting is, indeed, for real.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110722/big-cable-braces-for-a-lousy-quarter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110718/why-time-warners-tv-everywhere-means-except-for-time-warner-cable/ http://allthingsd.com/20110718/why-time-warners-tv-everywhere-means-except-for-time-warner-cable/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:54:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=99244 Starting today, you can stream CNN’s TV broadcast right to your iPad or iPhone, in real time. It’s part of parent company Time Warner’s “TV Everywhere” campaign, which gives Web users the ability to watch TV shows for free, as long as they’re cable subscribers.

Unless they’re Time Warner Cable subscribers.

That company’s 14 million customers don’t get access to the digitized CNN feed, even though just about every other big pay TV provider –  AT&T, Comcast, Cox, DISH Network, Verizon — has signed on.

This isn’t the first time that Time Warner Cable subscribers have been shut out of a Time Warner TV Everywhere service. Earlier this year, Time Warner’s HBO released HBO Go, a very good iPad app, for customers of just about every big cable provider — except Time Warner Cable.

What gives? The short answer is that Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are two entirely separate companies that share a name but nothing else. The two formally split up in 2009, part of a decade-long corporate slim down on the part of Time Warner (also jettisoned: Warner Music Group, AOL, and not nearly as much of Time Inc. as many had predicted).

OK. But what really gives? Here I don’t have a good answer.

Some wags suggest that Time Warner Cable has some sort of theological/business strategy problem with TV Everywhere products that allow people to stream video outside of the home, because Time Warner Cable only sells broadband access to the living room. That is, if you’re streaming HBO Go on your iPad in an airport, using AT&T’s bandwidth, then Time Warner Cable doesn’t really get a chance to participate: It wants you to consume most of your broadband through its pipes, so it can charge you for it.

But that seems a bit of a stretch, particularly since Time Warner Cable subscribers can use some TV Everywhere products — just not the ones from Time Warner. Time Warner Cable customers can use ESPN’s excellent ESPN Watch app, for instance, and stream live sports anywhere they can tote an iPhone, no matter whose bandwidth they’re consuming.

Another theory: Time Warner and Time Warner Cable’s executives simply don’t like each other, a residue of the divorce proceedings. That also seems a bit of a stretch — in the cable business, nobody really likes each other. They just tolerate each other because they spend all their time negotiating incredibly complicated, expensive carriage deals, that ultimately let both sides make a bunch of money.

Still, if anyone can shed any light, I’m all ears: Neither Time Warner Cable nor Time Warner wanted to comment for this one.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110718/why-time-warners-tv-everywhere-means-except-for-time-warner-cable/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110708/ganging-up-on-internet-pirates/ http://allthingsd.com/20110708/ganging-up-on-internet-pirates/#comments Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:30:38 +0000 Ethan Smith and Geoffrey A. Fowler http://allthingsd.com/?p=95693 Internet users who share pirated movies and music online may soon be getting an unpleasant surprise: Warnings from their cable and phone providers that detail alleged copyright infringement and threaten to slow their Web connections if they don’t stop.

The new so-called Copyright Alert System was created by a coalition of major film studios, record labels and Internet-service providers, who agreed to guidelines for identifying and notifying Web users who violate copyrights.

Among the ISPs that have pledged to implement the new policy are Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110708/ganging-up-on-internet-pirates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110527/the-most-vicious-i-hate-my-cable-company-rant-youll-ever-read/ http://allthingsd.com/20110527/the-most-vicious-i-hate-my-cable-company-rant-youll-ever-read/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 18:07:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=79374 For people who like comedian Eugene Mirman and/or people who’ve ever fumed at their cable company. In this case, Mirman is talking about Time Warner Cable, but it’d be easy enough to insert “Comcast” or “Charter” or whoever’s in charge of bringing TV to your house.

Here’s a full-page ad Mirman took out this month in the New York Press and the Greenpoint Gazette, two free New York City papers.

(Sorta-meta side note: This is a prank that only works because he actually bought a print ad–anyone can write anything on the Web, so if he just did that, it wouldn’t have the same impact. But if Mirman hadn’t posted this to his Web site, who would have seen it? Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? I mean, really looked at them?)

Oh, also: This contains jokes about Stalin and Jeffrey Dahmer. Now you’ve been warned!

May 19, 2011

Eugene Mirman
Brooklyn, NY 10217

Time Warner Inc.
One Time Warner Center
New York, NY 10019

Dear Time Warner Cable,

On April 23rd I moved and had an appointment with Time Warner Cable to come and install cable, Internet and phone service and no one showed up. When I called, I was told my appointment was entered wrong and moved to May 4th, without anyone calling me. No big deal, why would a company check with someone to see if they are home on a Wednesday afternoon? Of course they are. Everyone is. Name one person who isn’t home on a Wednesday afternoon? You can’t. It’s impossible, because everyone is home. It would be a waste of resources to call and talk to him. Did Stalin ever call people before he arrested them and sent them to die in Siberian work camps? No! Why should Time Warner Cable have a policy that is any different from Stalin’s?

Did you know that on Yelp, Time Warner Cable has one and a half stars? That’s less stars than Jeffrey Dahmer — who killed and ate people, maybe even had sex with their skulls (I don’t really know). Obviously what I’m saying is untrue, because Yelp does not review serial killers, but if they did, his babaganoush would be better than yours, if you both made babaganoush, even if his drugged and murdered people. Sorry that got weird. F**k you. I just made you read that confusing thing.

To give you an idea of how much I dislike your company, I have come up with plagues I hope God smites your board of directors with. I know He’ll only do this if you enslave the Jews, but considering you might have a monopoly in NYC, you sort of already have:

1. Awkward. Every board member’s cell phone ring loudly announces their weight and also the day they’ll die.

2. Bathroom. The constant feeling that you have to go number two, but completely forgetting how.

3. Improv. Your first-born will want to be a short form improviser.

4. Popcorn. Your second born will smell like hot buttered popcorn. It’s not that bad at first, but eventually I bet it will be maddening.

Sincerely,

Eugene Mirman and probably everyone of your customers

P.S. On May 4th I called you and got an automated message saying my appointment was moved to May 10th, but spoke to two representatives who assured me it was still on May 4th. Twenty minutes later, I got a call saying the technician called and couldn’t reach me and my new appointment would be on May 12th. An hour later I got a call apologizing and saying my appointment was moved to May 6th. Why does your company act like a controlling, abusive husband on an episode of Law and Order?

P.P.S. On May 6th a very nice, professional man came, rang my doorbell and installed everything. I would feel remiss to not mention that a handful of other employees were also very helpful. However, overall your company is run like an ill managed Soviet factory. I bet if Ayn Rand was still alive, she’d write a fun to read, but poorly argued book about how appalling and inefficient your company is. Please cut it out. Thank you.

This is a paid advertisement

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110527/the-most-vicious-i-hate-my-cable-company-rant-youll-ever-read/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110429/hbo-comes-to-the-ipad-a-couple-days-early/ http://allthingsd.com/20110429/hbo-comes-to-the-ipad-a-couple-days-early/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:28:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32279 HBO Go, the pay cable channel’s Web service, doesn’t formally launch on the iPad until Monday. But no need to wait: You can download it now at iTunes.

As advertised, the free app is a mirror of HBO’s existing broadband service: It lets the channel’s subscribers stream a very deep catalog of HBO’s shows and movies, on demand, via both Wi-Fi and wireless networks.

It will also work on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as 20 phones running Google’s Android; it won’t work on tablets running Google’s newest Honeycomb OS, though. (Demo video from BTIG’s Rich Greenfield at the bottom of this post)

The two catches:

• The service is available to most cable customers, with the exception of Time Warner Cable and Cablevision subscribers. Time Warner Cable says it’s working on a deal; Cablevision won’t comment.
• It’s a very deep catalog–1,400 titles, including the complete run of great series like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”–but it will still have gaps that could frustrate HBO’s most avid users. I’d like to try David Simon’s “Treme” again, for instance, but I can’t get last season’s episodes; just the new ones that started airing last week.

Some of you will bemoan the fact that you have to be a cable subscriber to get this–there’s no broadband-only option, a la Netflix and Hulu Plus. But that’s the point: Parent company Time Warner is completely wedded to the cable industry and wants to build as many incentives as it can to keep you there, too.

Still, this stuff is lightyears ahead of where the cable business was just a couple years ago, where paying subscribers had no way to get these shows except on their TVs, or by buying it again on DVD or iTunes.

And if you really are a dedicated cord-cutter, and a patient one, you may eventually get your way: I can imagine a scenario where HBO does offer this stuff directly to consumers, and if it happens within a few years, I won’t be completely shocked.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110429/hbo-comes-to-the-ipad-a-couple-days-early/feed/ 15 http://allthingsd.com/20110428/gripe-about-the-cable-guys-if-you-want-but-theyre-having-a-very-nice-quarter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110428/gripe-about-the-cable-guys-if-you-want-but-theyre-having-a-very-nice-quarter/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:24:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=32233 If you live in certain pockets of the country, or on the Web, you know that the TV business is the Titanic, and that it’s just about to be smashed into pieces.

Could be!

But right now the industry is steaming merrily along. Today’s snapshot, via three earnings reports:

• Discovery Communications: Revenue up 9 percent, profits up 20 percent.
• Viacom: Revenue up 20 percent, profits up 47 percent.
• Time Warner Cable: Revenue up 5 percent, profits up 50 percent.

And those cheery results hold up when you dig into the reports, too: Discovery’s numbers are up because it’s getting more for both the ads and the subscriptions it sells–in the U.S., those numbers are up 6 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Viacom has the same story, plus “The Jersey Shore,” which remains astonishingly and distressingly popular.

(But don’t get me wrong: The boob tube has always been the boob tube. And, really, much boobier, in the old days of three (three!) networks. Here, via Bill Simmons, is a clip of Heather Locklear and Heather Thomas in a “Battle of the Network Stars” dunk tank. And at the bottom of this post, Telly Savalas and Gabe Kaplan and Farrah Fawcett. So great/bad.)

Okay, but those are programmers. What about Time Warner Cable, which merely owns pipe? Doing fine, too. The company did lose 66,000 video subscribers–about a half-percent of its 12.2 million base, so if you’re looking for evidence of cord-cutting, you can point to that.

But the cable industry’s consistent refrain is that any customers that are cutting the cord aren’t doing it to watch Web video on iTunes or Netflix or Hulu; they’re doing it because they don’t have any money for anything, period.

Here the numbers seem to bear out the argument: Time Warner’s video losses were outweighed by customers who added broadband and/or phone service to their packages, and the company ended up adding a total of 208,000 new subscription services for the quarter.

Next week we can check in with Comcast, which now has its hands in both the programming and pipe business. Those numbers should be instructive.

And now, because I can:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110428/gripe-about-the-cable-guys-if-you-want-but-theyre-having-a-very-nice-quarter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110407/espns-iphone-app-shows-us-what-tv-everywhere-is-supposed-to-look-like/ http://allthingsd.com/20110407/espns-iphone-app-shows-us-what-tv-everywhere-is-supposed-to-look-like/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:00:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31549 Two years ago, the big cable networks and providers started talking about “TV Everywhere” — a plan that was supposed to let cable TV subscribers watch anything on TV, on whatever device they wanted, wherever they were.

The idea was that whatever/whenever access would be enough to keep cable TV subscribers paying their monthly bill instead of cutting the cord for Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. And while it sounded pretty good on paper, it’s been very slow going since.

But here’s what it’s supposed to look like: ESPN’s new “WatchESPN” app, which does just what you think it does. It lets you watch the sports network live, for free, on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, no matter where you are.

It seems to work pretty well, too. Here’s a screenshot of live TV I took from my iPad. Note that the app is technically an iPhone app (an iPad-optimized one is coming), but the image looks pretty nice even blown up at 2x:

Catches? Of course.

• The biggest one is that Disney’s network has carriage deals so far only with Time Warner Cable, Brighthouse TV and Verizon FiOS. That covers 18 million homes, but that won’t make you any happier if you don’t live in one of them. It’s worth noting that Comcast, the country’s biggest cable provider, isn’t included here, even though it has previously set up broadband programming deals with ESPN.
• There’s no app for Google’s Android platform, though ESPN says that’s coming.
• ESPN says there are a “few circumstances” where it still doesn’t have the rights to transmit its on-air programming online. The biggest one you’ll care about is “Monday Night Football,” which the network can’t transmit to mobile phones because Verizon has paid big money for those rights. But ESPN says it can send the game to your iPad, regardless of where it is or what connection you’re using.

But given the nature of this stuff, that’s still a pretty short list.

And unlike the iPhone and iPad apps we’ve seen recently from Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cablevision, which either don’t work outside your house or do with limitations, this is one where you don’t have to scratch your head for a reason to use it. This is stuff you’ll want to use if you like sports but aren’t able to watch from your couch. Simple, useful.

Note for ad folks: The apps don’t carry any ads right now at all–when a commercial break comes on, viewers just get a temporary graphic. But ESPN ad boss Sean Bratches says by August, his company will have technology that will allow it to serve up different ads to different users at the same time. And when that’s available, he’ll start selling access to tablet and phone eyeballs in conjunction with TV ad buys.

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