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DirecTV Plans Netflix Competitor
jfruhlinger writes "DirecTV isn't sitting still in the long-simmering war between traditional TV providers and digital streaming services. A survey the satellite network sent to customers this week indicates that it may be planning a streaming service of its own."
Of course it is.
the rest of the available global bandwidth....
captcha: prophecy
Then they may as well forget it
I'm stuck with Wildblue as my ISP and seeing that I can barely stream anything from Hulu or Netflix without having to pause the show every 3 minutes or so to buffer I doubt that having another dish and paying another $70 a month for DirecTV is going make much of a difference.
Please bring real broadband to us poor rural folk! I like the 20minute drive to my mailbox (not that there is anything in it...) but I do not like the 8-16kB/s connection with random bursts up to 60kB/s.
It's not just streaming; a reliable mail service that allows me to watch many of the movies I enjoy is worth the monthly fee.
Are like excuses. Everybody has one.
DirectTV is going to be offering an On Demand service to its subscribers. That service has been around for years, and Netflix didn't start it. Just that Netflix is the first that I know of that provided the service without being the community cable company.
The main difference of netflix and DirecTV is that DirecTV might as well use your ISPs internet for upload only. They already have an entire satellite system, and I wouldn't be surprised if they used that to stream their movies to a receiver, instead of using crowded ISP pipes, bypassing ISPs stupid caps. If that indeed happens, it will be definitely a game changer.
How about charging $1 for PPV movies instead of $4-6. There you go. Now ya don't have to waste a bunch of money on a service that is going to fail.
DirecTV has something in their favor over Netflix: a set of pipes. Satellite internet is AFAIK still expensive and inherently very high latency (Counterstrike players, day traders, and VoIP users need not apply; you'll never see a two-digit ping), but it's an option that would be especially lucrative in rural areas where dial-up or wireless tethering are the only options. They've already got the backhaul circling the globe, so it's really a matter of whether they can match Comcast/Time Warner/Cablevision + Netflix subscription at the price point. On top of that, they've already got enough pull in Hollywood for their garden variety broadcast licensing. It'd be separate of course, but they've got the precedent. If they can ensure that the service can scale while keeping the prices competitive with the other guys without having to deal with the bandwidth caps, then they could actually be a serious threat to the present system for large groups of people.
Even if the service is crap it will spur a flurry of streaming services from other media giants. Choice is good. This is the end of TV as we know it.
1) It will be wildly overpriced relative to its rivals 2) It will be slower and attached as an add-on to already crappy HDD based DVR's that are slow, buggy, and break constantly yet I have to pay to fix/replace them 3) There will be a bandwidth and viewer cap per show, 4) It will have commercials added in while I browse to subsidize revenue 5) The content will be ancient and I won't actually want to see it 6) They will adapt an iTunes/Pay-Per-View model on content that is free on other providers instead of an all-you-can-stream model, PLUS they will play the cutsie auto-delete game on content I paid for after a certain time, a-la Pay-Per-View. 7) It will be a raving pain in the ass to find anything as the remote will most certainly lack a qwerty input because YOU ARE CHEAP 8) Half of the content will be Programming in A Foreign language, Dogmatic religion channels, and there will be a curious absence of indy, YouTube and non-commercial studio content. 9) I will be restricted on the number of episodes I can 'save' or view at one time. 10) I'm more likely to get a high Def video faster from a torrent source than I am a directTV service 11) You will force me to purchase crap channels/content/HD services I don't want to access this service 12) The content that is available won't be the complete catalog of a series. I will be the last 5 episodes plus ancient episodes a la Hulu. 13) You will disable fast-forward through commercials in downloaded content to boost your revenue streams. DirectTV: I'd rather have a pineapple forcibly shoved up my ass and spun around at 4000 RPM's than have your filth clogging the one last refuge of free speech and innovation in the world. Your installation franchisees are awful. Your internet service sucks. You hold content providers hostage. Your DVR's are crap. I really hope Netflix comes and knocks you on your ass...
Why do you "need" to sit around watching overpaid strangers chuck a little ball around?
looking for a date?
They will do like any other business, use the service to try and protect their core business. You think they will settle for selling a service that earns around $10 per month and destroy their own business that earns around $70 per month? Me thinks not.
I would like to purchase a copy of your pineapple video.
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Unless the competitors can come up with a selection algorithm as good as Netflix who cares. Getting content is easy, getting the right content is something else.
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Netflix has done everything near perfectly for streaming service to our TVs. Expanding the fight for content drives up the price citizens pay for access to it so only the movie and television gain more for the same content they are largely already selling on their home channels. I haven't an issue with subsidizing entertainment if I am paying for it but I am instead paying for access to them after the fact. This new service suggests that Netflix will got into a price war with DirectTV and Amazon and thus push me more towards torrents than into paying $20-50 a month to cover the cost of the war.
This isn't a bad idea because DirectTV already owns a distribution (not to mention "internet") link that site-steps existing internet pipes, and therefor caps.
I have no doubt in my mind they'll do it poorly, but from a technical standpoint, all they really have to do increase the buffer (say 10 minute chunks) and use wider bandwidth channels and slice the streams up ala TDMA. That way the streams aren't being wasted, nor are entire channels being wasted on one stream being paused. When the playback enters a 10 minute block, the backend requests the next 10 minute block, or even optionally just download the entire movie. It's only about 1GB per hour of video, but on a satellite that can be downloaded in seconds. Just download it to a RAM buffer large enough. We're almost at a point where 8GB of ram can be had for about 100$.
It's hard to believe that anyone would ever want to watch PPV except for live broadcasts (sports, live shows/events) I could never understand why anyone would want to pay 5$ to watch a show once, at home. Netflix for 7.99 and you can pretty much watch 100 hours of shows a month if you really are up to it. Prior to things like Netflix and Crunchyroll.com people just pirated things. Netflix competes successfully against pirates because people won't go through the bother of downloading something for free if they can pay to watch it anytime. There are a lot of people out there who just download video, games and music because it's there, and feel they are being some kind of archivist. This one guy I knew, somehow had thousands of cd's ripped because they were all copied from a radio station that went out of business. "Rare stuff" as he put it. Not really that rare, as it's all stuff put out there for the Radio station to use since CD's became available.
But that's my point with streaming. You help curb the pirate problem by making it easier to not pirate, and in the case of torrents, taking people out of the share stream, and making it slower to pirate.
Kermet the frog?
Too little, too late. First mover advantage is critical when your business is not about content creation but only about content distribution. (This ignores, of course, that NetFlix is getting into content creation too -- but that's just another strike against DirecTV
It's not DirecTV anymore, it's DIRECTV.
I know this because I work for a DIRECTV HSP provider, and our Senior Director of Marketing lit me up for typing it incorrectly.
... they already provide first?
It's ridiculous that I cannot watch the stuff that my DVR recorded on another device (unless I buy another DirecTV receiver). More ridiculous that everything shows up as a UPnP service on the home network, I just can't actually view any of it.
There have been many times I was going away for a weekend, or on flights, where it would have been nice to catch up with everything the DVR had recorded.
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