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Intel's Attempt At A-La-Carte Television Hits Delays
bill_mcgonigle writes "Updating the previous story, Forbes and Gigaom are now reporting that Intel is running an internal startup aimed at offering an internet-connected set top box with a-la-carte 'cable' channel subscriptions. They also apparently plan to record everything and offer all content on-demand. While some are skeptical that content providers will give up their cable cash cow and they've run into licensing problems already, perhaps the economic effects of cord-cutters will finally make this business model viable."
We had cable until COX took Turner Classic Movies off of analog cable and put it on digital cable, at which point we had enough. Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, The History Channel, and Sci-Fi/SyFy were already on the way down but hadn't hit rock bottom yet.
We don't miss it. Between XBMC, free content or ad-supported streaming content via our network-connected Blu-ray player, and free content via web browser, there's no reason to pay for content that still comes with ads anymore.
Cut the cord permanently.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I bet the first thing you'll be able to watch on this device is "Duke Nukem Forever: The Movie".
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Anyone else read the arrogant comment attributed to some unnamed source at Intel, stating that Intel was frustrated with "everyone doing a half-assed Google TV so it's going to do it themselves and do it right." ?
So, not surprisingly, Intel has now run into "delays" in securing agreements with content providers (in this case, the word "delay" means a quantity of time as large as forever). Why on earth would Intel believe that they have the consumer electronics clout to pull this off where Apple and Google continue to fail?
And who in their right mind at Intel decided to blast the media with their arrogant claims before they actually secured the elusive content agreements? Are they this completely incompetent as to think that Internet TV has anything at all to do with their fabulous semiconductor technology, instead of realizing it has everything to do with negotiation and leverage?
The kool-aid must run strong...
I mean, net neutrality is nice and all, but I hardly think that Google and ATT will just roll over and let Intel use their backbone fiber without a fight.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
When almost everything consumers already have hooked up to their TVs (game consoles, TiVos, blu-ray players, hell even the TVs themselves now) are able to stream media over the internet, it's becoming less and less necessary to have a cable subscription. It doesn't take long to get over the "OMG I CAN'T WATCH THE LATEST EPISODE OF [new show] TONIGHT" feeling, and once that is gone the wealth of streaming-available content is overwhelming.
Assuming they already have a broadband connection (which most people do), for under $20/month plus the initial outlay for an antenna, people can have access to Netflix ($7.99), Hulu Plus ($7.99), YouTube (free), and broadcast TV (free). Unless someone is really addicted to one particular cable channel, that's an extremely hard offer to beat and will offer far, far, far more choices than anyone could ever get through.
As more and more people realize this and get rid of their cable subscriptions, more cable networks will put their shows on Netflix/Hulu/Youtube and cable TV will fade away.
Just wait until someone tells them they have to meet those requirements too. Trust me, with modern streaming technologies that is a tricky bit of legal mandate to comply to, and quite expensive too.
Oh man I *so* hope this kinda thing takes off somehow, even if Intel's specific version of it doesn't make it... keep plugging away at it, because this is what cable TV *should* be. Without all the craptastic bundling - if a chan or a show isn't popular, then let it die. Let alone, driving a wedge between content and infrastructure.... but thats probably a job for the regulators.
C|N>K
Originally $150/mo going towards various TV things, now down to $35/mo myself as well. $0 soon enough.
Roku + torrents + spotify + netflix + pandora + amazon prime -> no use for TV whatsoever.
Roku CAN do it. You just might have to PAY FOR IT. Not that Netflix is totally free on it's own. It is merely cheap.
Of course you are going to have few options if you are only willing things that are free and ad supported (Hulu) or have a pittance monthly fee (Netflix).
Depending on your use case, the PAY FOR IT option might even be a lot less than what you would pay for cable. Ala Carte is already here. It's just done by the show rather than by the channel.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Like that's gonna work with all of the greedy content providers* licensing agreements. Just the other day I was at a woman's house and we were deciding what to watch on her Roku box. Hey, let's watch this on Netflix! Oh, we can't, that's DVD-only. Let's watch it on Amazon! Oh, premium membership (or whatever the fuck the problem was) only. It seemed that wanting to watch every movie that was a cult classic or otherwise worth watching held us hostage from some kind of restriction,
What kind of restriction are you talking about? You said the movie was available on Amazon streaming (but you'd have to pay for it), and Amazon streaming runs fine on Linux.
Is it paying for the content that you object to?
which is inexcusable beacuse outfits like Netflix have had quite awhile to get their shit together and still have no native Linux client.
Why would they? It would gain them a tiny number of users but incur large support costs - MS has 3 mainstream operating systems to support: XP, 7 and now 8. Linux has dozens of distributions they'd have to support... and that's after they've spent the money to train their support staff on Linux. If they wanted to provide a Linux client, they'd just do it - they already have one since the Roku runs Linux.
Intel managed to make themselves look completely clueless and oblivious to the market. If it were so easy, Apple would have done this 5 years ago with the AppleTV, that was their plan to begin with.
Ala carte over the top is the holy grail that every tech company has been chasing. Google, MS, Apple, Sony, Netflix, Tivo, Roku, Nitendo, anyone with an box with an internet connection and a tv output.
All of them have been stymied because it would be the end of big contents business model. Making people pay for content they don't want or need and running adds on it.
Get a VPN service and use the iplayer to get BBC content. Sadly, they have to negotiate rights for the UK only for a lot of content. The iplayer standalone app is great too, episodes are downloaded automatically so the buffered issues from streaming through a VPN are bypassed.
About the only thing I am willing to pay for is the sports. But no one will sell me just the sports. I am not willing to pay the extortion fee all year to get a couple games a week for 5 months a year. Whether it is sports or something else, most people aren't interested in any more than a small percentage of what is provided on cable TV. They have just been convinced that it is worth paying for. For example, my parents have about 200 channels. There are only 168 hours in a week. Even if all they did was watch TV 24-7 they couldn't even watch one hour per week on each channel. They also sleep and have jobs so they have cable TV on a couple hours a day max.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
at least put sports on there own and have theme packs for the other stuff.
Sickbeard is the "DVR" app that cable companies should have released.
I would use it, but the front page of shows is sending me a powerful message to stay away:
Breaking Bad
Criminal Minds
Destroyed in Seconds
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What I want to know is why BBC American can't just leave their shows at 50fps, and deliver content as 1080i50 and 720p50? Modern HDTVs, even American ones, can display 1080i50 and 720p50 just fine over HDMI. IMHO, 50-60hz temporal rate conversion is pointless when the TVs can deal with the native framerate anyway. It's like the fetish web designers had around 1996 of pre-converting images into ugly dithered web-safe colors, instead of just letting the browser deal with it when necessary. Leave 50 as 50 and 60 as 60, and let the TV sort it out the way God and Engineers intended.
So long as the content producers make more money from linear channels (regardless of the distribution medium, be it cable, satellite, fiber, whatever) than they would make through a-la-carte content distribution (subscriptions, individual program purchases, whatever) they wont change.
Remember that for any given piece of content, there is almost certainly a non-zero number of people who are paying for the content (through their package) but who do not consume the content. The amount of money that content producers would loose from people who pay for their content but dont consume it would far outweigh any profit they make from people who actually pay for their content (including those paying for it now because its available a-la-carte but who weren't paying for it before when it was only available as a linear channel)
Also, remember that the online subscription content by and large would not contain ads like the TV channels generally do (or certainly not the same $ value of ads as the TV channels have)
So as long as it remains more profitable to make the content available through a linear channel and force people to pay for content they dont want to get the content they do want, the content providers will continue to do that.
True except for one five-letter word: Sport. Yes, yes; great unwashed, bread and circuses for the masses, but until that nut can be cracked, the majority in the US won't be cutting the cord.
And yet, any good torrent tracker with a couple thousand active users can do the same thing - for free yet. So why can't a big corporation with thousands of times as many resources as those users do the same thing, especially if they expect you to pay for it? Simple answer: they're stupid.
(Disclaimer: I don't watch TV, nor do I pirate it. I buy the content I want on Blu-Ray or DVD)
Is it paying for the content that you object to?
No, it's HBO demanding that people pay $1,000 per year just for Game of Thrones that I object to. Instead, I have chosen to do without. It's also the fact that certain decades-old movies and TV series aren't available to the public for any price that I object to (such as Song of the South and Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea).
there's no reason to pay for content that still comes with ads anymore.
Yet people pay for content that is ads. "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" by The New Seekers is a Coca-Cola commercial, "Summer Girls" by LFO is an Abercrombie commercial, and "Replay" by Iyaz is an iPod commercial. The 1989 film The Wizard is one big ad for Nintendo products that raked in $14 million at the box office.
Of course you are assuming people are within range of an OTA tower.
Yes, it has become fashionable to assume people are in the vast majority. There is an implicit claim that terrestrial free-to-air TV reaches the vast majority of people in the major anglophone markets. If you dispute this, I'm willing to take a look at your evidence.
I have found that the cost of one month of cable can pay for one or two seasons of a show a month.
That of course depends on what kind of programming you prefer. Political talk shows don't come in "seasons", and though professional and college sports are broadcast in "seasons", there's no market for box sets because the market is so spoiler-sensitive that it has to be broadcast with less than a 60 second delay. One family in my sample keeps cable for ESPN and the other sports channels, and another keeps cable for MSNBC, Bloomberg, C-SPAN, and C-SPAN2.
the content providers like NBC are going to require the cablco's to include Bravo and USA and Syfy if you want MSNBC or vice versa.
If it's a matter of bundling all of one content provider's channels, then why don't they let cable operators sell packages "all of Turner's basic channels", "all of NBCUniversal's basic channels", "all of Disney's basic channels", etc.? I can see requiring a subscriber to buy the Turner package before HBO, as Turner and HBO are both owned by Time Warner, but why should one have to buy Disney's ESPN to get Time Warner's HBO?
the mpaa and riaa are still suing people who download stuff online so don't get your hopes up.
I can see this for movies: a producer needs MPAA money to afford the production values that most people expect in a feature film that isn't one of a few novelty movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. But as for music, on what grounds can the labels in the RIAA sue people who choose to download recordings under a Creative Commons license or other recordings whose copyright is not owned by an RIAA member?
How do they intend to address the issue of Live Sports?
Buy a ticket to a home game and watch it in person.
Instead of trying to force the content providers (networks) to allow ala carte, why don't we go directly to the content creators, the people who produce shows that may be picked up by the networks, and present them with a convenient, well-integrated outlet to consumers that bypasses the networks entirely?
I know, to a certain extent this is already being done, but I'm thinking that Intel (in this example) should be going directly to Chuck Lorre, J. J. Abrams, Tim Kring, et al, and say "how would you like to survive the inevitable downfall of network television? And make a lot of money?"
The content providers are just middle men. It seems like they could be eliminated.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Your suggestion doesn't work for me since there's no team in my vicinity. Or even country. One Buffalo Bills game a year in Toronto doesn't really cut it.
Don't you have the Argonauts in your country's league?
You have good points; it wouldn't be easy, but I still think it's doable. However:
> However, just hiring a known entertainment name to create content for your business is not enough. You also need to fund the expenses that studios have -- soundstages, cameras, sets, costumes, catering, etc. -- while producing the content. Unless you want new science fiction stories filmed through a laptop camera and recorded with headset microphones for YouTube, that is.
I'm hoping you meant that as hyperbole. As a matter of fact, production and post-production costs have been dropping for quite a while. You may have heard about the House season finale that was shot entirely with a Canon 5D. I wouldn't have done that, but a Canon C-300 (about fifteen grand plus lenses) is within reach of a small studio. (or rent it for $400 a day) Looking at what has been done in webisodes (notably Sanctuary before Sci-Fi channel bought it and killed it) it's easy to see how a decent production can be done for a reasonable price. "a laptop camera and headset microphones" is so last century. Look at the first (and sadly, probably only) episode of the scifi drama "L5".
But your underlying point, that the money to produce the shows has to come from somewhere, is correct. However, there is another layer in all this that we haven't mentioned yet. Traditionally the money for pilots are provided by studios, which, if they sell, get paid by the networks to continue. The studios are usually completely different entities from the networks. I'm saying, the studios don't really need the networks anymore, they have the opportunity to make similar deals with the new content providers, Intel, Apple, Google and the like. And in fact, to the extent they continue to work with the networks only, they're going to eventually be at a competitive disadvantage. The world is changing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.