Infrastructure
Why I Can’t Break Up With Cable
Cable prices suck, you’re paying more for less — that’s the gist of a New York Times report that said cable prices have gone up 77 percent since 1996, almost double the rate of inflation. Adding insult to injury, we’re only watching 13 percent of the channels offered. I hate dealing with the cable company, but I just can’t seem to break up with it. Maybe NewTeeVee readers can offer a few suggestions to help me cut the cord.
There are three main reasons why I stay in this lopsided relationship: laziness, HD and discovery. Read more of this story
Who Will Control Your Digital Media?
It’s still unclear is if the digital home will be a consumer-controlled environment or a carrier-controlled one. Samsung said today it is realigning to put its digital media assets in its telecommunications division, but meanwhile Forrester sees Apple moving to unify the broadband networks with the audio visual networks inside a consumer’s home through some sort of hub strategy combined with installation services. In this scenario, the consumer buys the tools used to access and navigate digital content coming from the web, rather than using an ISP-supplied set-top box. Continue reading at GigaOM.
Q&A: KIT Digital’s Kaleil Isaza Tuzman
We’ve found it hard to find anything in common between the white-label video provider ROO Group and what it has become in the five months since new Chairman and CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman joined the company. It’s now called KIT digital, operates out of Dubai, has laid off significant portions of its staff, raised $15 million and acquired two companies to take it in new technical directions. ROO Group, the white-label video provider, is increasingly looking like a shell company for Chairman and CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, who joined the firm at the beginning of this year and quickly renamed it KIT digital. But in one of his first interviews since getting involved with the venture, Isaza Tuzman told us that he’s just aggressively honing the company’s core business: enterprise video for a global market. Isaza Tuzman previously was at JumpTV, KPE and govWorks (for which he was immortalized in the bubble documentary, Startup.com). In a phone interview yesterday, he told us about KIT’s acquisition of Stockholm-based Kamera, a mobile video company.
Isaza Tuzman also pitched KIT digital’s global strategy, during which he managed to criticize each of the major U.S. white-label video players for having a local focus. Meanwhile, Brightcove announced today the formation of a Japanese subsidiary with $4.9 million in funding, with three of its investors serving as local sales agents. So maybe he spoke too soon.
Isaza Tuzman also told us about dropping legacy ROO customers, KIT’s future acquisition possibilities, and why he shut down Wurld Media. Keep reading for an edited transcript of our conversation.
Update: Brightcove felt like they were described inaccurately in this interview, and I agreed, so I gave them the opportunity to respond. I am posting the full text of their reply in the comments (as it is rather long), but the core points are that Brightcove has large and well-known customers from all over the world who pay significant amounts of money for the service. Please do give the response a look.
Sandvine’s New Plan to Slow You Down
Sandvine, the company behind the devices used by Comcast and others to block BitTorrent, has just introduced a network management tool called FairShare that aims to address Net Neutrality concerns. FairShare is supposed to allow ISPs to manage their networks with a protocol- and application-agnostic approach, precisely what Comcast promised to switch to before the end of the year.
Comcast isn’t the only one that could benefit from FairShare. Sandvine itself has been looking for a way to win back customers that were scared off by potential policy implications. The company saw its revenue fall 46 percent in the first quarter of 2008, a downturn that it attributed to customers delaying purchases because of the Net Neutrality debate.
So what will FairShare mean for online video? Well P2P startups will no longer be singled out as the Internet’s bandwidth bogeymen. But your P2P-powered NBC Direct downloads won’t necessarily be any faster with FairShare. In fact, all bandwidth-intensive online video applications are at risk of being throttled.
No Free Ride From Cable Programmers
The web may be packed with free content, but don’t look for cable programmers such as Time Warner, Disney or MTVN to follow suit any time soon. During a panel discussion at this year’s Cable Show, the networks rejected the notion that they will have to give away their content in order to remain competitive.
Broadcasting & Cable quotes George Bodenheimer, co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, as saying that just because the Internet has lots of free, user-generated content, “I wouldn’t be too quick to give away [professionally-produced content] for free.” He added that, “I think we deliver value and I think we need to keep that dual stream going.”
Research: Kids Influence Parents Over TV
Kids these days are wielding more power over how video and televised entertainment are being pumped into their homes, according to new research from Motorola. The company studied the influence and behaviors of the Millennial generation (young adults ages 16 - 27), and the results are not surprising: They want HD content when they want it, wherever they want it.
Some highlights from the Motorola study include:
- 71 percent of Millennials influence parental decisions about cable, DSL or satellite services.
- 62 percent have influence over purchasing an HDTV set and programming package.
- Nearly 50 percent of DVR-owning Millennials use it for half of their TV watching.
- 84 percent are interested in TV and movie content on demand.
- 83 percent want to be able to download TV from a DVR to their mobile players.
Again, the results of the study aren’t surprising. Modern TV setups are complex, so its natural to lean on the guidance from your connected child. Additionally, this generation was the first to get a taste of consuming content on its own terms. Just wait until the post-Millenials, who have never known anything but on-demand, start making the decisions.
At Structure08, Get the Cloud Computing Lowdown
We are inching close to ourStructure08 conference and are trying hard to round out the speaker list and the agenda. Our friends at Techcrunch wrote nice things about the upcoming conference on their blog today. I have been spending a lot of time researching the topics so we can make the event more fun and informative. The conference will be held on June 25, 2008 at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. More details are here. For ticket sales, click here.
Even Cox Doesn’t Like Its Existing UI
While the ISP part of Cox Communications is busy interfering with its customers’ BitTorrent traffic, the cable part of the company is trying to improve its customers’ experience. The country’s third-largest cable operator tapped NDS Group earlier this week to revamp its user interface. Not only will the redesign unify Cox’s different digital offerings, but it’s also a step towards keeping up with some of the rival upstart hardware makers as they vie for the home video-delivery crown.
Cox thinks its current cable UI is too complicated. “What we have out there today is not consistent is nor easy to use,” Lisa Pickelsimer, Cox’s director of product development, told me by phone. “The navigation has an ad hoc feel; that happened because historically we rolled out different services and had to tack them on. It started with linear programing, and then we started adding VOD and DVR and the email viewer. That resulted in the user feeling like they are interacting with different applications. We just want to make it easy.”
To achieve that easy feeling, the redesign will streamline the company’s different video offerings like regular TV, recording and VOD into one user interface.
Move: Online Profits Approaching TV Levels
We sometimes worry if we write about Move Networks too much. But it’s an interesting startup with real technology making an increasingly significant impact on how people are entertained. And hey, when the CEO stops by your office and spews out a bunch of numbers with dollar signs attached to them, you gotta write it up.
According to Move CEO John Edwards,
- Move customers are seeing CPMs of $35 up; $70 CPMs for better networks and even up to $100
A year ago it cost at least 18 cents to transmit a gig; Move got it down to $0.10 six months ago — so it’s starting to approach the point where you can make the same money showing something on TV as showing it online
Whatever Happened to Red Swoosh?
Remember Red Swoosh, the P2P company that was bought by Akamai for $18.7 million in April 2007? Red Swoosh used to be a competitor to Akamai, albeit on a much smaller scale, offering P2P-powered content delivery services to corporate customers. Shortly before the Akamai acquisition, the company reinvented itself, rolling out products for amateur videographers and file-swapping consumers.
This new direction opened up a lot of possibilities for Akamai. In particular, it offered a way for Akamai to extend its business model to blogs and other platforms for user-generated content. Call it the CDN solution for the long tail, if you will, complete with options to enter the advertising market. But none of that materialized. Instead, it looks like most Red Swoosh products have been discontinued or taken down.
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