Google has entered the premium content era, but its a la carte subscription approach is weak and looks backwards. It was announced late last week that YouTube would begin rolling out pay-per premium content services with video from producers ranging from Sesame Street and National Geographic to the Ultimate Fighting Championship. YouTube now allows these producers to sell monthly subscriptions of their content for a 50/50 revenue split. I can’t figure out why a forward-looking outfit like Google would fall back on such a primitive approach to content monetization as it dives into the premium content
Read More »The short answer is yes. As my learned colleague Ed Finegold points out, the Age of traditional Cable Companies may be coming to an end. Purchases of new TVs are being driven by screen size and price but more and more by whether they are Internet enabled. As we know only too well in the communications world, telcos now need real time capability in their charging and pricing infrastructure. In fact, real time capabilities are now needed, not just to provide instant information, but to provide Internet like predictive capabilities and choices. Billing is something
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When you read articles like this from GigaOM that show how Connected TVs are on the rise, you wonder whether it signals the beginning of the end for traditional cable TV. It may, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as far as MSOs are concerned. Cable set-top boxes are expensive and limited in flexibility. In a multi-device, OTT environment, cable operators are actually constrained by their set-top-centric services. They’d like to offer more apps, better user experiences, and better content engagement. If operators can move away from set tops, they’ll not only reduce their
Read More »It turns out that the real reason Pay TV packages make you pay a lot for very little of what you actually want is because of content owners. This great article from the Wall Street Journal explains how the big media companies essentially prevent Pay TV providers from offering personalized or even a la carte programming packages. One of the great takeaways from this article is that consumers have the best chance to break the old models by changing our behavior. First I want to apologize to MSOs for calling them “lethargic, nay-saying, status quo
Read More »I was reading the news today about Fox suing distribution partner DISH because its new “Hopper” set-top boxes allow subscribers to stream both live and recorded TV to connected and mobile devices and “instantly skip commercials.” It intrigued me because online and OTT video distribution are disrupting the status quo in Pay TV. Traditionally happy partners are being pitted against each other. They aren’t yet sure of the best ways to work together to capitalize on changes in consumer viewing behavior. Now that anyone can take content directly to individuals thanks to broadband-connected devices, the Pay
Read More »The more we hear “Cloud” the more it is associated with “outage.” Go ahead – do a Google search for Cloud Outage and you’ll see a number of big brands (Amazon, Microsoft) apologizing for their cloud outages. We see articles like this one from Streaming Media which gloss over the gory details and pump Cloud’s benefits…again. Folks in the Digital Content world don’t tend to be quite as technical as our Bell-head friends. They might be inclined to buy the Cloud’s supposed benefits without understanding its risks. The same folks might read a great, engineering-oriented
Read More »Customers aren’t houses anymore, we’re individuals. And individuals are everywhere, not just within traditional network boundaries. Selling to individuals changes billing radically, as do digital content, on-demand services, OTT models, and the cloud. This video discusses how they all tie together and raise big questions on what billing will become for operators
Read More »I’ve spent 16 years in telecom, and all of a sudden I seem to work in the TV business. One of the newsletters I like to read for general industry coverage is USTelecom Daily Lead. Lately I’ve noticed that more and more of its coverage is dedicated to digital content, and particularly to streaming video news. A recent issue, for example, aggregates news relating to AT&T’s digital life home monitoring and on-demand streaming services; Verizon FiOS TV; DISH TV Everywhere; Netgear’s streaming TV device; and Cisco’s Internet TV plans. So, when did Telecom become
Read More »While wishing the humble text message Happy 20th Birthday, many newspapers are also announcing its death. The culprits have been under suspicion for a while, for instance, WhatsApp now accounts for billions of messages and other Over the Top messaging media are not far behind. While ‘consumer’ SMS may be suffering in some countries and regions, according to Informa Telecoms and Media, there is still growth in the old dog yet – who predict that SMS traffic will increase 13.9 percent in 2012, to 6.7 trillion messages. The truth is that SMS is still
Read More »Just when we think we are taking a couple of steps forward, we then lurch to the left and take two backwards. And that is not even after a night out, that is just reading the latest news and analysis of the mobile advertising market. And now – suddenly – we find our way, like the adverts themselves, are blocked. One step back. One Step Forward According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, global mobile advertising revenues have hit $5.3 billion. eMarketer predicts that the figure for the US alone will hit $6.6 billion in
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