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Old WSBK TV logo

WBSK logo from the 1970s, courtesy of Logopedia

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Dish Network vs. DirecTV or cable is that Dish sells a la carte subscriptions to the five legally protected superstations. As rare examples of distant over-the-air TV, stations WBSK, WWOR, WPIX, KWGN, and KTLA are available through Dish individually or in a package.

That’s all going to end September 19, less than two weeks from now, when Dish will no longer offer the superstations, although existing superstation subscribers will be grandfathered indefinitely according to an email from Dish to its retailers. That news was reported by the SatelliteGuys site, which is usually right about such things.

Those five superstations don’t include the two you might guess, WGN and WTBS, not any more. Those five are the suvivors of the brief superstation wave that hit cable TV in the 1970s and 80s, with their grandfathered status preserved by a specific clause in the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA). (WGN and WTBS evolved to add non-OTA national versions of themselves, partly to skirt rules about cable systems importing distant OTA signals. Long story.)

Now Congress is debating STELA’s renewal, and some legislators want to add on an overhaul to all retransmission consent rules. There are contentious committee hearings going on now, and I’ll bet that no one at those hearings even mentions superstations. My guess is that Dish sees that Congress will overhaul STELA one day soon and that when it does, the superstation exemption will be gone.

When I chose Dish 12 years ago, the superstations were a large factor, but now it would be easy to say that these grapes have already soured. All five superstations once provided plenty of major-league baseball coverage, but this year they combined for only about 50 games, split between WWOR and WPIX. With the rise of second-tier networks (WB and UPN, then CW and My TV), these “independent” stations had less and less unique programming. And with HD as the new basic standard for most TV viewers, Dish still delivers only the SD version. A few years ago, I noticed how little I was watching them, so I dropped them.

If you want one last chance to get distant OTA channels delivered via pay-TV satellite, this might be it. I don’t know if they’re really worth $7/month, but I figured I’d subscribe to them one more time before it’s too late.

Update: It’s September 19, and sure enough, Dish no longer offers the Superstations on its a la carte programming page. Hope you subscribed if you really wanted them.

by ·Comments Off on DC judge tells FilmOn to stop streaming OTA TV
US Open tennis on CBS NY

Friday’s US Open tennis on CBS NY

On Thursday, a US District judge in Washington DC issued a preliminary injunction against our old friends at FilmOn, the TV streaming service. Several major networks had filed suit against FilmOn, claiming the service was rebroadcasting their stations’ signals without permission. In her opinion, Rosemary Collyer wrote that the networks are “likely to succeed on their claim that FilmOn X violates Plaintiffs’ exclusive public performance rights in their copyrighted works.”

According to the New York Times and others, Fox said in a statement that the injunction “would apply across the country, with the exception of New York, Connecticut and Vermont, where the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has upheld Aereo’s business model”. I don’t think that FilmOn founder Alki David agrees.

David told the Hollywood Reporter, “We are still in many other cities across the USA. We are opening Philadelphia on Monday. We will win DC back on appeal.” Sure enough, as I write this, FilmOn is still streaming local OTA stations from New York City, Denver, and probably other cities that are harder for me to check. Just not Washington.

(As an aside, you really need to read David’s response in Variety. It starts with “The judge is clearly in (the broadcasters’) pockets,” and continues with the word “hairy” and a part of the anatomy.)

And even if FilmOn ever gets completely shut out of streaming US OTA channels, (it’s happened before), it could still continue with its zillion other channels. David told Deadline.com that “We will continue without the Networks and appeal. We will win in the appeal.” What will probably happen is that the whole business question of whether a company can stream the OTA signal from an individual antenna to a single user will be settled by the Supreme Court, and that won’t happen for a couple of years according to a great analysis on GigaOM.

The other OTA streaming service, Aereo, has been very successful in the courts at blocking injunctions. For FilmOn to succeed in streaming US OTA, I think its next step should be to hire Aereo’s lawyers.

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My DTV logoCould this be the beginning of the end for mobile TV? As reported yesterday by TV Technology, the Mobile500 Alliance allows its domain to expire, causing its web site to disappear. Since that story was published, someone renewed the domain for another year, but the organization is definitely “undergoing a management transition”.

At the NAB Show last April, word was that Mobile500 would merge with Dyle, that other mobile-TV consortium. That’s was just before John Lawson, the Mobile500 executive director since its founding, stepped down. According to TV NewsCheck, Lawson’s replacement is Rob Hubbard, president of Hubbard Broadcasting, and Hubbard doesn’t see that merger coming any time soon.

TV NewsCheck also quotes Hubbard as saying that mobile-TV phone dongle is awkward at best. “The idea of the dongle is problematic, but that’s no surprise, everyone has known that,” Hubbard said. “When it’s built-in, it would get more use. The idea of having a dongle is something that people are less thrilled about.”

I hadn’t had a chance to mention this before, but on my recent visit to New York City, I observed hundreds of subway riders. Plenty of them were reading their phones. Plenty more were listening to something on their phones. No riders watched video on their phones, and that surprised me a bit. I still don’t know where the mobile viewers are supposed to come from, and maybe some of the mobile consortiums’ backers are starting to agree.

by ·Comments Off on How we all could have won the CBS showdown
Two businessmen arm wrestling.

© DepositPhotos / photography33

The following is a guest blog post by David McAdams, professor of economics at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and author of the forthcoming book, “Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations”. This article, titled “How Time Warner can win its CBS showdown”, originally appeared in the (Durham NC) Herald-Sun on Aug. 29, a few days before Time Warner Cable settled its retransmission dispute with CBS.

Since Aug. 2, Time Warner Cable has blocked about 3 million of its customers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and other areas from receiving their local CBS broadcast. The cable giant is balking over the network’s demand for higher fees to retransmit CBS programming.

Most industry watchers seem to agree that Time Warner is likely to lose this showdown, giving in to CBS sometime around the start of the NFL season in early September. But with new tactics and a little strategic imagination, Time Warner can turn the tables on CBS and win. Here’s how.

It starts with a seemingly submissive announcement by Time Warner chairman and CEO Glenn Britt:

“The CBS blackout ends today. Despite all our misgivings at the unfairness of this deal, we will accept CBS’s demand to charge our subscribers $2 per month to view its broadcast programming over our cable network.”

This might seem to be admitting defeat, but then Britt adds the following condition:

“There’s just one thing. We believe that subscribers who don’t want to watch CBS over our cable network shouldn’t be forced to pay this unreasonable fee. Everyone pays the same amount for most channels, because that sort of pricing typically allows us to negotiate lower rates. But when a channel goes off the deep end and refuses to accept a reasonable price, only those who want the channel should be forced to pay.”

CBS would never willingly accept this deal, as many cable subscribers would undoubtedly “opt out” and view their favorite CBS programs for free through a standard rooftop antenna. But what can CBS do? Undoubtedly, CBS’s chief Leslie Moonves would come out and decry the notion of giving customers an opt-out option as a “sham,” as he has in the past, but there’s a problem.

Now that Time Warner has restored CBS programming and even accepted CBS’s demand for $2 per month, CBS is in an awkward position. If access to CBS programs really is so valuable to cable subscribers, as the network has insisted all along, how can CBS demand that they be forced to pay?

Certainly, if CBS were to take a hard line and withhold its permission to rebroadcast over this issue – thus triggering another blackout and denying all Time Warner subscribers access to CBS programming because they insisted on charging people who don’t even watch CBS over cable — CBS would now be the one in the hot seat. Knowing this, Time Warner would now be the one comfortable to “wait it out” as long as necessary.

In the end, CBS would have no choice but to accept an opt-out clause for Time Warner’s cable subscribers, or else back down and accept a lower per-subscriber fee. Time Warner would not only “win,” but also lay the groundwork to control cable content costs while avoiding disruptive blackouts in the future.

The recipe for cable-company victory is actually quite simple:

  1. Allow every channel to charge whatever it wants. However, if a channel’s demand is “unreasonable,” only accept if the channel also agrees not to charge for subscribers who opt out.
  2. If the channel insists on charging everyone, refuse but do nothing. Force the channel to block its own transmission so that customers understand that blackouts are not Time Warner’s fault.
  3. Inform subscribers of their opt-out options and make sure that the opt-out process is simple and transparent. If few subscribers opt out of a channel, you will have learned that that channel’s demand wasn’t so unreasonable after all. But if many do opt out, you’ll have a powerful argument in hand when the next negotiation rolls around.

If cable companies like Time Warner (and satellite-TV providers like DirecTV) stick to this strategy, content providers like CBS won’t have an incentive any more to demand fees that even they believe are beyond what most subscribers are willing to pay. That’s a good thing for Time Warner, and a good thing for consumers as well.

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nimbleguideI finally had a chance to poke around the new, revived nimbleTV, and it looks mostly the same as the nimbleTV I got to know before Dish shut it down for a few weeks. There are a few differences, and the big ones have Dish’s thumbprint on them.

The first change is that all nimbleTV customers must provide a valid New York City address to watch NYC local channels. Good thing I’ve got a NYC mailing address.

The second change is a restriction on simultaneous recordings. I know it used to be at least nine, Peter Litman wrote that it was 10, and nimbleTV’s site had called it unlimited and still calls it limitless. Today, a subscriber is limited to four simultaneous recordings.

The third change is trivial compared to the first two. My Casual Viewer package (taking channels from Dish’s Welcome Pack) dropped a lot of shopping and religious channels but added HSN, Daystar, and TV Guide Network.

Most things haven’t changed. NimbleTV still uses my favorite guide (shown above), an outside-the-box horizontal scroller that works well once you get used to it. NimbleTV still provides great streaming TV to my iPhone and computers. And nimbleTV still uses Dish but refuses to say anything substantial about their relationship.

Here’s my theory: Despite Dish’s continued assertion that nimbleTV isn’t an “authorized retailer,” they must have a deal or an understanding in place, otherwise nimbleTV’s receivers would stay shut down. The first two changes address likely Dish objections. If you’ll remember, Dish ran into legal trouble over distant network channels before and wouldn’t want to replay that case just because of nimbleTV. The new recording limit probably came about because Dish didn’t like it that nimbleTV subscribers could record more shows than a regular Dish customer.

Consider that within a couple of days of the outage, nimbleTV was telling its customers that “It may take up to two weeks for the billing issue to resolve completely and for service to be restored.” That was a very specific timeframe, and in retrospect, it sounds like an estimate for the time nimbleTV programmers would need to change the system to check for more than four recordings and to split the channel packages for local and non-local viewers.

I eagerly invite corrections. If I’m wrong about any of these guesses, which are just one explanation for nimbleTV’s behavior, I would be happy to change this post and add whatever information Dish or nimbleTV would care to share with its viewers. But I’ve got an unusual feeling about all of this. It’s the feeling that I may be right.