by ·Comments Off on More signs that broadcast TV will stay healthy

Broadcast TV cameraLast year, I wrote (here and here) about the way that TV video systems were changing, and that TV broadcasting’s future was unsettled. This week, there are several signs that good old fashioned broadcast TV might do pretty well for a while.

Most recently, the National Association of Broadcasters launched a site promoting The Future of TV. Much of the site promotes mobile DTV, of which I’m still skeptical. The NAB talks about getting mobile DTV added to cell phones, but they’re having trouble even getting a $1 FM radio chip added to cell phones. Standalone devices still look pricy, although I hear that the Consumer Electronics Show will include some battery-powered regular and mobile DTV sets. I wouldn’t mind having something like that in the basement when a storm rolls through.

Speaking of storms, a Rasmussen poll released this week (and quoted here) said that over half of us still rely on local broadcast TV as our primary source for weather information. That’s exactly the edge that a local station has over anyone else; it can broadcast whatever is important and immediate to local viewers.

While those are positive signs for local broadcast stations, the topper came in a TV Business Report article which described a new Moody’s Investors Service report. Moody’s analyzed all aspects of TV viewing, and when it came to locals, Moody’s saw an advantage that no one can match. Local stations might continue to lose viewers, but they “will still generate a sizeable share of local advertising dollars as the content will continue to generate the largest audience.”

In other words, don’t fixate on the audience numbers, think about the advertisers. If you’re a local restaurant or car dealer, where can you get exposure to more customers than through local broadcast TV? Certainly not through the local newspaper with its dwindling readership.

So even if advertisers are paying for 80% of the audience local stations had five years ago, there’s still no better way for them to attract local customers. As long as that holds true, broadcast TV stations should be just fine.

by ·Comments Off on My First Rule of Programming strikes again

BBC America LogoLong-time readers might remember my First Rule of TV Programming: No matter what niche a pay-TV channel initially occupies, as time goes on, it will become more and more like all the other channels. It might start as the Chess Network, but by Year Five, it’ll be running old sitcoms and reality shows.

It’s easy to find examples of this rule in action. The Game Show Network became GSN and de-emphasized old game shows. TV Land, which started with classic TV shows, added shows about old TV shows, then added original sitcoms that had nothing to do with old TV shows. The Sci-Fi Channel became SyFy and added pro wrestling. The Nashville Network started with country music, then became TNN and added pro wrestling, then became Spike and added reruns of Star Trek and CSI. The History Channel runs reality shows. You get the idea.

(I pause here to give a shout out to the lone exception to this rule: Turner Classic Movies. It started later than American Movie Classics, but as AMC strayed away from that shared vision of commercial-free classic movies, TCM has expanded on it. TCM is one of my favorite channels.)

Anyway, from the logo at the top of this post, you can guess the latest channel to embrace this rule. BBC America has hired a vice president for its new original programming division.

This is particularly annoying because BBC America holds exclusive US rights to all BBC content. It’s the main reason why you can’t get the BBC channels anywhere in America. The BBC already produces more content than BBC America can show, yet the channel already pads its schedule with movies, The X-Files, and Star Trek. (At least it hasn’t picked up pro wrestling. Yet.)

Maybe if we’re lucky, BBC America will follow the path of several other channels and spin off a second channel that is pretty close to how it used to look. (Think Cartoon Network and Boomerang, or MTV and VH1 Classic.) That would buy us a couple of years until the new channel falls victim to my Rule all over again.

by ·Comments Off on Snowy reminder on dish placement

Satellite dish with a bit of snowHere’s another case where I’ve made a mistake so you don’t have to.

Long ago, when I had to move my primary Dish Network dish because of roof work, I “wisely” picked a spot that I could reach with a broom. That way, when the snows returned to Denver every year, I could brush off the dish and keep the signal alive.

So far, that’s a good idea. But the spot I picked is just barely within broom-swinging range. And that means that to brush off the snow, I need to stand directly under the dish as I clear the snow. Yes, so it falls on my head.

Fortunately (?), another round of roof work is likely in 2011, so I’ll get the opportunity to move the dish to a better spot. Or maybe I’ll just go find a longer broom.

Happy New Year, everyone!

by ·1 Comment

Simply ivy drawingivi.tv just keeps getting better. After launching with most of the local channels in New York and Seattle, ivi added Los Angeles, and most recently, Chicago. The independent channels and sub-carrier channels are particularly interesting, because they provide something you might not get with your local over-the-air network stations. Plus, this week, I was able to watch the snowed-out football game that moved to Detroit thanks to a local New York station’s broadcast. At $4.99/month, it’s a great deal.

It’s also heartening to see that ivi recognizes that it will exist only as long as the courts and Congress allow it to do so. Its CEO, Todd Weaver, visited Washington to lobby Congress and the FCC to please recognize its law-abiding usefulness.

The one voice I would expect to boom the loudest in opposition to this streaming TV idea is pro football’s, but I have yet to hear anything from them. They didn’t join in any of the lawsuits, and I haven’t heard any public pronouncements against it, even though it’s a party that has a lot to lose from its exclusive out-of-market pay-TV package. Instead, the National Association of Broadcasters’ president threw down the football championship game card with regards to a loosely related topic – retransmission consent for regular cable and satellite systems.

Why isn’t football itself getting involved? I’m guessing that it sees a lockout on the horizon and doesn’t want to use any political capital until after it wins that fight. But I digress.

FilmOn is continuing on its wacky, ever-changing way. The folks who were suing it were successful in getting an injunction, and FilmOn stopped showing those channels. (Except I sometimes see KTLA, and other times FilmOn says it can’t show it.) FilmOn added some Los Angeles Spanish-language locals that weren’t part of the suit, and continued its funky set of international channels and adult offerings.

This morning’s interesting change du jour is that the FilmOn standalone player has added New York stations WABC, WPIX, and WNET. I would have thought that the injunction would have blocked FilmOn from showing any ABC stations, but it’s not like I have a copy of it in front of me. Anyway, although FilmOn is offering subscriptions, its standalone player has been running for a really long time in free preview mode, so you might want to check that out too.

Oh, and sorry about the recent blog outage. The software should be fixed now to avoid those 500 errors. If you see problems, please let me know.

by ·3 Comments

Cablevision logoCablevision, stuck in an awful retransmission consent battle with Fox, issued the most amazing press release yesterday. It said that the 1976 Copyright Act allows any “governmental body, or other non-profit organization” to retransmit over-the-air (OTA) signals so long as it gains no commercial advantage and charges only enough to cover operating expenses.

Now this opinion is coming from a cable TV company. At this week’s earnings call, another cable giant, Comcast, said that it’s already losing subscribers to local OTA TV. What would happen to Cablevision if its subscribers had free access to lots of out-of-market OTA channels? When a company volunteers the idea that non-profits could legally take away its customers, you have to believe it, don’t you?

Fox doesn’t believe it. Fox quickly issued a statement that “It is alarming that Cablevision would put non-profits and governmental bodies at risk by encouraging them to violate the Copyright Act in order to gain a commercial advantage.” (That’s according to a story by Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton.)

I am not a lawyer, and I know just enough about intellectual property to be dangerous. (In other words, don’t try any of this without consulting your own lawyers!) But for the rest of this post, let’s all pretend that what Cablevision said is true. Maybe it is.

Here is the cornerstone of what could be a great FTA satellite TV service. Imagine a non-profit FTA broadcasting organization; I’ll call it SatFreeTV.org. It could use dozens of volunteers with OTA antennas to send channels from all over the country to an uplink center via the internet. The uplink would combine a dozen or two of these channels and bounce them off a dedicated transponder. Anyone with an FTA dish would have access to SatFreeTV’s slate of channels, all for free. It would be just like FTA’s glory days with all of those Equity channels, except better.

Volunteers don’t get paid, and they might be able to pick up their own internet expenses, but satellite space definitely isn’t free. SatFreeTV would have to pay roughly $150,000 per year per transponder. Where would the money come from? As a qualified, educational non-profit, SatFreeTV could attract some grants from foundations, donations from FTA equipment vendors, and maybe even free services from uplink centers. Perhaps with a cluster of attractive channels in place, SatFreeTV could charge some religious channels enough rent to help pay the transponder bill.

The other volunteers that SatFreeTV would need are lawyers. Regardless of whether it’s legal, SatFreeTV would attract the same kind of lawsuits as ivi.tv and FilmOn. There wouldn’t be any investors to foot the legal bill in the hope of a big payoff down the road. Maybe SatFreeTV could give the Electronic Freedom Foundation a channel in exchange for continuing legal services.

Then there’s Congress. If SatFreeTV became sufficiently popular, I would expect sports leagues to go to Congress and testify that they were going to have to remove all games from free TV. Who is going to pay for an out-of-market sports package if they can get all the games elsewhere for free? Would Congress paper over that old Copyright Act exemption? Or would the collected voices of SatFreeTV viewers convince it to leave it alone? Since this is our daydream, we’re free to hope for the best.

I’ve often thought that FTA needs a non-profit organization. This technology is already a great way to watch dozens of channels that aren’t available anywhere else. If we could also add dozens of OTA channels, then we’d hit the jackpot.