by ·Comments Off on DishWorld streams TV with a difference

ebruscreenAfter I wrote about DishWorld last week, I knew I needed to give it a try so I could let you know what it’s like. It turns out that DishWorld offers some interesting wrinkles on how to stream TV over the internet.

DishWorld offers TV programming packages in 15 non-English languages. All of them include a bonus set of international English channels, and some also include a few English sports channels. I chose the Mandarin package, which includes 22 Chinese channels plus the English and sports sets for $14.99 per month. Other languages are more expensive. For example, Filipino provides just two native channels plus English and sports for $19.99, and Hindi provides almost as many channels as Mandarin but for $44.99. Since I don’t get any special discounts for being a Dish shareholder, and since I can’t speak any of the 15 available languages yet, the cheapest package works best for me.

In addition to all that programming, there are plenty of on-demand movies available on DishWorld. A few dozen Bollywood movies are free on demand, and hundreds of US-made new releases and older films are available to rent, most for $3 or $4.

The English-language bonus pack includes:

  • ND 24×7 – News channel from India.
  • Fashion TV – My old favorite former-FTA channel featuring people who dress skimpy and walk funny.
  • France 24 – News channel from France.
  • Ebru TV – US-based general entertainment channel majority-owned by Samanyolu Broadcasting Company.
  • BabyTV – International channel for babies and toddlers. Not to be confused with Baby First TV.
  • Blue Ocean Network – News channel from China.
  • Eurochannel – European culture and lifestyle movies and shows.
  • Euronews – News channel from Europe, of course.
  • Trace Urban – International urban music channel.
  • Luxe.TV – Luxembourg-based channel “dedicated to the world of luxury and art of living”.
  • RT – Formerly Russia Today, news channel from Russia.
  • Zoom – Bollywood channel from India, of course.
  • Bloomberg – US-based business news channel.

And the four or five sports channels include:

  • One World Sports – International sports offshoot of the America One over-the-air network.
  • Nautical Channel – Covers boating and board sports.
  • Universal Sports – Former over-the-air digital sub-channel concentrating on Olympic sports.
  • BeIN Sport – Qatar-based channel with lots of soccer.
  • BeIN Sport 2 – Bonus soccer that wouldn’t fit on BeIN. Off the air otherwise.

That’s an interesting set of channels for $15/month, not to mention the bewildering (to me) variety of Mandarin channels I can watch. It’s all available to stream on PC and Mac, Android devices, and particularly Roku. DishWorld offers a free Roku LT or half off a Roku 3 for prepaying the first four months of service. (I picked the Roku 3, which is very interesting in its own way. More about that Roku 3 in a future post.)

Unlike nimbleTV, FilmOn, and Aereo, DishWorld doesn’t offer a cloud-based DVR, but it provides an interesting alternative. DishWorld’s guide shows the last eight days of programming on each channel, and every show from that period is available on demand. When I first activated my subscription, I was able to watch an episode of Doctor Who that had aired a week earlier on Ebru. When I change channels in the middle of a program, DishWorld asks whether I want to watch it live or from its beginning. It’s like having the PrimeTime Anytime feature from Dish Network’s Hopper, except all day for all channels, but without automatically skipping commercials. This week-back feature is so cool, I almost don’t miss being able to record. Almost.

For some channels that are hard to find anywhere else, $15/month is okay. For plenty of entertainment in your non-English native language, it’s probably worth whatever your package costs. For a glimpse of how all TV might be delivered 10 years from now, DishWorld is priceless.

by ·Comments Off on Dish Network pioneers streaming TV packages

A world map montage over a blue background.With all the talk about FilmOn and Aereo and nimbleTV, I keep forgetting to mention another really important internet-based TV service. Janko Roettgers of GigaOM reminded us recently that for years, Dish Network has been streaming TV channels from other countries through its DishWorld brand. I remember when Dish started the service and saw it both as a smart way for Dish to shift transponder space to more English-language HD programming and as another sign that internet-delivered content would eventually supplant most satellite TV programming. We’ll see how that goes.

Dish is in a great position to run this international offshoot because of its longstanding relations with foreign programmers. On the other hand, a big part of nimbleTV’s true potential is to provide parallel programming packages by providing virtual cable subscriptions from Bangalore or wherever nimbleTV can work out a good deal. Never mind watching New York channels as you travel; imagine the folks from India and other countries on long-term assignments here with a chance to tap into everything they’d get at home. FilmOn has also been adding a fair number of foreign-language channels, so it’s always possible that it could become a player in this market segment.

True one-to-many broadcasting makes a lot of sense when a lot of people want to watch the same live event at the same time. For programming that only a small fraction of viewers want to see, DishWorld is showing what the TV world is coming to.

by ·Comments Off on FilmOn adds OTA channel lists for DC, NYC, LA

FilmOnMHzI’ve been resisting the urge to write more about FilmOn because I don’t want this to become the What the Heck is Going On with FilmOn Blog. But once again, I’ve just got to ask, What the heck is going on with FilmOn?

On the legal front, it’s a little easier to explain what’s going on. Two days ago, a New York federal judge ordered FilmOn to pay CBS and other plantiffs $1.35 million plus interest and attorneys’ fees for failing to pay the full amount it owed under an October 2012 settlement on the old copyright lawsuit. Then yesterday, FilmOn asked Washington DC U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer to reconsider her injunction preventing it from streaming over-the-air broadcasters, claiming that the order puts it at a competitive disadvantage compared to Aereo, which keeps avoiding these injunctions. I also keep reading reports that the injunction prevents FilmOn from streaming stations from almost all of the US, but in real life, FilmOn continues to stream Denver, Chicago, and probably other cities I can’t easily check.

If FilmOn is ignoring or bypassing the “nationwide” part of the injunction, that would be just the beginning of the weirdness. Yesterday, its online channel list added New York TV and Los Angeles TV as new categories, populated by the names of every OTA channel and subchannel in those markets. Today, it added Washington DC TV, the one place I’d firmly believe is covered by Judge Collyer’s injunction, with a similar set of every possible OTA offering. Yesterday, my attempts to launch a handful of these channels were uniformly unsuccessful; selecting one kicked in the standard preroll ad, then a Loading graphic and that’s all. Today, I see that at least a few of the Washington DC channels are live, including 30.3, the MHz subchannel carrying CCTV News. The picture stutters and sometimes goes blocky, suggesting a marginal signal, but there it is.

As someone who has been following FilmOn for years, I can tell you that I have no idea what this means. It’s uncharacteristic of FilmOn to offer all available OTA channels for a market; for example, in Denver, it only offers the Big Four networks. Is FilmOn deliberately thumbing its nose at the injunction? Is someone in the control room experimenting with what FilmOn might do after they actually win a lawsuit? Is some prankster playing a trick on FilmOn or the rest of us? I suspect we’ll all find out soon enough.

Update: John Eggerton from Broadcasting & Cable followed up by talking with FilmOn founder Alki David. According to Eggerton, David was waiting for a ruling on FilmOn’s request for the judge to reconsider her decision. This afternoon, she denied that request. “We had a motion to stay. As a result of the stay motion, the order is put on ice. The decision is made so now we comply,” David said. There’s a lot more in Eggerton’s article, so go read it!

Update 2: By the time Eggerton’s article appeared, the local TV categories I mentioned had disappeared from FilmOn. As I type this the next morning, the Big Four networks are gone from Denver and Chicago, although WGN is still there. New York, safely in a pocket of District Court approval, looks the same as it did before all this happened. I still wonder what the plan was for those categories. Maybe David will let me know one of these days.

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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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.