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Roku logoRoku, which makes a device for translating streaming internet content to your television set, made a bit of news this week when it added the cable channel WealthTV. Much more quietly, our old friend ivi.tv added Brush with Life, which is, well, I’m not sure what. Go visit their site, preferably on a wide-screen monitor, and maybe you can figure them out. If you know more about Brush with Life, tell us about it in a comment, please.

Since the handful of corporations that control most TV content have dug in their heels against a la carte pricing, maybe odd little channels like these will be the future of TV programming. If we don’t need blockbuster programming, maybe tightly focused channels could deliver the kind of narrowcasting that pundits foresaw when digital cable channels proliferated. (Instead, as stated in my First Law of Programming, formerly narrow channels change to broaden their appeal. I wrote much more about that law, a la carte and cable channels in October 2009. I’ll try to avoid restating too much of that, so you’re welcome to go catch up if you want.)

As television moves from cable and satellite delivery to the internet, this could easily open the door to true narrowcasting. One of most commonly submitted questions to FTAList has been: How can I start my own satellite TV channel? The old answer is that you need to talk with an uplink center to rent some bandwidth, figure how to get your content to that uplink center, and oh yes, find a way to generate enough TV programming to fill every hour of every day. But internet-based delivery removed the uplink from that equation; if you can get the programming to the internet, that’s most of what you need. Then the real trick is to get enough paid subscribers to make payroll.

Some channels like these are already broadcasting on sites such as TVU and Justin TV. If any of these can put together enough original content for a 24/7 run, they could provide more choices for viewers who don’t want to pay for 200 channels to get the five they really watch. It’ll be fun to see how this shakes out over the next few years.

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Todd Weaver, founder of ivi.tvProgram note: This blog post comes to you from the Hub at the NBC Universal booth at CES. Thanks for inviting me!

Todd Weaver, founder and head of ivi.tv, paused after his second panel session here at CES to let us in on what’s up and what’s next with our favorite streaming TV service.

First, and most importantly, Weaver said that the folks in Washington were very receptive to ivi when he visited them a couple of months ago. “All lawmakers want more competition,” he said, and many of them were troubled by the pending NBC-Comcast merger. Interestingly, when the news got out that Weaver going to visit, local broadcasters called to lobby their representatives against ivi.

The FCC was also positive, in its own way, by saying that it wouldn’t take jurisdiction over ivi’s distribution system. “We had great access to all of the commissioners’ staffs,” Weaver said. In general, “It’s going to take years for the government to catch up with what we’re doing.”

The second-most important issue is the status of ivi’s legal challenges. That status seems to be unchanged. The media companies insist on trying their case in New York, where they filed, rather than Seattle, where ivi filed to show that it was not violating copyright law. But the judge in New York wants to wait to see what happens in the Seattle case.

A few more quick notes:

  • ivi’s next market will be Philadelphia, Comcast’s back yard. “We’re just taking the next biggest market in order, but I like the irony.”
  • Biggest surprise at launch: “Consumers wanted to use us on a 50-inch LCD.” ivi plans to start adding 720p HD feeds to some channels soon.
  • Don’t hold your breath waiting for the ivi Apple app. “It’s in legal review.” Which may or may not have anything to do with Apple’s TV partnerships. The Android app should come sooner, then maybe a Roku app.
  • Full DVR functionality should arrive around the end of March. “It will have appropriate pricing,” greater than the 99 cents/month for the current rewind/pause/fast forward.
  • “We expect to be profitable in less than six months.” Woohoo!

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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.

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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.

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FilmOn player update dialogJust a couple of quick notes about two streaming TV providers.

* A poster who says he’s Alki David, founder of FilmOn, posted a comment on the most recent blog post here. The poster (I hope it’s David) suggested that part of the reason for FilmOn’s spotty service was an attack on hosting company Reality Check Network. The FilmOn player required an update last week, and the details in that update dialog, shown here, suggest other problems.

But it’s true, now at least something works. The FilmOn player shows a large set of over-the-air channels from Great Britain. A dependable, live source of BBC programming might be worth the subscription price. But FilmOn’s subscription page doesn’t mention them, so I don’t know whether the British channels are here to stay. On the other hand, the adult channels are gone again.

* Ivi.tv keeps rolling along. Every now and then, a channel or two is unavailable for a while, but it’s been remarkably stable. Will it survive? Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports that ivi has asked a US District Court in New York to refrain from granting a restraining order or preliminary injunction against it. Eggerton writes, “Ivi argues that, quite simply, either would put them out of business.” Instead, ivi wants the case shifted to Seattle, where it had already filed for a declatory ruling that it does not violate copyright.

Ivi Chairman Ron Erickson is quoted as saying that if ivi wins in court, the media companies will turn to Congress to change the law. Which is what I’ve been saying all along. I still wonder how ivi can win that fight, but for now, I’m enjoying the chance to watch.