by ·Comments Off on More Evidence That Cable TV Is Dying

Last week, David Garrick at The San Diego Union-Tribune pointed out an impartial perspective on the decline of cable TV subscriptions. Cities have reported decreases in their franchise fees, which are typically set at a fixed percentage of cable systems’ revenues. For example, the city of San Diego has seen cable franchise fees drop 12.2 percent over the past two years, an annual loss of over $2 million.

Some cities have contemplated adding a tax on internet-delivered pay-TV, but Garrick couldn’t find any that had implemented it. Do cities get a franchise fee from internet service providers? It seems to me that would fix the problem.

Coming at it from another direction is my favorite pundit, Shelly Palmer. He wrote yesterday that TV has a problem coming from the other direction – its advertisers. Network ad sales groups are trying to whip up data-driven metrics to repackage their shows to attract ad buyers in ways the Nielsen ratings don’t. “Of course, the pressure on TV ad sales is not Nielsen’s fault,” Palmer wrote. “The blame can be placed squarely on changes in consumer behavior.”

Put another way, companies that buy ads don’t really want ads, they want results, either sales or an increase in brand awareness. The truly data-driven future is when these companies can track each outcome and pay the TV intermediary accordingly.

As always, Palmer sticks the dismount. “TV, the art form, is in its platinum age. But the future present of video packaging and distribution is on-demand and digital. TV the platform simply cannot survive under its current business model. It must evolve.” I would add that the natural benefits of free broadcast TV (ubiquity, attractive price, one-to-many bandwidth usage) should keep it in the mix in the decades to come, although its evolved form has yet to be unveiled.

 

by ·Comments Off on Donated “Zombie” Licenses May Benefit Public TV
Zombie hand coming out of his grave from TV

© Nomadsoul1 / Depositphotos

Looking for something more cheerful than anything going on in Washington right now? Then let’s talk about zombies. That’s what Scott Fybush at Current did yesterday, writing an extensive article about donations of commercial TV licenses that turned into “zombies” after their owners cashed out the value of their spectrum.

Those donated licenses are just low-power commercial digital TV, and their public broadcasting recipients – WGBH Boston, WNET New York, and WPBT Miami – are still deciding what to do with them. Meanwhile, their previous owners, who had sold their spectrum rights in the FCC auction earlier this year, get a tax write-off.

Fybush wrote that the FCC called these licenses “zombies” because, although they aren’t in active use, they can be resurrected if another broadcaster is willing to lend some of its own channel capacity to get them back on the air. Since they’re commercial licenses, the public stations could use them for commercial side projects, such as ATSC 3.0 sandboxes. Piggybacking on strong, existing UHF public TV channels could give the former low-power stations a wider reach than they ever had in their first lives.

It’s all a lot more complicated than I want to recap here, so you really ought to go over to Current and go read it!

 

by ·Comments Off on Free TV Sports Sighted In A Weird Market
Screen shot of a basketball game

University of Kansas basketball, as seen on KMCI TV

Thanksgiving Weekend often means travel time at FreeTVBlog World Headquarters, and this time the trip was to Kansas City MO to see relatives. An application of my mobile TV scanner revealed something I hadn’t noticed before: there are live sports available on independent over-the-air stations in KC.

There is nothing remarkable in a local affiliate simply carrying nationally broadcast sports, so I don’t get excited about games on the major networks or Stadium, the diginet formerly known as American Sports Network. Besides those outlets, there were two independent stations with regional sporting events over at least the couple of weeks after Thanksgiving. KMCI had games from Missouri State, Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas (twice). KSMO (technically a My Network affiliate) had another Missouri-Kansas City game plus part of its season-long coverage of the Kansas City Mavericks minor-league hockey team.

I think that Kansas City’s unusual situation has helped create this OTA opportunity. It’s not its size; Kansas City is the number 33 TV market, below Raleigh NC and Indianapolis, for example. Yet neither Raleigh nor Indianapolis have any non-network college basketball scheduled for the next couple of weeks.

My guess is that the answer is either its geography or its pay-TV regional sports network. Since the Kansas City market is split between Missouri and Kansas, it has twice as many schools to show. And Kansas City’s feed of Fox Sports Midwest gives them a lot of St. Louis Blues and Oklahoma City Thunder, neither of which is a big draw in KC.

For whatever reason, I’m thankful that there is another place where everyone with an antenna can watch the type of occasional local sports that I grew up with. It would be great if more stations could follow its example.

by ·Comments Off on Channel Master Dumps Rovi?

Logo showing DVR+ Firmware Update 135RLooks like I found something else that Channel Master was working on. Minutes after I posted my belated recognition that the company was coming out with another receiver, it posted a tweet about its old receiver, the DVR+:

New Firmware 135R has been sent to DVR+ units. This important update is required in order to continue receiving the 14-Day guide data. Your guide data has been migrated to a new CM-owned server (yay!) 2-day PSIP guide data is not affected.

That old guide data was provided by Rovi, which used to supply it to a lot of companies. Then in 2016, Rovi bought TiVo, which makes a direct competitor to the DVR+. After the firmware update, that name is gone from my receiver’s listings.

Maybe it’s all my fault. I asked Channel Master in mid-September to fix the listings for one of my local channels. After a short flurry of information gathering, the support staff wrote, “We will address this ASAP and will email you when Rovi confirms it has made a change.” Then silence for six weeks. Around the first of this month, I got an odd email from them that said, “I’m sorry that we were unable to resolve your issue this week but will ASAP.” I’d say the move has been in the works at least that long.

Here’s hoping that the new listing service will work even better than Rovi’s, and that it’ll mark the start of a new wave of refurbished functionality for the DVR+.

by ·Comments Off on Channel Master To Market AirTV Clone

At my desk at FreeTVBlog World Headquarters, I’ve got a TV on either side of my monitor. The right TV is hooked up to my AirTV, Sling’s Android TV-based receiver. The left TV is attached to my Channel Master DVR+.

AirTV is great for dishing up all sorts of internet-based TV. Thanks to my distant cable TV subscription (long story, I’ll elaborate in a few days), I can watch Fox Sports, ESPN, and other cable channels through their apps. On the other hand, its integration of over-the-air TV is just enough to watch live; there’s no way to record it.

The DVR+ is the opposite – great at recording OTA but with a much weaker selection of internet-based channels. In fact, those channels haven’t changed in a very long time, so I’d been wondering whether Channel Master was focusing on something else. I also found myself wishing that the DVR+ were also based on Android TV, the better to add complementary functionality to its OTA recording.

Today I noticed, thanks to Jeff Baumgartner, that Dave Zatz of ZatzNotFunny had connected the dots and then some. Zatz said that Channel Master would introduce the Stream+ at CES in January 2018, and he posted the YouTube video above. It’s supposed to be based on the Technicolor Skipper, a 4K Android TV receiver. Technicolor makes the AirTV.

The Stream+ sounds like could be a worthy addition to one of my desk TVs. I wonder which box it will replace.