by ·Comments Off on How to make TV ads more valuable
Riga (Latvia) Radio and TV Tower, as seen from beneath it

Riga (Latvia) Radio and TV Tower
©Depositphotos.com / amoklv

I don’t usually talk about radio, but I’m inspired by Rocco Pendola’s column in The Street last Friday. In short, radio station KNDD in Seattle has issued the 2 Minute Promise, to never play more than two minutes of commercials at a time. Also, the promise includes cutting the number of commercials played per hour in half, and not firing disc jockeys to pay for the promise. Pendola wrote that a Fresno CA station followed by promising to play no more than five minutes of commercials per hour.

Pendola wrote that this makes the remaining ads more valuable because they aren’t buried 10-deep, and presumably they’ll play to more listeners. It’s a way to regain listeners who might have rejected radio for Pandora, Spotify or other streaming music.

That all reminded me of Americans For Responsible Advertising, or AFRA, a non-profit group dedicated “to make Americans aware of the extent to which they are exposed to commercial and noncommercial (e.g., political) advertising and to false, misleading, offensive, and abusive advertising in particular.” According to an AFRA report (PDF), the weeknight national news shows of NBC, CBS, and ABC average 8 minutes of commericals per half hour. If news shows run 16 minutes of ads per hour, it lines up with a Nielsen report, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, that the average commercial time on broadcast TV is over 14 minutes per hour, and on pay-TV networks, almost 16 minutes per hour.

The Times story mentioned one side-effect of so many ads. “The rise in commercials likely will concern some marketers who fear their spots are being lost in all the ad clutter,” it wrote. “Also, as more viewers embrace digital video recorders, many of those ads are being lost to the fast-forward button.”

Sounds like the same problem that radio faces, with consumers increasingly interested alternatives to an increasing load of advertisements. Imagine if broadcast TV tried a similar solution: Cut back on the number and length of ad breaks, and make sure the public hears about the change. Maybe if the change sweeps radio stations, it’ll leak through to TV.

by ·Comments Off on NFL can worry a little about Aereo
NFL Network booth in Times Square

© 2014 Depositphotos / zhukovsky

I spent some time in Europe the past few weeks. It’s great to hang around in London and watch Sky try to lure subscribers with the very notion of relatively inexpensive pay-TV, because the set of free channels is so broad and culturally expected. (Yes, I know that Britons pay the equivalent of about $10/month as a license fee already.) It was also a great way to stop pondering Aereo for a while.

I don’t like to write depressing stories, and my take on Aereo is just that. As I wrote in a Broadcasting & Cable comment, I expect that corporate interests will compel the US Supreme Court to block Aereo, although I expect the justices will need to find a way to do so without breaking various cloud computing precedents. Therefore, my guess is that the court will rule narrowly that Aereo’s multiple-antenna setup is the same functionally as a single antenna, so it loses. Waiting for the Aereo decision, expected any day now, is for me just waiting for the shoe to drop.

Today, The Washington Post reported that an Aereo victory would “change how we watch football”. The timing of that story is interesting, considering that the New England Patriots’ web site carried an independent story with similar talking points hours later. Then the Consumerist came along to debunk the Post story, saying that the NFL would not be significantly damaged. I don’t think either side of this argument got it right.

At present, Aereo only serves subscribers in a particular home TV market. Even if a valid subscriber is on the road, Aereo won’t let him watch TV from home. (On the other hand, my home-based SimpleTV receiver performed like a champ, letting me watch my local shows from a Paris hotel room. But I digress.) The Consumerist seemed to take this as a permanent restriction, so local viewers would only be watching the local stations they could get over-the-air anyway. But FilmOn, which piggybacks Aereo’s justification, streams out-of-market broadcast TV now and would probably carry more Fox and CBS affiliates as soon as it could. And Aereo might do something like that after its legal clouds are gone.

Then the Consumerist suggested that because it’s not easy to switch between distant OTA channels, then NFL Sunday Ticket should remain untouched. No, you just don’t get it. A very large percentage of Sunday Ticket customers are folks who love one out-of-market team and watch to watch that team’s every game. Once in a while, the idea of a slightly less expensive Sunday Ticket, limited to one team, is brought up then quickly discarded. Letting that chunk of subscribers walk away to Aereo or FilmOn would cost real money. But the online model is so tech-driven (for now) and so dependent on reliable high-speed internet that such mass migrations wouldn’t occur for years.

If Aereo wins, I’m sure the networks and sports leagues will run straight to Congress to get new protection laws. Should the NFL move further to pay-TV (remember, it already moved Mondays and some Thursdays), it woud just join every other major US sports league in abandoning OTA TV. At least we’ll still have the FIFA World Cup, in Spanish.

by ·Comments Off on Southwest's inflight TV beats Frontier's

Southwest Airlines plane on several different-sized screensA few weeks ago, I posted a list of Frontier Airlines’ inflight TV channels, but I never got around to posting a list of the TV channels that I had available on my Southwest Airlines return flight.

As with the Frontier list, I couldn’t find anything online that actually provided the names of each channel. On a page on the Southwest site, it mentions “17 live channels,” which is a very specific number. As far as I can tell, it’s also accurate. Here are the live channels I saw:

Bravo
CBS
Discovery
Fox News
CNBC
MLB.com *
NBC
Fox
HGTV
TLC
Golf
Food Network
Animal Planet
Fox Business
Travel Channel
NFL Network (for real this time)
MSNBC

* That MLB.com is not the MLB Network; it showed live major league baseball games as served up by MLB.com.

As with Frontier, only ABC is missing from the Big Four broadcast networks. There aren’t as many live channels, but I appreciate getting the Travel Channel and the real NFL Network. Southwest also offers a bunch of on-demand TV episodes while Frontier adds a couple of passive channels of TV shows and movies. Based on the lineups alone, Frontier and Southwest are pretty similar.

There are two big advantages for watching TV on Southwest. Thanks to a promotion with Dish Network, which provides the programming, all those channels are free to watch. And instead of being stuck with a phone-sized standard-definition screen mounted in the seat back, these channels are streamed over inflight WiFi to the carry-on device of your choice. I saw a lot of passengers watching on laptops and tablets, all of which had better picture quality than the pioneering Frontier screens.

So there you have it. If you really want to know what to expect to watch for free on your next Southwest flight, that list will probably stay good for the rest of 2014 and maybe longer. Bring your tablet and enjoy the ride.

by ·Comments Off on Frontier Airlines' mysterious TV channels

Frontier Airlines channel list seat-back cardIt’s really difficult to find exactly which TV channels Frontier Airlines offers its customers. The channel list used to be available online, but now Frontier’s web site only offers a vague promise of “something for every member of your flight crew”. That may be partly my fault, so let me see what I can do to fix it.

Once upon a time, I was returning from a business trip on a Thursday evening in the fall. The timing was perfect to watch a game on NFL Network, because few shows are as engagingly mind-numbing as an NFL game. Frontier’s online list highlighted NFL Network, so I booked my flight with them. As you’ve guessed by now, Frontier substituted another channel for NFL Network that evening. When I wrote to complain, I received a written shrug and the kind offer to repay the TV fee I’d paid for that flight.

As I prepared my trip to the NAB Show (in progress as I type), I went looking around the internet for the latest channel list. That way I could check on TitanTV or some other listing service to see whether there would be anything I wanted to watch. My Google searches turned up empty, and Frontier’s site wasn’t any help.

Since that complaint about Frontier’s changing channels may be the reason it won’t post what DirecTV channels it carries (hey, it could happen), I hereby post the Frontier Airlines channel list as shown on the inflight seatback card:

1 NBC
2 Fox
3 CBS
4 ESPN
5 ESPN2
6 TBS
7 TNT
8 Bravo
9 USA
10 A&E
11 Food Network
12 HGTV
13 Live GPS map
14 “NFL Network” (Golf)
15 Fox News Channel
16 CNN
17 “CNBC” (NBC Sports Network)
18 History
19 Discovery
20 Disney Channel
21 Nickelodeon
22 Boomerang
23 VH1
24 MTV
25 Comedy Central
26-30 movies or TV shows, based on flight length

Note that although Frontier has updated its pricing, it still includes NFL Network, which still wasn’t available on my flight. (The Golf Channel was in its place.) Also, there was a Premier League soccer match on in place of CNBC, so I’m guessing that’s NBC Sports Network. Those were the only changes I could detect, but there were so many commercials that I can’t say for sure whether there are more. Also, isn’t it kind of weird that Frontier offers NBC, Fox and CBS but not ABC? The Disney Channel is in the lineup, so it’s not like it couldn’t work a deal with Disney. But I digress.

So there you have it. Next time you’re considering a Frontier flight, you can check to see whether you’ll want to pay for TV access. On my flight, I didn’t see anyone who wanted to pay $3.99 for an hour and a half. Most passengers were watching their laptops or tablets.

by ·Comments Off on Fashion TV back up after outage

Fashion TV logoFTABlog has a long history with Fashion TV, that great channel featuring oddly dressed beautiful people who walk in strange ways across runways. Fashion TV used to be available on FTA satellite, and it has been available on streaming TV through DishWorld and FilmOn. Around midnight Feb. 1, both of those platforms abruptly lost Fashion TV. DishWorld went black for that slot, with a “temporarily unavailable” message. FilmOn replaced it with the Fashion One network, although keeping the Fashion TV logo in its channel list.

If Fashion TV had disappeared on, say January 24, I would have suspected some technical issue, but the timing of this problem made me think that it was based on some kind of dispute. Thanks to a press release (PDF) from SatLink Communications, I think I know what happened. That Feb. 4 release says that SatLink “extended its agreement” to distribute Fashion TV on its C-band satellites. Sure enough, DishWorld resumed carrying Fashion TV the next morning. (FilmOn, ever the rebel, continues to show Fashion One on its “Fashion TV” channel as of this writing.)

And so you have the latest news about Fashion TV. Presumably, it won’t suffer another outage like this one any time soon. Does anyone else actually watch Fashion TV?