by ·Comments Off on US viewers lose a TV option, but that's good

Sezmi logo

This week, a unique delivery platform pulled out of the US market. Sezmi launched in Spring 2010 in Los Angeles, and it provided pretty standard TV fare in an unusual way. Sezmi subscribers used a special DVR to record normal over-the-air programming, pay-per-view movies (if they were hooked to the internet), and some cable networks. The difference was that Sezmi delivered those cable networks through an encrypted OTA signal that the special DVR unscrambled.

Taking a piece of OTA TV spectrum and using it for a pay-TV service is like putting a fence around some park land and charging visitors to get in. The presumption is that it’s a really bad thing for consumers. Sezmi wasn’t providing content that Los Angeles viewers couldn’t get from their cable or satellite TV providers; Sezmi was just doing it cheaper. And it’s easy to do cheaper when you piggyback on a public resource. That’s why I never liked Sezmi.

To be fair, Sezmi dropped the cable channel package less than a year later. It shifted its business model to be more of a standard OTA DVR plus internet-delivered movies. Which is what a Windows computer with Media Center will do for you for free, or what TiVo will do for you (beautifully) for a higher price. Whatever niche was left wasn’t enough, so Sezmi pulled the plug, shifting its focus to reselling its technologies to other providers.

Sure, Sezmi had stopped using OTA spectrum for pay-TV channels, but if I had given it any thought, I would have worried that Sezmi might start using it again if its national rollout of OTA DVRs had ever reached critical mass. So please forgive me for the shadenfreude, but I’m glad to see Sezmi leave town.

by ·Comments Off on ivi.tv wants you to chip in

ivi.tv coffee cup

One year ago, ivi.tv launched its disruptive, revolutionary service of providing distant over-the-air signals via the internet. For months, it satisfied my craving to time-shift programs, to watch OTA sub-channels that haven’t made it to my market, and to generally see what other people get to watch. Then the big-money networks managed to get a preliminary injunction to shut down that OTA redistribution pending the resolution of their lawsuit against ivi.

Now CEO Todd Weaver is raising money to keep ivi’s court fight going. You can go to ivi’s fund-raiser site and chip in a few dollars or more. In return, you’ll get recognition, some free service if ivi.tv starts operating again, or maybe even a cool coffee mug like this one. (I bought it separately from CafePress several months ago. Now I can’t find it there, but I did find another page with T-shirts, tote bags, and a different ivi mug for sale.)

In general, you might want to bookmark ivi’s blog, where Weaver writes about ivi developments and mentions in the press. For example, it has links to August articles in Multichannel News and Forbes. (I tweeted both of those links, but didn’t mention them before in this blog.)

As I type, the ivi.tv platform is still operating, but shows only two free channels and two pay channels with limited audiences. They never listen to me, but I keep saying that ivi would be better off if they carried as many channels as they could. If you look at other over-the-top services, you’ll see dozens of other networks that apparently don’t mind being carried this way. If ivi lumped together 20-30 of the best channels, such as NASA HD, and charged maybe $2/month, they’d get some cash flow and we’d have another way to watch. And if ivi added dark placeholders for the OTA channels it could carry again with a little court or government help, that would remind us viewers that we could help the good old days return.

by ·Comments Off on The Ultimate Satellite News-Gathering Apparatus

Summer break is over. I’d been waiting for some positive news to share, and this is it. NBC has launched a huge, searchable video archive of Saturday Night Live clips, including many that are available online for the first time. And included in those debuts is a character I’d been trying to find for years: Al Franken’s self-contained mobile satellite uplink unit.

In most of his reports, Franken refers to his “1.3-meter” dish. In his earliest segments his dish really looked about that large, but later he switched to this prop, which can’t be more than 30 inches. You can search for more of his reports, but this one is my favorite so far.

by ·Comments Off on Go read it!

Sometimes it feels like everything we know about TV and music is changing. Well, it’s always been that way, just slower sometimes.

NYU researcher Finn Brunton says that the history of successful media formats “is not a history of teleological progress that ends up where we are, but a constant Cambrian explosion of different and diverse forms, most of which don’t make it.” And Joab Jackson of the IDG News service wrote a great article at NetworkWorld about Brunton’s presentation. So go read it! Afterwards, you’ll be comforted that, whatever bad choices you make, they couldn’t be worse than the BBC’s Domesday Book project.

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Bleak trees in SW ColoradoIn my continuing quest to gather first-hand information to answer the continuing question, I journeyed to southwest Colorado to see Mesa Verde National Park and its surrounding areas. The same digital tuner that picked up 62 channels outside Houston indicated that, in a second-floor room in Cortez CO, you can get exactly 0 over-the-air TV channels.

When I returned, I checked AntennaWeb, and it agreed completely. There’s a tiny set of repeater stations dozens of miles away, and that’s it.

On the way, I spent a night at the Movie Manor outside Monte Vista CO. Not only is it the only drive-in theater that I know of that still has a playground in front of the screen, all the motel rooms face the main screen and include a speaker for the movie. Highly recommended. But don’t bother with your OTA antenna, either; the same tuner also showed 0 channels here, too. Ditto about the distant repeaters.

So there you have it. In the middle of nowhere, where the land is gorgeous and desolate and sometimes as bleak as a forest of burned trees, maybe you can’t get any over-the-air TV channels very easily. Sounds like a great place for a satellite dish.