by ·Comments Off on Blackouts remind us that local TV is free

A wide Dish Network satellite dishIrony. DirecTV had been the latest TV provider to see local over-the-air channels blacked out because of contract disputes. I was going to write about my common sense alternative to these retransmission consent arguments between broadcasters and providers, but yesterday the issue hit home. My home. (That alternative will have to wait until my next post.)

Dish Network lost its Tribune-owned stations yesterday. That includes two of my local channels and three of the Superstations I subscribe to. (Not only am I a shareholder, I’m also a customer.) The good news is that according to Dish’s press release, it’s offering free OTA antennas to affected subscribers. That’s a great reminder that viewers don’t need to pay for local TV.

To me, the worst thing about losing any local channels from my Dish receiver is the inability to record their shows on the same DVR I use for pay TV. Fortunately, I’m already used to recording OTA with a couple of other devices, my Tablo and my DVR+. Around 2009, Dish stopped adding subchannels to its program guide. Most Dish receivers won’t schedule recordings for any dot-2 that premiered after that cutoff. If I want to watch movies from ThisTV or GetTV or Movies!, I can watch them live through my OTA-enabled Dish receiver, or I can record them to watch when I want with my Tablo or DVR+.

Sure, it’s convenient to get it in the same pipe as ESPN and HBO, and it’s cable is a necessity for folks who can’t get their channels with an OTA antenna. But the point is, broadcast TV is free. When giant entertainment corporations do battle, that’s a comforting thought.

by ·Comments Off on Dish knows something AT&T doesn’t
The new HopperGO

The new HopperGO

I remember when I first explained what’s important to little kids when they watch TV. I was in my room at the Mirage, on the phone with Guest Services. Way back then, I was trying to figure out how to attach my DVD player to the room’s television set so my kid could watch something we’d brought along. Anything was possible at the Mirage, the voice told me, but why incur a charge for a technician visit when we could just tune to one of several channels featuring the finest in children’s entertainment? “My kid doesn’t want to watch the finest,” I told the voice. “He wants to see the same darned thing he watches 12 times a week. And he expects to watch it now.”

That story came to mind this week because of two news stories. A senior VP at AT&T said in an interview that the company plans to pump DirecTV content into connected vehicles through AT&T cellular service. Earlier, Dish announced a portable device for copying and replaying recordings from a Dish DVR. You can guess which idea I think is a good one.

AT&T is ignoring history. Companies have tried to program live back-seat TVs for years, and most leaned on children’s shows. None of them reached broad acceptance. For every family willing to pay for absolutely every accessory for their land boat there were a dozen others with simple DVD players.

AT&T is ignoring the present. Millennials don’t watch live TV, except a little bit of sports. No one wants to wait until the top of the hour for a show to start. No one wants commercials they can’t skip past. No one wants dozens of extra channels they don’t watch.

I own a laughably small sliver of Dish stock, but that’s not why I like the HopperGO. This little box can grab that favorite Spongebob episode and stream it to a backseat TV or any other connected device, over and over. It works for recorded movies in a hotel room. The release says HopperGO works “at the airport,” so probably not on the plane. You can’t have everything.

About the only place the AT&T plan would work better is for live sports while tailgating. Where there’s no WiFi, the equivalent Dish Anywhere stream would eat up a lot of cell data. Then again, it’s possible to set up an actual portable dish in a parking lot, and more stadiums are adding WiFi. If AT&T goes through with this, it’ll be just another solution in search of a problem.

by ·Comments Off on BitTorrent Live carries the legacy of ivi.tv

BitTorrent logoThis week at INTX (formerly The Cable Show), BitTorrent announced a new package of live streaming video. Once it launches, BitTorrent Live will include over a dozen linear channels, including Newsmax, ONE World Sports, and the Pursuit Channel. It will all be based on BitTorrent’s proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming protocol.

BitTorrent’s blog post said that this is just the beginning. Future channels will include subscription based, ad supported, and Pay Per View premium tiers. In the words of Erik Schwartz, vice president of media at BitTorrent, “What we’re launching … is functionally a virtual MVPD.”

This announcement has attracted considerable industry news coverage, but I haven’t seen anyone else make the connection between BitTorrent Live and the true pioneer of P2P online TV, ivi. It’s been over five years since ivi.tv was fatally wounded by a federal court decision against it. Before then, ivi carried dozens of broadcast channels, distributed mostly P2P. They had a few “seeding” servers with the broadcast signal, then most subscribers served to both send and receive pieces of each show. The result was a lag time of a few minutes, noticeable only if there was a live source for comparison or if the viewer expected shows to change at exactly the top of the hour. BitTorrent Live claims that its latency will be less than 10 seconds, which would be roughly equivalent to satellite TV’s delay. I’m very curious to see what its lag time will be in practice compared with a non-P2P service such as Sling International.

All of this assumes that BitTorrent Live will launch, and that it will perform as advertised. If so, this P2P special sauce could allow networks to reach the huge simultaneous audiences that can be problematic for one-way streaming services. I’ve been saying this a lot, but maybe this could be the next big thing?

by ·Comments Off on Broadcasters need help to lure millennials
Clark Gregg playfully hugs Ming-Na Wen

Clark Gregg and Ming-Na Wen at the Disney Media Networks International Upfronts in 2013.
© Jean_Nelson / Depositphotos.com

This is upfront season. That’s when TV networks gather advertising buyers into large meeting rooms and present the highlights for the next TV season, hoping that they’ll pay top dollar for ad slots on such superb entertainment. YouTube held its own ad buyers meeting, and announced that it reaches more consumers aged 18-49 than the top 10 prime time TV shows. That led Broadcasting & Cable’s John Consoli to crunch some Nielsen ratings, and he came to an alarming conclusion. Over 1 in 10 millennial viewers, 18- to 34-year-olds, have stopped watching broadcast TV since just last year.

That was just the latest sign that broadcast TV is in trouble. Last week, Fox CEO James Murdoch said, “Over the long term, but approaching quickly, all video entertainment will be consumed over IP streaming networks.” For the coming year, online video ad spending is projected to rise by 18-28%, depending on who you ask. TV just isn’t as attractive any more.

Here at FreeTVBlog, we happen to prefer free broadcast TV. (Over-the-top video, whether free or reasonably priced, is also acceptable, but I digress.) To convince these millennials to recognize the benefits of this great resource, broadcasters just need to shift how they think about it.

You see, these millennials want instant access on demand, preferably without paying for it. The free part is pretty easy for cord-cutters who have switched to an OTA antenna, but broadcast TV seems to be the opposite of on-demand. That’s where the paradigm shift needs to come.

My Tablo gets it. When I want to choose shows to record, Tablo displays a picture list of every program coming up on my broadcast channels over the next couple of weeks. The list doesn’t care when the show airs, or which channel it’s on. I just pick this one and that one, and a few days later, it’s ready for on-demand viewing.

That’s not the only way Tablo presents potential recordings. It also includes a standard live TV grid, or I can narrow the list by channel, or prime-time only, or genre. But the paradigm shift is to think of broadcast not as appointment TV, but as a constant source of programs that can be scooped up and saved to watch whenever.

That’s what the broadcasters need to do – embrace and promote OTA DVRs as pre-planned on-demand devices. Any system of suggesting programs, or of listing every available program, will help cord-cutters appreciate the wealth and variety of choices they have for free with local TV.

by ·Comments Off on Virtual reality came to life at NAB
Four men in virtual reality chairs

The Dell booth showed off virtual reality with a little motion and breeze thrown in.

Virtual reality. VR. That was the hottest technology on display at the NAB Show a couple of weeks ago.

VR doesn’t have anything to do with broadcasting, not yet. But it could happen sooner that you might think. For example, Streambox exhibited real-time VR streaming at the show.

On the second day of the show, I was reminded that even though we’re taller and dressed like grown-ups, we’re all kids inside. We filed in to a large meeting room for a VR seminar. Smiling workers handed each of us an official Google Cardboard viewer. Projectors showed a few VR apps to download to our phones. We took our seats, and many of us reconfigured our Cardboards from storage to Velcro-secured viewing mode. We were ready for whatever demonstration they could throw at us. The seminar began.

About 40 minutes into the scheduled hour, there had been plenty of discussion and shared expertise, but no demonstrations. That’s when I started hearing the unmistakable sound of ripping, unfastened Velcro. One by one, we realized we would not be playing with our new toys.

(Side note: Cardboard is available for anyone to manufacture, and I had bought a cheap knock-off a couple of months earlier. The type of Cardboard they handed out, which looked like this, was very much easier to assemble and use. Highly recommended.)

If you haven’t experienced VR, get a Cardboard and try it with your smartphone. That’ll give you a good taste of what the (currently) expensive VR headsets deliver. I’m not sure exactly where VR will fit in the future of video story-telling, but I’m sure we’ll see more of it somewhere.