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Watch live streaming video from spinthebottle at livestream.com

Every now and then, I check the logs to see what search terms drive web surfers to visit FTABlog. My most recent check revealed that months after our last installment, some people still want to see more 80s music videos. Well alrighty then.

Today I present a special treat. Shock the Monkey is the enigmatic hit that helped Peter Gabriel break out in the US, and this is the Pop-Up Video version. For the youngsters out there, Pop-Up Video was a VH1 show in the 1990s. In every episode, PUV provided behind the scenes info and often sophomoric commentary about several music videos. If you want more examples, there are dozens more at producer Spin the Bottle’s Livestream site. Enjoy!

 

by ·Comments Off on Dish Network pioneers streaming TV packages

A world map montage over a blue background.With all the talk about FilmOn and Aereo and nimbleTV, I keep forgetting to mention another really important internet-based TV service. Janko Roettgers of GigaOM reminded us recently that for years, Dish Network has been streaming TV channels from other countries through its DishWorld brand. I remember when Dish started the service and saw it both as a smart way for Dish to shift transponder space to more English-language HD programming and as another sign that internet-delivered content would eventually supplant most satellite TV programming. We’ll see how that goes.

Dish is in a great position to run this international offshoot because of its longstanding relations with foreign programmers. On the other hand, a big part of nimbleTV’s true potential is to provide parallel programming packages by providing virtual cable subscriptions from Bangalore or wherever nimbleTV can work out a good deal. Never mind watching New York channels as you travel; imagine the folks from India and other countries on long-term assignments here with a chance to tap into everything they’d get at home. FilmOn has also been adding a fair number of foreign-language channels, so it’s always possible that it could become a player in this market segment.

True one-to-many broadcasting makes a lot of sense when a lot of people want to watch the same live event at the same time. For programming that only a small fraction of viewers want to see, DishWorld is showing what the TV world is coming to.

by ·Comments Off on FilmOn adds OTA channel lists for DC, NYC, LA

FilmOnMHzI’ve been resisting the urge to write more about FilmOn because I don’t want this to become the What the Heck is Going On with FilmOn Blog. But once again, I’ve just got to ask, What the heck is going on with FilmOn?

On the legal front, it’s a little easier to explain what’s going on. Two days ago, a New York federal judge ordered FilmOn to pay CBS and other plantiffs $1.35 million plus interest and attorneys’ fees for failing to pay the full amount it owed under an October 2012 settlement on the old copyright lawsuit. Then yesterday, FilmOn asked Washington DC U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer to reconsider her injunction preventing it from streaming over-the-air broadcasters, claiming that the order puts it at a competitive disadvantage compared to Aereo, which keeps avoiding these injunctions. I also keep reading reports that the injunction prevents FilmOn from streaming stations from almost all of the US, but in real life, FilmOn continues to stream Denver, Chicago, and probably other cities I can’t easily check.

If FilmOn is ignoring or bypassing the “nationwide” part of the injunction, that would be just the beginning of the weirdness. Yesterday, its online channel list added New York TV and Los Angeles TV as new categories, populated by the names of every OTA channel and subchannel in those markets. Today, it added Washington DC TV, the one place I’d firmly believe is covered by Judge Collyer’s injunction, with a similar set of every possible OTA offering. Yesterday, my attempts to launch a handful of these channels were uniformly unsuccessful; selecting one kicked in the standard preroll ad, then a Loading graphic and that’s all. Today, I see that at least a few of the Washington DC channels are live, including 30.3, the MHz subchannel carrying CCTV News. The picture stutters and sometimes goes blocky, suggesting a marginal signal, but there it is.

As someone who has been following FilmOn for years, I can tell you that I have no idea what this means. It’s uncharacteristic of FilmOn to offer all available OTA channels for a market; for example, in Denver, it only offers the Big Four networks. Is FilmOn deliberately thumbing its nose at the injunction? Is someone in the control room experimenting with what FilmOn might do after they actually win a lawsuit? Is some prankster playing a trick on FilmOn or the rest of us? I suspect we’ll all find out soon enough.

Update: John Eggerton from Broadcasting & Cable followed up by talking with FilmOn founder Alki David. According to Eggerton, David was waiting for a ruling on FilmOn’s request for the judge to reconsider her decision. This afternoon, she denied that request. “We had a motion to stay. As a result of the stay motion, the order is put on ice. The decision is made so now we comply,” David said. There’s a lot more in Eggerton’s article, so go read it!

Update 2: By the time Eggerton’s article appeared, the local TV categories I mentioned had disappeared from FilmOn. As I type this the next morning, the Big Four networks are gone from Denver and Chicago, although WGN is still there. New York, safely in a pocket of District Court approval, looks the same as it did before all this happened. I still wonder what the plan was for those categories. Maybe David will let me know one of these days.

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Old WSBK TV logo

WBSK logo from the 1970s, courtesy of Logopedia

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Dish Network vs. DirecTV or cable is that Dish sells a la carte subscriptions to the five legally protected superstations. As rare examples of distant over-the-air TV, stations WBSK, WWOR, WPIX, KWGN, and KTLA are available through Dish individually or in a package.

That’s all going to end September 19, less than two weeks from now, when Dish will no longer offer the superstations, although existing superstation subscribers will be grandfathered indefinitely according to an email from Dish to its retailers. That news was reported by the SatelliteGuys site, which is usually right about such things.

Those five superstations don’t include the two you might guess, WGN and WTBS, not any more. Those five are the suvivors of the brief superstation wave that hit cable TV in the 1970s and 80s, with their grandfathered status preserved by a specific clause in the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA). (WGN and WTBS evolved to add non-OTA national versions of themselves, partly to skirt rules about cable systems importing distant OTA signals. Long story.)

Now Congress is debating STELA’s renewal, and some legislators want to add on an overhaul to all retransmission consent rules. There are contentious committee hearings going on now, and I’ll bet that no one at those hearings even mentions superstations. My guess is that Dish sees that Congress will overhaul STELA one day soon and that when it does, the superstation exemption will be gone.

When I chose Dish 12 years ago, the superstations were a large factor, but now it would be easy to say that these grapes have already soured. All five superstations once provided plenty of major-league baseball coverage, but this year they combined for only about 50 games, split between WWOR and WPIX. With the rise of second-tier networks (WB and UPN, then CW and My TV), these “independent” stations had less and less unique programming. And with HD as the new basic standard for most TV viewers, Dish still delivers only the SD version. A few years ago, I noticed how little I was watching them, so I dropped them.

If you want one last chance to get distant OTA channels delivered via pay-TV satellite, this might be it. I don’t know if they’re really worth $7/month, but I figured I’d subscribe to them one more time before it’s too late.

Update: It’s September 19, and sure enough, Dish no longer offers the Superstations on its a la carte programming page. Hope you subscribed if you really wanted them.

by ·Comments Off on DC judge tells FilmOn to stop streaming OTA TV
US Open tennis on CBS NY

Friday’s US Open tennis on CBS NY

On Thursday, a US District judge in Washington DC issued a preliminary injunction against our old friends at FilmOn, the TV streaming service. Several major networks had filed suit against FilmOn, claiming the service was rebroadcasting their stations’ signals without permission. In her opinion, Rosemary Collyer wrote that the networks are “likely to succeed on their claim that FilmOn X violates Plaintiffs’ exclusive public performance rights in their copyrighted works.”

According to the New York Times and others, Fox said in a statement that the injunction “would apply across the country, with the exception of New York, Connecticut and Vermont, where the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has upheld Aereo’s business model”. I don’t think that FilmOn founder Alki David agrees.

David told the Hollywood Reporter, “We are still in many other cities across the USA. We are opening Philadelphia on Monday. We will win DC back on appeal.” Sure enough, as I write this, FilmOn is still streaming local OTA stations from New York City, Denver, and probably other cities that are harder for me to check. Just not Washington.

(As an aside, you really need to read David’s response in Variety. It starts with “The judge is clearly in (the broadcasters’) pockets,” and continues with the word “hairy” and a part of the anatomy.)

And even if FilmOn ever gets completely shut out of streaming US OTA channels, (it’s happened before), it could still continue with its zillion other channels. David told Deadline.com that “We will continue without the Networks and appeal. We will win in the appeal.” What will probably happen is that the whole business question of whether a company can stream the OTA signal from an individual antenna to a single user will be settled by the Supreme Court, and that won’t happen for a couple of years according to a great analysis on GigaOM.

The other OTA streaming service, Aereo, has been very successful in the courts at blocking injunctions. For FilmOn to succeed in streaming US OTA, I think its next step should be to hire Aereo’s lawyers.