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My DTV logoCould this be the beginning of the end for mobile TV? As reported yesterday by TV Technology, the Mobile500 Alliance allows its domain to expire, causing its web site to disappear. Since that story was published, someone renewed the domain for another year, but the organization is definitely “undergoing a management transition”.

At the NAB Show last April, word was that Mobile500 would merge with Dyle, that other mobile-TV consortium. That’s was just before John Lawson, the Mobile500 executive director since its founding, stepped down. According to TV NewsCheck, Lawson’s replacement is Rob Hubbard, president of Hubbard Broadcasting, and Hubbard doesn’t see that merger coming any time soon.

TV NewsCheck also quotes Hubbard as saying that mobile-TV phone dongle is awkward at best. “The idea of the dongle is problematic, but that’s no surprise, everyone has known that,” Hubbard said. “When it’s built-in, it would get more use. The idea of having a dongle is something that people are less thrilled about.”

I hadn’t had a chance to mention this before, but on my recent visit to New York City, I observed hundreds of subway riders. Plenty of them were reading their phones. Plenty more were listening to something on their phones. No riders watched video on their phones, and that surprised me a bit. I still don’t know where the mobile viewers are supposed to come from, and maybe some of the mobile consortiums’ backers are starting to agree.

by ·Comments Off on How we all could have won the CBS showdown
Two businessmen arm wrestling.

© DepositPhotos / photography33

The following is a guest blog post by David McAdams, professor of economics at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and author of the forthcoming book, “Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations”. This article, titled “How Time Warner can win its CBS showdown”, originally appeared in the (Durham NC) Herald-Sun on Aug. 29, a few days before Time Warner Cable settled its retransmission dispute with CBS.

Since Aug. 2, Time Warner Cable has blocked about 3 million of its customers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and other areas from receiving their local CBS broadcast. The cable giant is balking over the network’s demand for higher fees to retransmit CBS programming.

Most industry watchers seem to agree that Time Warner is likely to lose this showdown, giving in to CBS sometime around the start of the NFL season in early September. But with new tactics and a little strategic imagination, Time Warner can turn the tables on CBS and win. Here’s how.

It starts with a seemingly submissive announcement by Time Warner chairman and CEO Glenn Britt:

“The CBS blackout ends today. Despite all our misgivings at the unfairness of this deal, we will accept CBS’s demand to charge our subscribers $2 per month to view its broadcast programming over our cable network.”

This might seem to be admitting defeat, but then Britt adds the following condition:

“There’s just one thing. We believe that subscribers who don’t want to watch CBS over our cable network shouldn’t be forced to pay this unreasonable fee. Everyone pays the same amount for most channels, because that sort of pricing typically allows us to negotiate lower rates. But when a channel goes off the deep end and refuses to accept a reasonable price, only those who want the channel should be forced to pay.”

CBS would never willingly accept this deal, as many cable subscribers would undoubtedly “opt out” and view their favorite CBS programs for free through a standard rooftop antenna. But what can CBS do? Undoubtedly, CBS’s chief Leslie Moonves would come out and decry the notion of giving customers an opt-out option as a “sham,” as he has in the past, but there’s a problem.

Now that Time Warner has restored CBS programming and even accepted CBS’s demand for $2 per month, CBS is in an awkward position. If access to CBS programs really is so valuable to cable subscribers, as the network has insisted all along, how can CBS demand that they be forced to pay?

Certainly, if CBS were to take a hard line and withhold its permission to rebroadcast over this issue – thus triggering another blackout and denying all Time Warner subscribers access to CBS programming because they insisted on charging people who don’t even watch CBS over cable — CBS would now be the one in the hot seat. Knowing this, Time Warner would now be the one comfortable to “wait it out” as long as necessary.

In the end, CBS would have no choice but to accept an opt-out clause for Time Warner’s cable subscribers, or else back down and accept a lower per-subscriber fee. Time Warner would not only “win,” but also lay the groundwork to control cable content costs while avoiding disruptive blackouts in the future.

The recipe for cable-company victory is actually quite simple:

  1. Allow every channel to charge whatever it wants. However, if a channel’s demand is “unreasonable,” only accept if the channel also agrees not to charge for subscribers who opt out.
  2. If the channel insists on charging everyone, refuse but do nothing. Force the channel to block its own transmission so that customers understand that blackouts are not Time Warner’s fault.
  3. Inform subscribers of their opt-out options and make sure that the opt-out process is simple and transparent. If few subscribers opt out of a channel, you will have learned that that channel’s demand wasn’t so unreasonable after all. But if many do opt out, you’ll have a powerful argument in hand when the next negotiation rolls around.

If cable companies like Time Warner (and satellite-TV providers like DirecTV) stick to this strategy, content providers like CBS won’t have an incentive any more to demand fees that even they believe are beyond what most subscribers are willing to pay. That’s a good thing for Time Warner, and a good thing for consumers as well.

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nimbleguideI finally had a chance to poke around the new, revived nimbleTV, and it looks mostly the same as the nimbleTV I got to know before Dish shut it down for a few weeks. There are a few differences, and the big ones have Dish’s thumbprint on them.

The first change is that all nimbleTV customers must provide a valid New York City address to watch NYC local channels. Good thing I’ve got a NYC mailing address.

The second change is a restriction on simultaneous recordings. I know it used to be at least nine, Peter Litman wrote that it was 10, and nimbleTV’s site had called it unlimited and still calls it limitless. Today, a subscriber is limited to four simultaneous recordings.

The third change is trivial compared to the first two. My Casual Viewer package (taking channels from Dish’s Welcome Pack) dropped a lot of shopping and religious channels but added HSN, Daystar, and TV Guide Network.

Most things haven’t changed. NimbleTV still uses my favorite guide (shown above), an outside-the-box horizontal scroller that works well once you get used to it. NimbleTV still provides great streaming TV to my iPhone and computers. And nimbleTV still uses Dish but refuses to say anything substantial about their relationship.

Here’s my theory: Despite Dish’s continued assertion that nimbleTV isn’t an “authorized retailer,” they must have a deal or an understanding in place, otherwise nimbleTV’s receivers would stay shut down. The first two changes address likely Dish objections. If you’ll remember, Dish ran into legal trouble over distant network channels before and wouldn’t want to replay that case just because of nimbleTV. The new recording limit probably came about because Dish didn’t like it that nimbleTV subscribers could record more shows than a regular Dish customer.

Consider that within a couple of days of the outage, nimbleTV was telling its customers that “It may take up to two weeks for the billing issue to resolve completely and for service to be restored.” That was a very specific timeframe, and in retrospect, it sounds like an estimate for the time nimbleTV programmers would need to change the system to check for more than four recordings and to split the channel packages for local and non-local viewers.

I eagerly invite corrections. If I’m wrong about any of these guesses, which are just one explanation for nimbleTV’s behavior, I would be happy to change this post and add whatever information Dish or nimbleTV would care to share with its viewers. But I’ve got an unusual feeling about all of this. It’s the feeling that I may be right.

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FortecDishWe’re getting a lot of new visitors, so I thought this might be a good time to talk about the foundation of this blog: free-to-air (FTA) satellite TV. That’s a system providing hundreds of channels that don’t require an internet connection to watch but are completely free and legal.

By the way, when I tell the people I meet about FTA satellite TV, about 10 of every 12 act like I’m talking about an imaginary friend, one guy will reminisce about the C-band dish he used to have, and the last one will say, “I used to subscribe to that, then it got scrambled.” Unfortunately, satellite TV pirates often misused the term “FTA” to refer to their practice of unlawfully, temporarily unlocking pay-TV channels. (How stupid is it to risk $thousands in legal damages to save $20/month on satellite TV by paying a pirate instead of Dish or DirecTV?) Anyway, let me make it clear up front that my use of FTA is its original, positive meaning – unscrambled channels that are free for anyone to watch.

As long-time FTABlog readers know, anyone who can mount a small Ku-band dish with a clear line of sight to the right part of the sky can get an amazing array of FTA TV and radio channels. Not only are there hundreds of regular channels, there are also healthy doses of raw news and sports feeds that you’d never see anywhere else. This whole FTA phenomenom is so exciting that it’s the reason I founded FTAList.com a long time ago, as a resource for keeping track of what’s available and a guide to getting started.

After creating FTAList, I added this blog to write about some of the changes in the channels that were available. Then about three years ago, I began to notice that there were more channels and video content online than on FTA satellite. The few over-the-air stations that had used satellite to relay their signal to cable systems mostly switched to IP-based delivery. New streaming technologies provided other ways to watch distant channels, so that’s often the focus on this blog.

In general, FTA satellite provides a great supplement to local over-the-air viewers (what they used to be called before “cord cutters”). There are two catches. The first is that you won’t find HBO or ESPN; full-time FTA channels tend to be networks you haven’t heard of. The second catch is that the channels come and go as they please. Some FTA channels last for years, some for weeks. That’s why FTAList is there to try to keep track of the changes.

If you want to learn more about this easy way to add lots of channels to your entertainment setup, go visit FTAList and poke around. You might find watching odd, often unique free programming to be as much fun as I did.

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hand rising from grave, in TV screen

© DepositPhotos / Paulus Rusyanto & Lyudmyla Kharlamova

Just as I was typing my last post, pointing out that nimbleTV’s guide was the best of the streaming services I’ve seen so far, I got an email from nimbleTV support. It’s coming back.

There are a few new wrinkles in the system. The first was that Dish Network will no longer bill separately for its part of the fee. “(G)oing forward, there will be single charge (sic) for the total amount including the TV provider’s amount,” the note read. The email never mentioned Dish by name, suggesting that nimbleTV doesn’t want to be accused of reselling Dish without permission.

The second, more serious wrinkle in the email is that the New York City locals delivered by Dish are off limits by default. “If you wish to continue to get New York local channels, a New York Metropolitan Area address is required.” I find that wording interesting. It doesn’t say that I need to live in NY, or even provide a NY credit card billing address (as Aereo requires). It doesn’t say that it has to be my address. Did you know that the Empire State Building is at 350 5th Ave, 10118? Just sayin’.

I haven’t provided any new address yet, but I am able to log in to my account. All of my old channels are there, plus TV Guide Network, minus the NYC locals. I can’t watch any of them live; when I try, I see a pop-up that says “Sorry, we’re still activating this channel.” Until I verify my address, all I’ll get to watch are my pre-stoppage recordings, including those I made from NYC locals.

So what happened? Except for that email, nobody has told me anything, though notes on Twitter suggest that nimbleTV has been reactivating accounts for a few days now. Everything still matches my old guess that somebody (NFL? broadcast networks?) leaned on Dish to cut off nimbleTV to block out-of-market viewing, so Dish whipped out its “unauthorized retailer” card because it was shocked, shocked that nimbleTV was selling subscriptions that way. If anyone ever comments on the record about that, I’ll let you know.

An old acquaintance of mine had wondered whether nimbleTV was account stacking. That’s the practice of adding another receiver to your Dish account, running the cord to your next-door neighbor and splitting the bill. (Account stacking is unlawful and dumb considering the small savings and real risks from such a setup.) Theoretically, a company could get Dish subscriptions for a couple hundred receivers, copy and store all the programming, then serve thousands of customers while pocketing their full subcription fees. Before the stoppage, it was easy to answer that question, because Dish billed each nimbleTV subscriber separately. Now I still don’t suspect account stacking, but I’ve got no way to refute it. So congratulations to nimbleTV for clawing its way back to life. I sure hope it’s legal.