by ·Comments Off on Voom vs. Dish should be fun to watch

Voom logoIn a modern-day clash of titans, the 4-year-old lawsuit between Voom HD and Dish Network has reached a trial, which started today. Billionaire cable pioneer Charles Dolan will face off against billionaire satellite pioneer Charles Ergen in a case to be decided by a jury of their peers.

Dish abruptly dumped the Voom channels in May 2008, claiming that Voom hadn’t spent enough on its programming, as its contract with Dish had required. (As a Voom viewer, I can say that during its last year, Voom’s shows seemed to be about 90% repeats.) In today’s trial, “Cablevision attorney Orin Snyder said Dish was ‘hell-bent’ on getting out of a contract covering a high definition channel package offered by Voom HD,” according to a Reuters article.

The trial is expected to last for several weeks. You might want to check Google News to find some sources who will be covering this. Sounds like it’ll be fun, and it might even be enlightening.

Update: After a train wreck of a trial, with Ergen apparently next up on the witness list, Dish settled by giving Cablevision $700 million and agreeing to carry the AMC channels.

by ·Comments Off on How will Congress regulate internet TV?

US Capitol BuildingThe Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus held an educational briefing Friday titled, “Internet TV: What Must Congress Do About It?” Phil Kurz of Broadcast Engineering has a nice summary of the issues and discussion flying around. You really should go read it!

My favorite quotes are from Andrew Jay Schwartzman, who used to run the Media Access Project. “TV Everywhere says, ‘Fine, get a video subscription, and you can get video online.’ And through various contractual arrangements they are trying to tie in some of these cable channels so they can’t really offer their services al a carte online so you can just get the channels you want….”

Best of all, you can download the whole thing as an MP3 podcast here. Enjoy!

by ·Comments Off on Watching OTA over the internet could be Simple

Simple.TV deviceYet another service that offers over-the-air channels streamed to internet devices is about to hit the market. This one looks legal, because it uses your home antenna.

Simple.TV is a great story. It showed off a prototype at the International CES in January, won a Best of CES award from CNET, then rode a successful Kickstarter project to create a finished product for consumers. You plug in your home OTA antenna and an ethernet connection, then it streams the shows to you wherever you are. Add a USB hard drive and it’ll even act as a DVR for you. All for the cost of the $150 device, although you might want to spring for the $4.99/month enhanced TV listing subscription.

Streaming this way isn’t completely new. You can hook up a Slingbox or a TiVo and get the same results with the right equipment. What’s new is that Simple.TV has brought that functionality down to a lower price point with a, dare I type this, simpler interface.

What fascinates me is that programmers don’t seem to care much about this kind of streaming, but they’re still battling hard against Aereo, which is only different in that it maintains the OTA antenna for you. Cablevision was the most recent company to dogpile on Aereo, submitting a brief that says Cablevision’s cloud-based DVR is nothing like Aereo’s because Cablevision paid retransmission fees. Yes, this is the same Cablevision that publicly suggested less than two years ago that any non-profit could freely retransmit any OTA channel. So you might want to take all that with a grain of salt.

Anyway, Simple.TV is supposed to begin shipping units this week. I hope it encourages more people to explore the wealth of programming they’re already getting for free.

by ·Comments Off on Directed vs. non-directed viewing

Bugs Bunny in Falling HareI can remember when TV was limited to just four or five broadcast channels, and that was it. I remember when the first 36-channel cable box arrived, with much rejoicing. I remember the days when VCRs first emerged, and how long it took for me to spend the big bucks (then) to buy one. In other words, my formative years were steeped in non-directed viewing, and it’s taking me some time to unlearn those habits.

Directed viewing is the future, and a lot of the present. When you dig around online to find a particular old Looney Tunes cartoon, or when you order an episode of Downton Abbey on demand, or when you pop in a DVD or Blu-ray disc, that’s directed viewing. The old days of flopping on the couch and channel surfing to see what’s on, that’s non-directed.

Watching a lot of free-to-air TV networks, it’s easy to think, “Hey, I could run a channel as well as that.” FTA viewing is pretty much non-directed, unless you use a DVR with it. But satellite time is expensive, and internet streaming is pretty cheap. And that’s why I started experimenting with TVU Networks, as I explained a few posts ago.

You remember the old cartoon Falling Hare, where Bugs Bunny fights a gremlin? (You can watch it here.) The gremlin convinces Bugs to whack a bomb just right to make it go off. After a wild windup, just as he’s about to hit the bomb, Bugs stops short and yells, “What am I doing?” That was my flash of insight as I dug deeper into launching a 24-hour internet channel. It’s all in the difference between directed viewing and non-directed viewing.

If you’re on the internet already, you have a zillion on-demand options for viewing content, and you’ll probably use them. Directed viewing. If you just want to hit the couch and flip around, you’ll probably be watching broadcast TV or cable/satellite channels. Non-directed viewing. Put it all together, and a 24-hour online-only entertainment channel is probably a bad idea. Good thing I stopped!

 

by ·Comments Off on Some background on TV bandwidth

Leslie EllisLeslie Ellis is the force behind Translation-Please.com, a great blog that discusses TV’s technical side in terms that we normal humans can understand. She’s also got a blog on Multichannel News, and that’s where she just posted a concise background piece about that TV bandwidth that lots of folks are fighting over.

How much bandwidth do you need for a channel? Why are channels set the way they are? What happens to them after they’re switched to carry data services instead? Leslie answers all these questions, so go read it!