by ·Comments Off on Snowy reminder on dish placement

Satellite dish with a bit of snowHere’s another case where I’ve made a mistake so you don’t have to.

Long ago, when I had to move my primary Dish Network dish because of roof work, I “wisely” picked a spot that I could reach with a broom. That way, when the snows returned to Denver every year, I could brush off the dish and keep the signal alive.

So far, that’s a good idea. But the spot I picked is just barely within broom-swinging range. And that means that to brush off the snow, I need to stand directly under the dish as I clear the snow. Yes, so it falls on my head.

Fortunately (?), another round of roof work is likely in 2011, so I’ll get the opportunity to move the dish to a better spot. Or maybe I’ll just go find a longer broom.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Simply ivy drawingivi.tv just keeps getting better. After launching with most of the local channels in New York and Seattle, ivi added Los Angeles, and most recently, Chicago. The independent channels and sub-carrier channels are particularly interesting, because they provide something you might not get with your local over-the-air network stations. Plus, this week, I was able to watch the snowed-out football game that moved to Detroit thanks to a local New York station’s broadcast. At $4.99/month, it’s a great deal.

It’s also heartening to see that ivi recognizes that it will exist only as long as the courts and Congress allow it to do so. Its CEO, Todd Weaver, visited Washington to lobby Congress and the FCC to please recognize its law-abiding usefulness.

The one voice I would expect to boom the loudest in opposition to this streaming TV idea is pro football’s, but I have yet to hear anything from them. They didn’t join in any of the lawsuits, and I haven’t heard any public pronouncements against it, even though it’s a party that has a lot to lose from its exclusive out-of-market pay-TV package. Instead, the National Association of Broadcasters’ president threw down the football championship game card with regards to a loosely related topic – retransmission consent for regular cable and satellite systems.

Why isn’t football itself getting involved? I’m guessing that it sees a lockout on the horizon and doesn’t want to use any political capital until after it wins that fight. But I digress.

FilmOn is continuing on its wacky, ever-changing way. The folks who were suing it were successful in getting an injunction, and FilmOn stopped showing those channels. (Except I sometimes see KTLA, and other times FilmOn says it can’t show it.) FilmOn added some Los Angeles Spanish-language locals that weren’t part of the suit, and continued its funky set of international channels and adult offerings.

This morning’s interesting change du jour is that the FilmOn standalone player has added New York stations WABC, WPIX, and WNET. I would have thought that the injunction would have blocked FilmOn from showing any ABC stations, but it’s not like I have a copy of it in front of me. Anyway, although FilmOn is offering subscriptions, its standalone player has been running for a really long time in free preview mode, so you might want to check that out too.

Oh, and sorry about the recent blog outage. The software should be fixed now to avoid those 500 errors. If you see problems, please let me know.

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Cablevision logoCablevision, stuck in an awful retransmission consent battle with Fox, issued the most amazing press release yesterday. It said that the 1976 Copyright Act allows any “governmental body, or other non-profit organization” to retransmit over-the-air (OTA) signals so long as it gains no commercial advantage and charges only enough to cover operating expenses.

Now this opinion is coming from a cable TV company. At this week’s earnings call, another cable giant, Comcast, said that it’s already losing subscribers to local OTA TV. What would happen to Cablevision if its subscribers had free access to lots of out-of-market OTA channels? When a company volunteers the idea that non-profits could legally take away its customers, you have to believe it, don’t you?

Fox doesn’t believe it. Fox quickly issued a statement that “It is alarming that Cablevision would put non-profits and governmental bodies at risk by encouraging them to violate the Copyright Act in order to gain a commercial advantage.” (That’s according to a story by Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton.)

I am not a lawyer, and I know just enough about intellectual property to be dangerous. (In other words, don’t try any of this without consulting your own lawyers!) But for the rest of this post, let’s all pretend that what Cablevision said is true. Maybe it is.

Here is the cornerstone of what could be a great FTA satellite TV service. Imagine a non-profit FTA broadcasting organization; I’ll call it SatFreeTV.org. It could use dozens of volunteers with OTA antennas to send channels from all over the country to an uplink center via the internet. The uplink would combine a dozen or two of these channels and bounce them off a dedicated transponder. Anyone with an FTA dish would have access to SatFreeTV’s slate of channels, all for free. It would be just like FTA’s glory days with all of those Equity channels, except better.

Volunteers don’t get paid, and they might be able to pick up their own internet expenses, but satellite space definitely isn’t free. SatFreeTV would have to pay roughly $150,000 per year per transponder. Where would the money come from? As a qualified, educational non-profit, SatFreeTV could attract some grants from foundations, donations from FTA equipment vendors, and maybe even free services from uplink centers. Perhaps with a cluster of attractive channels in place, SatFreeTV could charge some religious channels enough rent to help pay the transponder bill.

The other volunteers that SatFreeTV would need are lawyers. Regardless of whether it’s legal, SatFreeTV would attract the same kind of lawsuits as ivi.tv and FilmOn. There wouldn’t be any investors to foot the legal bill in the hope of a big payoff down the road. Maybe SatFreeTV could give the Electronic Freedom Foundation a channel in exchange for continuing legal services.

Then there’s Congress. If SatFreeTV became sufficiently popular, I would expect sports leagues to go to Congress and testify that they were going to have to remove all games from free TV. Who is going to pay for an out-of-market sports package if they can get all the games elsewhere for free? Would Congress paper over that old Copyright Act exemption? Or would the collected voices of SatFreeTV viewers convince it to leave it alone? Since this is our daydream, we’re free to hope for the best.

I’ve often thought that FTA needs a non-profit organization. This technology is already a great way to watch dozens of channels that aren’t available anywhere else. If we could also add dozens of OTA channels, then we’d hit the jackpot.

by ·Comments Off on FilmOn adds BBC channels, ivi keeps fighting

FilmOn player update dialogJust a couple of quick notes about two streaming TV providers.

* A poster who says he’s Alki David, founder of FilmOn, posted a comment on the most recent blog post here. The poster (I hope it’s David) suggested that part of the reason for FilmOn’s spotty service was an attack on hosting company Reality Check Network. The FilmOn player required an update last week, and the details in that update dialog, shown here, suggest other problems.

But it’s true, now at least something works. The FilmOn player shows a large set of over-the-air channels from Great Britain. A dependable, live source of BBC programming might be worth the subscription price. But FilmOn’s subscription page doesn’t mention them, so I don’t know whether the British channels are here to stay. On the other hand, the adult channels are gone again.

* Ivi.tv keeps rolling along. Every now and then, a channel or two is unavailable for a while, but it’s been remarkably stable. Will it survive? Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports that ivi has asked a US District Court in New York to refrain from granting a restraining order or preliminary injunction against it. Eggerton writes, “Ivi argues that, quite simply, either would put them out of business.” Instead, ivi wants the case shifted to Seattle, where it had already filed for a declatory ruling that it does not violate copyright.

Ivi Chairman Ron Erickson is quoted as saying that if ivi wins in court, the media companies will turn to Congress to change the law. Which is what I’ve been saying all along. I still wonder how ivi can win that fight, but for now, I’m enjoying the chance to watch.

by ·Comments Off on One easy solution to TV retransmission troubles

Economics logoFirst, before I forget, I owe you a review of the SatHawk / Solomend FTA receiver I’ve been using. (It uses the same innards as the OpenBox S9.) So far, everything is great, and even the DVR is working pretty well. I’ll write much more about it next week.

When Dish Network and Fox couldn’t reach an agreement to renew a bunch of regional sports networks and a couple of other pay-TV channels, Fox yanked them from Dish. Trade publications had a note on it, local newspapers where the sports networks went out mentioned it, and a few perceptive souls noticed that the dispute might spread to include some Fox over-the-air channels in November. Congress and the national media yawned.

But last weekend, when Fox yanked over-the-air channels away from Cablevision, which services New York and Philadelphia, that’s when US Representatives felt moved to act. Or at least talk about acting. In a way that somehow keeps the channels on while allowing the free market to work it out. But which punishes those who bargain in “bad faith”, a determination that courts rarely make.

Long Side Note: Dish and Cablevision often say they’re holding the line to keep customers’ prices low. That’s garbage. They’re holding the line to provide the best return for their investors, as is their duty. The retail cost of anything is set to maximize profit. Set the price too high, and reduced sales drop the total profit. Set it too low, and the thin margins produce a smaller profit.

Here’s a concrete example. Once upon a time, I bought and sold used and collectible books. (I bought them used and sold them collectible.) Suppose that I bought a pile of them at $1 each. Now suppose that the next pile I bought cost $3 each. Would I automatically raise prices by $2/book? Of course not! The price was always set based on demand and competition. Higher costs cut into my profit, but they had no effect on the customer’s price.

When a business has an increased cost, such as a higher wholesale fee for a channel, it merely changes the floor for the minimum price to consumers. And that higher floor only changes whether the business will sell that thing at all; it won’t automatically set a higher price. Back to the books, if demand for those $3 books fell off, the competitive price might drop to $2 or less. I’d sell however many I had left in inventory at below cost, but I’ll know not to buy any more of those at $3.

These rate disputes are all about which company gets to keep more of subscribers’ fees. This talk about protecting consumers from rate increases is hogwash.

Anyway, there’s one painless way to solve all retransmission disputes. It’s used in similar markets, yet I never hear it brought up as a solution to this mess. As personal inspiration and drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs often puts it, “I’m surprised I have to explain these things.”

Get the networks (a handful of companies own most of them) on one side of a bargaining table. Get the cable and satellite companies on the other. Make them work out one national formula for how much any given network is paid per subscriber. Repeat every couple of years or so. Everyone gets a fair shake, and viewers never see holes in their lineup from channel disputes.

Personally, I’d like to see the formula tied to the number of viewers, not subscribers. If your channel adds interesting programs, ratings go up, then you get more money next quarter. If you rerun the same old crud and no one watches, you get less money.

This model works in music. It works for streaming radio stations. In Canada, it works for schools photocopying text and for retransmitting OTA channels. There’s no reason this kind of system couldn’t work here.

Think of all the money this would save these companies. Take the number of channels. Multiply by the number of cable/satellite providers. Multiply by the number of worker-hours (or lawyer-hours) needed to negotiate each carriage agreement. Multiply by the hourly cost of company workers or lawyers. No matter how much a central agreement would cost to negotiate, it would be a lot less than this.

However, without being forced to the table, the channel providers would never agree to this. Disney thinks that ESPN is indispensible (maybe it is), charges almost as much as HBO for it, and demands that it be included in the lowest tier on every system. Other providers also have a long history of winning the big fights like the current dispute. Why be forced to take a standard rate when you have the leverage to demand a premium? But if Congress really wants to build a system that’s fair to everyone, this is it.

Or Congress could mandate a la carte pricing, as supported by Consumers Union. Everyone pays a set amount to connect, then buys each channel separately, so if a channel raises its rate, subscribers can decide whether they’d rather pay extra or drop it. Opponents say a la carte pricing would make users pay more for fewer channels, but have the folks who make Consumer Reports ever been really wrong about anything like that?