Reports indicate Intel may offer a set top box with a la cart programming.
http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-cable-2013-1
http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-cable-2013-1
95% of my commercial skipping consists of 6 presses of the 30-sec skip button. That is very little work in pretty much every definition of the term.wmb said:I expect product placement and shows that are essentially extended commercials will become more prevalent.
Also, commercial FF/skipping is a lot of work.
A year or two ago, Sat Racer said that authentication was a big issue in renegotiations. That is the DirecTV anywhere that is becoming a major part of the product.Hoosier205 said:...despite the fact that the trend is in their favor year after year?
The NFL ST on PS3 is kind of a unique case as it's filling the role that MLB, NHL and NBA online offerings offer. I don't see them forgoing satellite and providing the complete experience over IP.wmb said:A year or two ago, Sat Racer said that authentication was a big issue in renegotiations. That is the DirecTV anywhere that is becoming a major part of the product.
DirecTV should be scared of VOD. They do not have a high bandwidth direct delivery mechanism for on demand content. They are at the mercy of cable providers net neutrality and customers desire to subsidize distribution costs by paying for high band width internet.
That said, DirecTV also must know that they have a potential opportunity as a content aggregator. This past year, they offered Sunday Ticket over Play Stations, without any other DirecTV product. Imagine people getting DirecTV content on their own hardware, without DirecTV having to install a dish and receivers.
Really? The DVR is not much more than a more capable VCR. VCR/DVRs have been around for 30 years. Not rapid at all, especially when cable/satellite companies have been giving them away.unixguru said:I have the opposite reaction - wow, that's a huge penetration in little time.
1) 2023 is a long way off. By then 4K and 8K UHD will be a reality and the data rates will need to that much higher.unixguru said:http://www.ieee802.org/3/ad_hoc/bwa/public/sep11/cloonan_01a_0911.pdf
See slide 12:
If a 20 Mbps, 3D-HD, H.264 video feed is sent to (on average) 2.3 people per home, then each home should be satiated with an average bandwidth offer
of (20 Mbps)*(2.3)=46 Mbps.... which we predict we will hit by ~2023
You have stated in other posts that the DirecTV bitrate is 6-12 Mbps so the average is less than 10. H.265 will reduce this another 40% to around 6 Mbps average.
That's 1/3 of what that quote references. That pulls in the date from 10 years to what, 5 or less? Do 2.3 people per home watch TV 24 hours a day? We watch about 6 hours so with a DVR that's a quarter of the load per day (spread out over entire day).
Slide 29:
The Downstream growth rate has been roughly 1.5x per year... Web-Surfing was the driver of growth in 2000... P2P was the driver of growth in 2008... IP Video is the driver of growth today
Intel would not be entering this market, whether it is ultimately successful or not, if there wasn't infrastructure and growth projections to support it.
What in God's name does this have to do with a la carte television?unixguru said:Middlemen are getting squeezed everywhere. Our local news today (Minnesota, BestBuy HQ) had a story about how BB was going to have a new price-matching policy to stop "showrooming" (looking at product in BB and then buying online from somebody else). They are obviously desperate. In our area there is a store every 5 miles in every direction. They simply cannot compete on price (without suicide) and they have little else to offer. Does Samsung, Sony, anybody care whether their products are sold retail or online? Nope. Maybe someday there will be a single mega store in the entire Minneapolis metro that sells marketing space to consumer electronics companies for those people that must see something in person or needs help deciding. Retail consumer electronics will essentially be dead. There is a certain justice here - my elderly parents owned a mom-n-pop small town electronics and appliance store and they were driven out of business by BB years ago (fortunately right about retirement age anyway).
Good question. There have been a series of odd comparisons involving completely different scenarios and/or industries.tonyd79;3183009 said:What in God's name does this have to do with a la carte television?
There have definitely been some tangents in this thread. I think the main problem is that people think a la carte would be cheaper, so they want it. Traditional providers won't provide it, so the "internet" must be the solution. The problem with that line of thinking is that you need a provider on the internet to share your vision of a la carte. The economics of providing TV service are well defined, so it remains hard to argue for a la carte. Therefore the idea that some mythical company is going to come in and blow everyone out of the water, when they need networks/channels to have a product to provide is a self-defeating prophecy.Hoosier205 said:Good question. There have been a series of odd comparisons involving completely different scenarios and/or industries.
DirecTV is not a middleman?tonyd79 said:What in God's name does this have to do with a la carte television?
Indeed they are and are getting very much squeezed.unixguru said:DirecTV is not a middleman?
I'll just say that the same people that are today saying that al-a-carte pricing models won't save the viewer any money are the same people that 10 years ago were saying that DVRs would ultimately raise the price of TV. No vendor is going just settle for less money for their product. Absent a competitive force or goverment regulation, the content providers will set the price of their content in such a way to insure that they make the same net revenue.unixguru said:Another thought to consider...
Delivery services are pushing DVRs because they add revenue through purchase (for some) and services. Revenue that they keep; doesn't pass through to content distributors.
Content distributors see one of the major uses of DVRs is to skip ads. They can't get delivery services to put no-FF flags on everything as that kills their revenue booster. So they jack up the price the delivery service has to pay for their content. Guess who gets burned in this war?
It's a double edge blade. All the delivery services have these DVRs - which they can't control...
Yes, but you continue to compare very different industries.unixguru;3183023 said:DirecTV is not a middleman?
Thanks. That just steams me even more. Looks like 11 or more of the top 13 are included in the base Entertainment package. At a cost of nearly $15/mo $174/yr + DirecTV markup. The only one we watch (infrequently) is CNN.Diana C said:The only comprehensive list is from 2009 (http://allthingsd.com/20100308/hate-paying-for-cable-heres-the-reason-why/)...add 25% for a rough current estimate, or spend a lot of time searching for individual channels.
There you go, again, and making this about you and your family. It doesn't matter what you, myself or others here watch. It's about popularity and trends bigger than you or I.unixguru said:Thanks. That just steams me even more. Looks like 11 or more of the top 13 are included in the base Entertainment package. At a cost of nearly $15/mo $174/yr + DirecTV markup. The only one we watch (infrequently) is CNN.
I gave a few reasons why it wasn't going to be 10 years. You will also be paying $50/mo to DirecTV for UHD.Diana C said:1) 2023 is a long way off. By then 4K and 8K UHD will be a reality and the data rates will need to that much higher.
Only if you're hung up on doing it live. We always watch NCIS, several weeks after it airs.Diana C said:3) Even if there were the capacity at the viewer end, do you have any idea what is involved in delivering 20 million simultaneous HD streams (the number of viewers of NCIS two weeks ago). Even if the stream were compressed down to 5 megabits/second, that's 100 petabits per second.
If I did watch it every year it would be OTA.Diana C said:Now think of what it takes to deliver 100 million - the number of viewers of the Super Bowl.
Not taken that way.sigma1914 said:There you go, again, and making this about you and your family. It doesn't matter what you, myself or others here watch. It's about popularity and trends bigger than you or I.
(This a personal attack on you or your family.)
I recently checked on this for just the series we watch on premiums. Season price on Vudu, 1 or 2 seasons back.bakerfall said:Well, you CAN go out to iTunes and buy a season pass for $42.99 (or other competitors). So it's possible to get current eps of cable series in an "a la carte" format. However, unless you're viewing is very limited, that price model doesn't make sense for very long.
So now the story is the Internet will survive long enough for a major dent in the industry ripples back to the content providers?unixguru said:Not taken that way.
I realize that we aren't every family. But you have to realize that there are a lot of families like mine. The underlying trends are similar to many more.
Again, if only 10%, 20%, whatever of the people go over this threshold it's going to get attention and action.
On that we can agree. The root of this is that the cost of service is rising too fast and much of the reason seems to originate in sports. People that aren't heavily into sports will not continue to subsidize it at this rate. As it continues to take up a bigger and bigger portion of the air in the room something has to give - breaking sports out into a few bundles would silence my complaints.Diana C said:But let's come back to the core issue. Why is al-a-carte pricing models more attractive? Because they cost less? We have seen that in order to cost less, the content providers will have to accept a sharp decrease in revenue. Since that revenue finances the production of new content, that will diminish both the quantity and quality of programming int the future.
It honestly seems to me that most people, when they talk about al-a-carte, really mean "don't include sports in my bill." Understandable, since ESPN, the various other channels, and regional sports networks make up about 50% of the basic programming costs in our bills.
Sports is also a content type that does not work well with on-demand viewing. Most people that watch sports want to watch it live. As a result, it won't be moving to internet delivery anytime soon.
Perhaps that is where we are headed - where sports is nearly the ONLY content on traditional linear broadcasts and everything else is available using some form of on-demand delivery (whether by internet or prestaging on servers or DVRs).
The bulk of the population has access to OTA. My amplified OTA antenna is smaller and cleaner looking than my dish. It can remain linear forever.Diana C said:But keep in mind that the traditional OTA broadcast networks are still both the source of the majority of all non-sports content, and still command the majority of the primetime viewing audience. They are the originators of the linear delivery model and have an enormous investment in it. I honestly don't see them or the cable networks going away anytime soon.
I don't like government intervention either. But what other way is there to even accomplish what you suggested - breaking out sports? We saw on Wall Street what happens when there aren't reasonable controls.Diana C said:Forcing al-a-carte onto the existing industry will require government intervention - something I personally would not like to see. I doubt they will do it correctly, and I think it has real constitutional issues.
One thing for sure...this has conversation has been stimulating.
Best Buy gets replaced by another middle man. So what?unixguru;3183023 said:DirecTV is not a middleman?