Tag: television

CBS & Time Warner Fight It Out Over Broadcast Fees & Four Excellent Articles On The TV Revolution Already In Progress

Linda Reimer

CBS & Time Warner Fight It Out Over Broadcast Fees: As you may have heard, CBS and Time Warner are having a rather vocal and public spat over broadcasting fees. CBS is insisting that Time Warner increase the amount it charges each customer for from $1 to $2 to receive broadcasts of its television shows; that may not sound like much but it is a 100% increase and Time Warner doesn’t want to pass that increase along to its customers. The ensuing dispute has translated into some Time Warner customer losing their access to CBS. This large storm not-in-a tea-cup but perhaps a large swimming pool isn’t impacting all Time Warner customers only those who receive CBS via stations owned by CBS and those stations are mainly in the Los Angeles and New York City areas.

However, I think this whole dispute is interesting because it shows how the traditional status video broadcasting quo is changing. Time Warner is certainly aware that as more and more people access video content through the web more people in general are less likely to pay to access video content via traditional cable TV services. And in fact there is a growing population of both “cord cutters” who have dropped their cable TV packages in favor of accessing video content via the web and “cord nevers” that term meaning young people who have grown up as Digital Natives who have never paid for cable television service; and now that they are now out and on their own – they don’t want to pay for cable service.  Those two groups of people are fine with just viewing online video content including some less expensive than most cable TV package options like subscribing to Netflix and Hulu Plus both of which offers web based access to their video libraries of television shows and movies for $7.99 a month.

And I think those factors show that the way many people are accessing video content is changing. There are more ways to watch video via the web than ever before and gone are the days when your local cable TV provider who provided you with access to ABC, NBC & CBS was the only way to go– and I think Time Warner sees this as in their dispute with CBS they have urged people in the New York area to subscribe to the Areo streaming video service to obtain CBS! However, I’m not sure CBS is quite with the new program yet as they still seem to be playing by the old rules that gave the networks almost supreme power in dictating how much they charged for their content and who could receive that content because they were the only game in town.

Here’s a link to a Gigaom article on this very subject which is aptly titled “CBS and Time Warner Cable bring new tricks to an old TV fight;”

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/05/cbs-and-time-warner-cable-bring-new-tricks-to-an-old-tv-fight-but-its-time-to-change-the-game/

Four Excellent Articles On The TV Revolution Already In Progress: And I found an another set of articles on the Gigaom site that nicely complements the first section of this blog posting because it too focuses on what we might call the “Television Revolution.” I define the TV Revolution as meaning the ways people can access video content through the web – in the form of television shows and movies as well as user generated content. Gigaom tech columnist Janko Roettgers offers four articles in a series all of which deal with the changing video landscape! The first article is from July 31 and is titled “Making TVs smart; why most smart TVs still feel pretty dumb” and it goes on to echo what Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the All Things D tech conference earlier this year that although modern technologies have transformed our lives in many ways the television experience of the American living room is still stuck in the past and that experience should be brought into the 21st century and made a simpler one – quite probably by ditching the use of traditional television remotes and using voice activated televisions or streaming boxes with microphone inputs so instead of having to click through the channels to find our favorite shows we can tell our television “Turn to PBS” or “bring up the latest episode of Arrested Development and play it” and presto the TV will do what we tell it to do sans remote! And no doubt we’ll also increasingly have more web accessed video options.

And I’ve digressed slightly! Getting back to the subject of the Gigaom articles; the second article is from August 2 and is titled “Making TVs smart: why TV app developers struggle to succeed in the living room” and it goes on to shed some light on the struggle of app and Internet video content creators like Netflix, with its “House of Cards” and “Hemlock Grove” TV series, as their new way of delivering video content via the web disrupts the traditional network and cable company status quo; the third article is titled “From DIAL to Chromecast: How Netflix and Google want to save TV” and it also discusses the TV revolution and the new Google Chromecast device; and the fourth and final article is from August 5th and is titled “From DIAL to Chromecast: How Netflix and Google want to save TV” and like the article mentioned in the first section of this blog posting it focuses on the fight between CBS and Time Warner over broadcast fees.

Here’s the link to article 1:

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/making-tvs-smart-part-one/

Article 2:

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/01/making-tvs-smart-part-two/

Article 3:

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/02/making-tvs-smart-part-3/

And article 4:

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/04/from-dial-to-chromecast-how-netflix-and-google-want-to-save-tv/

And on another tech note don’t forget you can receive free assistance in learning to use your personal technology device at the library! A member of our tech team can answer your questions regarding how to use  your smartphone, tablet, e-reader, laptop or other device. You can drop in with simple questions or call us to make an appointment for a free One-On-One session with a member of our tech staff! Did I mention this service is free? Call us @ 607-936-3713 to make an appointment today!

Have a great day!

Linda R.

References

Roberts, Jeff John. (2013, August 5). CBS and Time Warner Cable bring new tricks to an old TV fight. Gigaom. Online. Accessed August 5, 2013.

Roettgers, Janko. (2013, August 4). From DIAL to Chromecast: How Netflix and Google want to save TV. Gigaom. Online. Accessed August 5, 2013. http://gigaom.com/2013/08/04/from-dial-to-chromecast-how-netflix-and-google-want-to-save-tv/

Roettgers, Janko. (2013, July 31). Making TVs smart: why most smart TVs still feel pretty dumb. Gigaom. Online. Accessed August 5, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/making-tvs-smart-part-one/

Roettgers, Janko. (2013, August 1). Making TVs smart: why TV app developers struggle to succeed in the living room. Gigaom. Online. Accessed August 1, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/08/01/making-tvs-smart-part-two/

Roettgers, Janko. (2013, August 2). Making TVs smart: why Google and Netflix want to reinvent the remote control. Online. Accessed August 2, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/08/02/making-tvs-smart-part-3/

How Angry Birds Saved Plush Toys & How Cord-Nevers Will Help Transform The Way We Watch TV

Linda Reimer

Happy Monday everyone! I came across two articles over the weekend that I thought I’d share. One of them I found vastly amusing! The first article regarding how the plush toy industry, which had recently fallen on hard times, has been offered a tremendous shot in the arm by an app game – titled, and you guessed it I’m sure! – Angry Birds! And the second article discusses how young people who are coming of age today, and have grown up with Internet access via portable Wi-Fi devices as a ubiquitous fact of their lives – are going to transform the cable industry in the near future because they won’t subscribe to cable television but instead will access all their video content online. 

How Angry Birds Saved Plush Toys: The Wall Street Journal has a neat article titled How Angry Birds Is Helping Rescue Plush Toys which relays the story of  how the Commonwealth Toy & Novelty Co., a small family business that sells plush toys, found a unique way to entice the public to buy plush toys again. It seems plush toys had fallen out of favor with kids desiring portable electronic devices instead of plush toys; and correspondingly sales of plush toys had fallen dramatically. And then, a new employee at the Commonwealth Toy Company had an idea – the idea was to license the rights to manufacture and sell plush toys made to look like the characters in a very popular game app called Angry Birds. And the far-seeing employee was right! When, Rovio the company that makes the popular Angry Birds game put game related merchandise on its website, the company figured it would sell out in a couple of weeks and instead everything sold out in two hours! So not surprisingly the Commonwealth Toy Company’s licensing of the rights to make and sell plush versions of the pigs and birds seen in the game has really paid off – the sale of the Angry Birds plush toys has become a great boon for the company; they sold around 200 million dollars worth of Angry Birds plush toys last year and are projecting that number will rise to 400 million this year.

And thus plush toys, at least in the form of green pigs and colorful birds, are popular once more!

Here’s a link to a Wall Street Journal article titled How Angry Birds Is Helping Rescue Plush Toys that offers more information on the subject:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/08/02/how-angry-birds-is-helping-rescue-plush-toys/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=

How Cord-Nevers Will Help Transform The Way We Watch TV: The Atlantic offers a cool article that sheds light on how growing Internet connectivity, specifically the way people increasingly have more ways to watch video content on portable Wi-Fi devices like smart phones and tablets, will change how we watch television shows and movies in the future. The article makes the point that the switch from watching television on a TV via a cable company connection to watching television on Wi-Fi devices via the Internet is going to be accelerated not just by people who already have cable television subscriptions and do the “Cord-Cutting” thing and drop those subscriptions to stream video content via the web; but also by “Cord-Nevers” a term they’ve coined to describe young adults who have grown up with Internet access and are used to watching video content on the web and will not pay for cable subscriptions in the future.

In fact, the article makes a solid case that cable companies should be more nervous about how the Cord-Nevers will quickly change the cable TV status quo by the simple fact that those young people will not subscribe to cable TV at all and the cable industry will lose its traditional continual influx of new cable subscribers.

The Atlantic article is titled Forget Cord Cutters Cable Companies Should Worry About Cord Nevers, here’s the link:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/08/forget-cord-cutters-cable-companies-should-worry-about-cord-nevers/55380/

Linda R.