[opendtv] McAdams On: TV Everywhere, Why Aereo Wins the PR War...

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 23:16:54 +0000

"My query then to Aereo is based on their premise that they should be able to 
retransmit broadcast signals for free: So why isn't their service free? Aereo 
would be much better off cutting deals with broadcasters to provide free, 
universally authenticated service versus milking end-users for a few bucks 
apiece."

Interesting question Ms. McAdams asks. My answer to it would be, it's because 
Aereo is not being compensated by the ads as the broadcasters are. Which is 
also the answer to making schemes such as Aereo legit.

Nielsen is talking about including online viewing their ratings (or has started 
doing so). The ISPs themselves could track online TV viewing. So FOTI TV should 
conceivably be as viable as FOTA is, for any and all content, live and 
otherwise.

For instance, the TV networks and affiliated broadcasters could treat Aereo as 
they would a translator station. The broadcasters wouldn't be paying for that 
transmitter site, instead they pay Aereo. Then Aereo wouldn't have to ask for 
subscription fees. If the additional eyeballs attracted by Aereo can be 
quantified, and that part should be well within the state of the art, all of 
this should be simple enough.

Another quote:

"Rather than a single, simple, universal interface that provides TV Everywhere 
access to all network content, each network and provider has to have its own."

I continue to wonder about this conceptual disconnect, on the part of trade 
scribes and probably consumers too. Would anyone expect all restaurants to 
share the same site? Banks? Flower shops? Even before TV was on the Internet, 
there were all manner of different aggregation media from which TV could be 
viewed (OTA, different cable companies, different DBS companies). With Internet 
TV, you instead have different OTT sites or portals. I don't see anything 
surprising or fundamentally different, EXCEPT that over the Internet, all of 
these different portals are accessible to all (save for artificially-induced 
geo-location limitations).

I really like the part where Deborah talks about "cloud-based broadcast 
facilities." Why not? I would be surprised if TV stations weren't already 
started down this path, even if "the cloud" resides mostly inside their own 
facilities still.

Bert

--------------------------------------------------
http://www.tvtechnology.com/mcadams-on/0117/mcadams-on-tv-everywhere-why-aereo-wins-the-pr-war/220293

Deborah D. McAdams /
07.11.2013 09:22AM

McAdams On: TV Everywhere, Why Aereo Wins the PR War...
...and The IP Singularity

SOUND, GARDEN - Television is at the event horizon of an IP singularity. The 
singularity is where all content creation and distribution occurs on IP-based 
networks. The event horizon is where the chaos happens. As such, there are 
profuse moving parts going in multiple and unpredictable directions.

On the end-user side, for example, consider "TV Everywhere," the television 
industry's underwhelming appellation for delivering programming to any type of 
screen Chinese labor can churn out. The conundrum of TV Everywhere is the same 
one unleashed by Napster in 1999-digital content is virtually impossible to 
control. Consequently, TV Everywhere is subject to authentication, the types of 
which vary like black-hole particle behavior, or a pack of feral cats on Red 
Bull.

Rather than a single, simple, universal interface that provides TV Everywhere 
access to all network content, each network and provider has to have its own. 
That's understandable from their perspective, but a lot of methane for 
end-users. I couldn't watch any of the 2008 Beijing Olympics online, for 
example, because I was not a cable subscriber. In other words, because I was a 
loyal viewer of NBC's over-the-air signal in Los Angeles, I was rewarded by 
being locked out of the network's online Olympics coverage.

Now, five years yon, this injustice has been rectified. No, it has not. BTIG 
Analyst Rich Greenfield wrote this week about a new TV Everywhere app from ABC 
that the local New York affiliate, WABC, has been barking up on taxi-cab TV.

"Unfortunately, there is no way for New York City residents to actually live 
stream on the WatchABC app," Greenfield said. "When you pull up live streaming 
on the WatchABC app, you are asked to authenticate, but neither Manhattan 
MVPD-Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS-allows you to authenticate WatchABC," 
nor does DirecTV nor Dish.

Meanwhile, Aereo is blasting the live signal from WABC and other local 
affiliates all over the five boroughs to anyone willing to pay $8 for TV, 
everywhere. Aereo doesn't have a huge following yet, and while I've taken issue 
with their legal maneuvers, the service appears to be far more user-friendly 
than what networks and pay TV providers offer.

My query then to Aereo is based on their premise that they should be able to 
retransmit broadcast signals for free: So why isn't their service free? Aereo 
would be much better off cutting deals with broadcasters to provide free, 
universally authenticated service versus milking end-users for a few bucks 
apiece.

Broadcasters are instead trying to sue Aereo into the ground. If that doesn't 
work, News Corp. honcho Chase Carey says he'll just pull Fox off the air. Fox 
would presumably then become a pay TV network, or maybe an "Internet-only 
broadcaster," as TV Technology contributor Wes Simpson theorizes in "Can TV 
Broadcasters Really Go OTT?"

Internet broadcasting, though IP-based, is fundamentally different from IPTV, 
which telcos have employed for years to deliver television and broadband 
service over dedicated networks. (Think NetFlix vs. AT&T's Uverse.) IPTV is 
bandwidth efficient because video signals are delivered to the home 
individually, versus in a package as they are with cable and satellite.

Internet TV is similarly delivered per individual "request." That's one thing 
when watching TV online is "over-the-top" of traditional consumption methods. 
It's another matter entirely to think over-the-air broadcasting can be replaced 
by OTT via public servers and IP networks that can be brought down by 
stampedes. This is not to say it cannot be done. Television delivered 
exclusively online is the singularity, (in technical terms-socioeconomic 
implications aside). We are at the event horizon, where steps toward the 
singularity are being defined by companies like Cisco, for example.

What TV Everywhere currently lacks, Cisco is attempting to bring to at least 
one aspect of television-the electronic program guide. Cisco is working on a 
cloud-based EPG that uses one HTML5 code for rendering the same user interface 
across TVs, smartphones and tablets, according to Videonet. Service providers 
get a universal application, and end-users get one, simple, consistent 
interface for all their devices.

Cisco's cloud EPG also has implications for an all-Internet TV world as well, 
in that it uses predictive analysis to anticipate usage peaks and manage server 
capacity. There's nothing particularly new about the concept, but doing it on 
the level of universal TV delivery would be unprecedented. Perhaps not for 
long, however, given the escalating advances in computer technology, 
particularly on the software side. As Tiernan Ray writes in Barrons, even 
enterprise computing hardware is being supplanted by software.

"A network switch or router is a specialized computer with specially developed 
chips that perform calculations to determine how to direct bits of data between 
computers," Ray said. "As complex as they are, some of those calculations can 
now be efficiently performed in software running on Intel processors."

It's only a matter of time, and probably not much of it, before this same 
concept is applied within the broadcast industry, Joe Zaller writes at 
Devoncroft. Zaller describes a broadcast business on an IP event horizon, with 
graphics, transcoding, even playout moving from dedicated hardware to software. 
As with black holes, the parts are accelerating rapidly. Zaller and others see 
a future of fully cloud-based broadcast facilities.

"Some have gone as far as saying their ultimate goal is a 'virtualized 
broadcast infrastructure with in-line processing.' In other words, they foresee 
a future where the broadcast infrastructure is housed in an IT data center, and 
the operations done today primarily by hardware boxes are carried out by 
software that plugs in to the IT core.  And by the way, broadcasters probably 
won't be building this facility.  Instead, they'll rent computing power on an 
as-needed basis from AWS or some other cloud-based service provider."

Some of the barriers now involve bandwidth constraints, incompatible formats in 
the absence of standards, and certain security issues as perhaps illustrated by 
the recent EAS hack. An all-IP world is by no means perfect, and going from 
hardware to software means giving up a certain amount of control-like going 
from a manual to an automatic transmission. There will be vulnerabilities and 
bugs, as well as capabilities and opportunities not yet imagined. Cisco's 
"third eye" for example, which mines TV content metadata to notify viewers of 
what's happening on channels they're not watching.

The broadcast business is not going away any time soon, a friend of mine likes 
to remind me. It is definitely on the IP event horizon, however, from which 
there is now no turning back. The current state of flux and fluid obsolescence 
will continue until the singularity is achieved.

 
 
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