[opendtv] Re: Valve's Newell: How PCs Will Take Over the Living Room

  • From: "TLM" <TLM@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:05:31 -0800

I always was pretty annoyed that you had to pay for the "Premium" package to
get that one extra channel you really wanted and 20 that you'd never watch
in your life.

-----Original Message-----
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Manfredi, Albert E
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 5:06 PM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Valve's Newell: How PCs Will Take Over the Living
Room

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

> All of this is of little interest, however, until the conglom content 
> logjam is broken up. Perhaps a deal with a major MSO to replace the 
> current dumb STBs with a more capable device could be the breakthrough.

"Of little interest?" A "deal with the MVPDs" is precisely what we don't
need.

Making the MVPDs' proprietary STBs smarter is fine and good. But there is no
incentive for MVPDs to allow their subscribers wide open access to Internet
TV content right to their TV sets. None. On the contrary, wide open access
would eliminate the need for using the MVPD's own in-system DVRs (and its
monthly use charges), and it would eliminate the dependency on the MVPD's TV
content tiers. The MVPDs would much prefer if any Internet TV content stayed
on small or tiny screens only.

The congloms, PBS, and a zillion other sources of TV content, are all
offering their material on the web these days. Maybe not all of their
content, maybe not a lot of live content (in the US), but there's PLENTY out
there to make this an attractive solution NOW. Yes, even some content that
is otherwise only available on MVPD tiers also finds its way to sites like
Hulu, believe it or not.

The more people use the Internet as TV content medium, the more the congloms
and others will feel compelled to put their stuff on it. But this won't
happen with your suggestion of more deals with entrenched middlemen.

The logjam will only ever break if you eliminate middlemen that deliberately
*subtract* value. And these middlemen would include solutions such as Roku
and AppleTV, that don't allow wide open access to the Internet and that
don't support all of the popular streaming protocols to boot!

I wouldn't be able to do any of my usual Internet TV watching (on the large
screen TV) with any of these so-called "solutions."

Bert

 
 
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