GigaOM » Carriers

In the Future, Ads Will Skip You

Janko Roettgers — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:01:01 +0000

TV networks and advertisers alike have long been looking for ways to make ads more relevant to consumers prone to skipping, or simply ignoring advertising. This quest has become even more urgent with the advent of new advertising opportunities online that are increasingly rivaling the 30-second spot. Personalized TV advertising is an obvious solution in theory; making it a reality however, has proven to be difficult, with major efforts to develop the technical infrastructure to serve different ads to different consumers stalling.

UK-based pay-TV solutions provider NDS has come up with a new approach to personalized advertising that’s not only much more feasible than previous efforts, but should also please privacy advocates worried about the implications of behavioral targeted marketing. In fact, the technology is so simple that it could easily be rolled out to millions of consumers tomorrow — if it wasn’t for the fact that it forces cable operators and TV networks alike to rethink a major part of their business.

Personalized advertising is not a new idea. In fact, major industry players including Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable and Comcast started to collaborate on a project code-named “Canoe” two years ago with the goal of building a system that would allow them to deliver targeted ads to their cable TV customers. Comcast even built a 500TB data warehouse to aggregate data about the viewing habits of its subscribers, and use this data to deliver relevant ads. However, Canoe couldn’t actually get the personalization to work so instead shifted to interactive advertising, which it still hasn’t rolled out, either.

NDS has been developing a number of ad insertion technologies dubbed NDS Dynamic that include more traditional ad swapping and personalization features closer to Canoe’s initial plans. But the company has also developed a product called Ad Agent that would avoid much of the overhead that’s been slowing down Canoe by bringing the whole process straight to your set-top box.

The Ad Agent would essentially turn your cable box or DVR into an ad recommendation engine, monitoring all your interactions with the box. Cable networks would just send a number of ads to your DVR, where they would sit on your hard drive until it deemed one of them to be relevant to your viewing behavior and the programming currently running. The Ad Agent uses a SQLite database optimized for set-top boxes to utilize this kind of targeting and gradually builds up your profile through pre-defined rules. Which means it might give a little more weight to the sports category every time you tune into ESPN. Watch a game every Sunday, and the device will soon have you categorized as a sports fanatic.

Of course, what’s really interesting about this approach is that all of the behavioral targeting takes place in the box, so the data about which shows you’re watching never leaves your home. That should be a major relief for privacy advocates, who have increasingly expressed worries about behavioral targeted advertising.

There’s also an interesting business aspect to distributing the Ad Agent closer to the end user. The technology would not only be able to capture much more data than any centralized effort, but it could also use a lot of otherwise unavailable data to profile users. Cable operators would obviously not be able to swap or personalize ads on channels that they don’t have the right to monetize to, like your local NBC affiliate.

However, your cable box could easily measure any of your interactions with NBC and make use of this data to build up its model of your likes and dislikes. You’re regularly watching Heroes and Community? Then don’t be surprised to get some ads targeted towards comic book-loving 30-somethings the next time you turn into a cable channel, even if you’ve never watched that channel before. “It allows an operator to capture an audience, and then wait until they have an opportunity to utilize that knowledge,” said Nick Thexton, senior VP of R&D at NDS.

Thexton’s company is getting ready to deploy a simpler version of NDS Dynamic next year. Getting the Ad Agent out in the field won’t be that hard, either. “The agent invokes very little processor and memory overhead,” he told me. The complete code is just about 140kb, something any current DVR should be able to work with. However, the bigger challenge is to get operators to adopt this type of technology.

Making ads not only measurable, but also addressable would make the traditional 30-second spot that gets blasted out to everyone, no matter how many people actually tune in, much less valuable. Add to that the fact that ad buys nowadays are often negotiated months in advance as part of upfront sales, based on programming and not on audience, and it becomes clear why these 140kb of code could prove to be quite disruptive.

However, Thexton believes that technologies like the Ad Agent could eventually help to aggregate increasingly fragmented audiences. “Using knowledge of the schedule, it would now be possible to take audience X and glue it to audience Y, based on viewing data of two mutually exclusive programs,” he said.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: With TV Apps, Over-the-Top Video Gets New Backers (subscription required)

Cable Subs See Low Value For Their Money

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:08:09 +0000

Cable providers could find customers defecting for other services, or possibly even cutting the cord if they don’t find ways to provide more value to their subscribers, according to a new survey from Strategy Analytics. As many as two-thirds of cable subscribers said they would switch providers if they could find cheaper services elsewhere, which could be bad news for Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others.

At the heart of customer dissatisfaction is the fact that most don’t believe they are getting a lot of value for the money they spend on cable. According to Strategy Analytics, less than 22 percent of pay TV subscribers said their service exceeded or greatly exceeded their expectations of value for money. With the growth of online video services like Hulu and Netflix, Ben Piper, director of the Strategy Analytics Multiplay Market Dynamics service (MMD), sayd cable subscribers see less value in paying for traditional cable subscriptions.

According to the survey, more than two-thirds of cable subscribers stated they would switch providers if offered a 20 percent discount over their existing pay TV bills. IPTV providers fared better, with half as many saying they would churn if offered a lower-priced service. That is consistent with other findings of the survey; for instance, customer satisfaction among telco and IPTV customers was about 95 percent, compared to 67 percent for cable.

Cable companies have made some advancements in the customer service portion of the survey; last year, in a similar survey, customer service was the weak component for cable providers. However, cable providers are now falling behind in articulating added value on the innovation front when compared to satellite and IPTV providers.

While the study asked specifically if pay TV customers would consider switching providers, Piper sayd that dissatisfaction among cable subscribers could also lead to cord cutting, if they continued to show dissatisfaction with the services their service providers offered.

There is some hope for cable companies, however; particularly if they have managed to get their customers to sign up for bundled services. Customers that had signed up for bundles were much more likely to be satisfied with the services that they were being offered, and 19 percent less likely to leave their cable company if an alternative service provider offered similar services at a 10 percent discount.

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Fox & Time Warner Cable Make Up While Scripps & Cablevision Face Off

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:25 +0000

Cable customers in Denver and Los Angeles didn’t have to miss last weekend’s Sugar Bowl after all: Time Warner Cable and News Corp. announced a deal on Friday that allows the cable company to continue to carry the Fox network’s TV channels, after Fox had threatened to cut off Time Warner as part of a transmission fee standoff. The details of the deal were not announced, but Staci Kramer over at paidContent calls it “unlikely” that Fox got anything close to the $1 per cable subscriber it had demanded.

All of that is of little consolation for Iron Chef fans in New York and New Jersey. Customers of Cablevision didn’t get to watch yesterday’s highly publicized special White House edition of the show because HGTV and Food Network owner Scripps Networks cut off access to the networks on January 1st after Cablevision failed to agree to higher retransmission fees.

The spat between Scripps and Cablevision bears some resemblance to the Fox vs. Time Warner Cable drama. Scripps wants more money for its networks, but Cablevision isn’t willing to pay. Scripps is trying to get the public involved, and both are leaking details about the dispute to the press. Scripps has said that Cablevision previously paid around $0.25 per subscriber, and Cablevision has lamented that Scripps’ demands would result in “a more than 200 percent fee increase.” Scripps calls this a fair market rate, Cablevision is complaining that media company is “holding (its) own viewers hostage” by cutting off access to its programing.

However, there’s also two important differences: Food Network and HGTV may have some pretty good ratings for being cable networks, but people still care much more about their football game than about Ace of Cakes. In other words: Expect Cablevision to wait this one out until Scripps comes back with another offer.

Which brings us to the other difference. HGTV and Food Network are not on Hulu. Both networks only make limited content available on their web sites, and since both are cable networks, busting out your rabbit ear antenna won’t help you either. In other words: Cablevision customers that like to watch HGTV really don’t have any alternative – except, of course, for all those home design and make-over shows on other networks. Something tells me the folks at TLC busted out an extra bottle of champagne a their New Year’s Eve party.

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With MediaFLO Disappointing, Qualcomm Wants to Become a Mobile CDN

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:20:59 +0000

Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile television network hasn’t met the chipmaker’s expectations, according to COO Len Lauer, who spoke with me at the Mobilize 09 event last week in San Francisco. He said of Qualcomm’s FLO network for broadcasting mobile television, “We’re not where we need to be. We’re not meeting our expectations.”

He blamed the lack of success so far on the few FLO-enabled devices available and the long wait for a nationwide network. While he was optimistic that FLO would be on more devices and noted that as of the DTV transition, Qualcomm had a nationwide network, he was also quick to portray the FLO network as more than a television delivery network. Yes, boys and girls, it’s a platform.

If mobile TV isn’t the right use for the separate network that Qualcomm has built at a cost of more than $800 million, Lauer thinks it might be used by carriers to help offload demand for video on the 3G and 4G networks, something I’ve mentioned as a possible strategy on how carriers can keep profiting on their mobile networks (GigaOM Pro, subscription required). “The reason we built this, and we’re starting to get more and more interest from network operators, is for network offload,” Lauer said. He said data usage on carrier networks is up by about 400 percent, more than half of which is streaming video, such as content from YouTube. Lauer said that they can help carriers use the FLO network to deliver broadcast or commonly accessed content to the handset and then cache parts of regularly accessed web sites on the device.

However, the FLO network may not be the only game in town for network offload. With this use case in mind, the GSM Association last week endorsed Integrated Mobile Broadband or IMB as one that might also work for offloading video, and one that’s likely to win more favor among carriers, according to telecommunications analyst Chetan Sharma. That’s because it uses spectrum the carriers already own and makes more efficient use of that spectrum for delivering video, as opposed to the FLO network, which is a completely different network operating on Qualcomm’s spectrum. IMB was also developed in conjunction with several carriers such as Vodafone, Telstra, T-Mobile, Orange and SingTel.

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Canadian Content Producers Take a Stand for Net Neutrality

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:00:44 +0000

Oh, Canada: Your health care is universal, your forests are green, and your creative industries are against BitTorrent throttling. The Canadian Film & Television Production Association (CFTPA) and two other trade groups representing filmmakers and TV producers testified in support of net neutrality in front of the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) this week. The CRTC has been conducting hearings to look into Bell, Rogers and other Canadian ISPs throttling their subscribers’ BitTorrent traffic.

Bell’s BitTorrent throttling is very similar to what Comcast tried in the U.S. until it got forced by the FCC to stop interfering with torrent transmissions. However, the reactions from entertainment industry representatives were very different on this side of the border. The MPAA and NBC Universal came out in support of Comcast, making clear that they viewed BitTorrent throttling as the first step towards a world in which ISPs are proactively policing their networks against copyright infringement.

CFTPA Vice President John Barrack told the regulators yesterday that BitTorrent is one of the only ways for content producers to get their work out to the public without major broadcasters, according to a report by CBC.ca. He got support for his position from the Independent Film and Television Alliance; the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists; as well as advocates for people with disabilities and an independent ISP.

Canadian cable ISP Rogers has been throttling BitTorrent since late 2005, but the country only started to debate net neutrality issues when Bell Sympatico admitted to throttling P2P traffic in the fall of 2007. The debate got especially heated when Bell started to interfere not only with its own DSL subsribers’ P2P transmissions, but to throttle traffic it was reselling to other ISPs renting the telecom giant’s lines.

Bell, Rogers and a few other Canadian ISPs that have admitted to BitTorrent throttling got a bit of a break when the CRTC decided late last year that the practice can continue until further notice. The commission also scheduled public consultations to investigate the issue further. These proceedings have been going on since February, and a decision is expected before the end of the year.

Proceedings advanced much quicker when the FCC investigated Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling last year, even though the ISP got some major backing from the entertainment industry. Both the MPAA and NBC filed a motion with the FCC in support of Comcast, with NBC arguing that BitTorrent was used mostly for illegal file-sharing and that more intrusive copyright filters could help to prevent legal content from being blocked.

Even major broadcasters seem to think different about these issues in Canada: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has in the past experimented with BitTorrent video distribution, only to see its downloads throttled by Bell and Rogers.

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Cablevision Says No To Analog TV

Om Malik — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:05:34 +0000

Cablevision, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator, says it will only sell digital video services and say “sayonara” to analog television, so to speak. Existing analog cable customers will get analog simulcasts on television sets connected directly to Cablevision’s receivers. More than 91 percent of Cablevision’s 3.1 million television customers today receive digital service, and approximately 5 percent of the company’s cable television customers today receive analog expanded basic service. With the looming switch away from analog television over the airwaves, it looks like the bell is tolling for analog TV. Get ready for a future in which news anchors will be able to show their blemishes even more!

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Amazon Web Services to Launch CDN Services

Om Malik — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:00:59 +0000

Akamai, Limelight, Level 3 and more than a dozen other startups should be worried about Amazon’s move into the content deliver business. Amazon Web Services’ latest offering will cause price pressure in an already commoditized business. In an email to its customers today, Amazon said that the service will be available later this year and will utilize the company’s points of presence in North America, Europe and Asia. This is good news for online video startups that are looking for CDN services but are on a budget. The company will charge its customers on usage instead of the long-term contracts current players foist on their clients. In addition, the company will publish its prices on the web and, most importantly, it is going to be inexpensive. You can read our full news analysis on GigaOM.

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MobiTV Says It Has 4M Subscribers — Is Growth Slowing?

Om Malik — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:34:45 +0000

The first time Paul Scanlan, co-founder of MobiTV, showed me his service at a friend’s barbeque in Sausalito, it was nothing but a herky-jerky video transmission of CNN on a Sprint handset. I had just moved back to San Francisco, and this was before the current investment cycle had started. To be honest, I didn’t give it much of a chance, and wondered who would want this service. Oops!

Five years later, the Emeryville, Calif-based company that got going in 1999 has grown tremendously. Today it announced that its mobile television service now reaches four million subscribers, though it is not clear how many pay for the service. MobiTV seems to defy the conventional wisdom about mobile video.

I decided to look at MobiTV’s subscriber growth over the years to measure the trajectory thus far. I also added the number of months it takes them to add another million users, and from that yardstick, it seems like the growth has started to slow down a little.

April 2006: 1 million subscribers
February 2007: 2 million subscribers (10 months)
October 2007: 3 million subscribers (8 months)
August 2008: 4 million subscribers (10 months)

The subscribers come from over 15 carriers including Sprint, AT&T Wireless, Alltel (soon to be owned by Verizon), Telus, Rogers and Bell Canada, among others. “The company continues to accelerate its growth trajectory, adding another million subscribers in the past 10 months,” said Charlie Nooney, chairman and CEO of MobiTV, in a press statement.

The company has raised a whopping $130 million in venture financing over the years, and has been an early evangelist for mobile video. At our NewTeeVee Live conference last year, Scanlan pointed out that its “…vision for the the future is really creating a seamless experience from home to PC to mobile phone. The mobile phone and PC are very complimentary to what you do at home. We believe that in the future, subscribers will have access to the content piped into their home onto their mobile handset.”

Let’s hope for his sake that’s really the case. Sure, the company has proven that people want TV on the tiny screen, but it stands to face competition from Qualcomm’s MediaFLO-based services. Verizon and AT&T, two of the largest mobile operators, are betting on FLO and rebranding them for their own purposes. Which brings to me the next question: What happens to MobiTV’s growth if the two major carriers start pushing FLO-based services to their customers?

Scalnan once said that the “TV in your living room vs. TV on your PC will all kind of blend together, that’s why we’re looking at the whole space instead of silos.” Maybe that’s his strategy for staying in the game. We shall see, for if there’s one thing I have learned it’s never to count this guy out.

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Poll: Will Metered Broadband Make You Switch Your ISP?

Edit Staff — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:52:56 +0000

While not so uncommon overseas, bandwidth caps and metered broadband are coming to the US market place. Time Warner is the first major cable company to announce its metered broadband strategy & prices for a small Texas market, in what can be described as draconian.

We have written about Bend Broadband of Oregon resorting to such tricks. Comcast, recently proposed bandwidth caps as well. What it means: get ready to pay more and get less for broadband. Will this spur into action, and switch ISPs or look for alternatives. Take our poll and share your opinion.

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Comcast to Test Bandwidth Caps?

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:58:37 +0000

Comcast is reportedly considering monthly caps on bandwidth usage and may charge customers who go over these limits. DSLreports writes that users would get to use up to 250 GB per month and be charged $15 for every 10 GB over the limit. When contacted for comment a Comcast spokesperson told DSLreports:

“Comcast is currently evaluating this service and pricing model to ensure we deliver a great online experience to our customers. We have not made any changes to our current service offerings and have no new announcement to make at this time.”

Comcast has said it will start targeting bandwidth hogs, and this could be the way they do it. If you’re wondering if you’d have to pay extra, Silicon Alley Insider did some quick math and here are a few highlights of what 250 GB represents:

- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)

- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.

- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day, every day. Do you know any of those folks?

This plan differs than the pay-per-use model Time Warner is testing. Comcast would offer near-unlimited bandwidth, whereas Time Warner would charge you more the more you use. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should trust Comcast. Setting caps and overages allows them to eventually raise fees while lowering the caps.

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Is 2008 the Year of VOD?

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:13:51 +0000

For all of you too lazy to drive to the video store or too impatient to wait for your DVDs in the mail, 2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for you. The video-on-demand (VOD) space is heating up, which means you have one less reason to pry yourself off the couch.

The Wall Street Journal writes that as the cost of distributing films theatrically keeps rising, movies being bought up at festivals like Tribeca are actually going to VOD platforms. For example, Mark “online video gloom and doom” Cuban’s HDNet acquired the rights to the dark comedy Finding Amanda, starring Matthew Broderick, but will release it on VOD before putting it in theaters. At last year’s Cannes, IFC picked up seven films to fill its VOD pipeline. Lots of indie movies get small theatrical releases, and in fact most of the movies acquired from Tribeca last year went straight to DVD or cable. But the economics of widespread theatrical distribution don’t hold up any longer.

And VOD isn’t just important for the art house set, either. Big names have also jumped into the on-demand pool lately.

Time Warner has announced that all of its DVD titles will be released concurrently on VOD this year. Apple says it will offer movies for purchase on the same day they’re released on DVD (something Vudu has offered for a while). VOD will play an important distribution role for the new pay network being created by Viacom, Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM. And let’s not forget the on-demand capabilities that TV networks are providing, both through their own sites and through sites like Hulu.

But the studios aren’t offering up all those sweet shows because they like you — they see dollar signs. A recent survey by consulting firm Oliver Wyman predicted that by releasing content on VOD on the same day and date as DVDs and jacking up the rental prices to anywhere from $7 to $9, consumer spending could be boosted by $5 billion by 2010.

Image grabbed from the online trailer for “Finding Amanda.”

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Time Warner Defies Subscriber Expectations

Chris Albrecht — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:12:05 +0000

The big news coming out of Time Warner this morning was that the company is finally selling off its cable division, the second largest in the country (our pal Stacey at GigaOM says its the beginning of Time Warner’s death by 1,000 cuts). But the other, not-quite-as-big-but-still-big news from the earnings call was that Time Warner cable added 55,000 basic subscriptions during the quarter.

Analysts had predicted Time Warner would lose anywhere between 21,000 to 32,000 customers as cable companies wage a multifronted war against satellite, aggressive telcos and even a souring U.S. economy. Adding 55,000 isn’t huge, especially compared to the hundreds of thousands of video customers Verizon and AT&T are racking up, but at least Time Warner isn’t losing ground… yet.

Comcast reports tomorrow, which should further clarify the state of cable.

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Telcos’ TV Slowly But Surely Doing Better

Om Malik — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:48:33 +0000

Thanks to some generous support of their pal, FCC Commish Kevin Martin, and others at the state level, the big bets made by AT&T and Verizon on video — in the form of U-verse and FiOS, respectively — are slowly beginning to pay off. Last week, AT&T reported that it added 148,000 new U-verse subscribers in the first quarter, taking its total to 379,000. Ma Bell hopes to have a million subscribers for its U-verse service by end of 2008.

Today Verizon says it added 263,000 new FiOS subscribers in the first quarter of 2008 for a total of 1.2 million FiOS TV customers. Funnily enough, their presence is causing all sorts of problems for traditional TV providers, the cable and satellite guys. This is resulting in negative advertising campaigns, that while full of hyperbole, are amusing nevertheless.

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Vid-Biz: Comcast, Veeple, YouTube

Chris Albrecht — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:55:08 +0000

Comcast Doesn’t Admit to BitTorrent Blocking; in the wake of the Comcast/BitTorrent agreement, the cable company takes exception to statements made by the FCC chairman regarding its so-called network management practices. (Multichannel News)

Veeple Joins the Clickable Video Fray; company uses Flash to recognize and embed links and ads through an interactive overlay. (VentureBeat)

Google Comes Under Fire for Lack of Content Filters; MPs in the U.K. lambasted YouTube for not employing a single person to proactively monitor content after a video of a gang rape was posted to the site. (Guardian)

Hardly Anyone is Watching CNBC Plus; the business channel’s premium web streaming service has pulled in 15,000 paying subscribers — since late 2006. (paidContent)

Major League Baseball Calls Up Inlet Technologies; company’s Spinnaker technology to power the MLB.TV live broadcasting service. (Broadcasting & Cable)

Rogers Taps Rentrak; Canada’s largest cable operator signs up for VOD measurement service. (The Hollywood Reporter)

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DirecTV VOD Already Available; Now with Screenshots

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:38:39 +0000

Though the DirecTV VOD service doesn’t officially launch until the second quarter, it’s been available for beta testing for some time already. As we’ve written before, because of satellite’s one-way-only transmission, DirecTV will be using a combination of pre-selected movies beamed directly to set-top box hard drives and downloading them through a viewer’s existing broadband connection (to learn how to set it up, visit the DirecTV on Demand page).

So how is it working so far?

An NTV reader told us that setting it up was a snap; he also said he can start watching non-HD content as soon as it starts downloading using his 6Mbps connection. A perusal of the forums on DirecTV indicates there have been a bunch setup/connection issues, as well as a few complaints about download speeds. The real test will come when this thing goes live and more than early adopters start using it. As Om pointed out:

Imagine how ticked off you’ll be when your home email access slows to a crawl because someone’s watching “America’s Next Top Model.”

Check out pics from the service. If you’ve been using it, drop us a line in our comments section and let us know how it’s working for you.

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Relax, Let Verizon Do the Cable Canceling

Chris Albrecht — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:24:54 +0000

Verizon knows that breaking up with your cable operator can be tough, so the company has asked the FCC for permission to do it for you. The FiOS TV provider is petitioning the commission to make switching your TV service similar to switching phone companies. Presumably this is because you are too lazy and weak when faced with the siren song of customer service reps, who will tempt you to stay with your existing cable by offering you four new HBO channels PLUS six months of Encore.

Instead, leave it to the cold-blooded Verizon reps, who, with Anton Chigurh-like ruthlessness, will cut that cord. Naturally, once you’re rid of that scourge, you’ll run to Verizon’s warm fiber-optic embrace. Om doesn’t buy Verizon’s arguments for such a move, and reminds you of the company’s past sins.

My only question: Will Verizon also come to my house, detach and return my cable box?

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