A bid for full live English Premier League soccer rights may have been out of Google’s league. But could YouTube yet bid for online highlights? Read more at paidContent »
Real-time soccer fantasy betting outfit Picklive’s founders look toward their next early-stage startup, after selling to digital pools operator Sports Millions. Read more at paidContent »
English soccer viewers will get to watch live games in new ways from next summer, as winners emerge from the Premier League’s first ever “technology-neutral” rights auction. Read more at paidContent »
Super Bowl 46 is around the corner, and Verizon is taking huge steps to ensure the mobile broadband flows as fast the beer at Lucas Oil Stadium. Here’s a video look at the effort, which includes a 600 antenna Wi-Fi system for up to 28,000 people. Read more »
When it comes to live TV, sports still rule. That’s especially true for football as we take a look at DirecTV’s third-quarter earnings release. Thanks to an NFL Sunday Ticket promotion, DirecTV added 327,000 subscribers, even as competitors struggled to retain existing customers. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Soccer fans will be able to see the world’s most popular sport like never before during this year’s World Cup in South Africa — if they have a 3-D TV and the right cable or satellite package, that is. Read more »
Advice for George Clinton: Do not go to Notre Dame. Doesn’t sound like they want the funk there. On Thursday, April 29, We Are ND, a music video featuring the funk artist Freekbass, was uploaded to Notre Dame’s official YouTube channel. After a week online, the […] Read more »
Even if he doesn’t have the support of NBC, Conan O’Brien has the support of the Internet, leading the charge as the most-talked-about television personality for the past week, according to Trendrr. Conan collected 215,145 tweets for the week, with a peak of 51,843 tweets on […] Read more »
Over the past three years, the Internet has become a major secondary distribution platform for free-to-air broadcast programming. Whether through network programmers’ own sites, such as ABC.com, or through aggregators like Hulu and TV.com, ad-supported broadcast programming today is generally available online shortly after its initial airing at no cost to the user. However, programming such as ESPN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, which originates on pay-TV platforms (i.e. cable, satellite and telco TV services) has been a different story.
Cable system operators and other multichannel video program distributors (MVPDs) are loathe to see the programming for which they are charging subscribers hefty monthly fees made available “over-the-top” without a subscription. Over time, they fear, consumers would be tempted to drop their expensive cable service if they could access their favorite programs online.
Cable networks, for their part, collect hefty fees from MVPDs for the right to retransmit their programming, from a few cents per subscriber per month, to as much as $3.75 per subscriber per month, for the most popular channels like Disney’s ESPN. In aggregate, cable networks collect about $25 billion per year in “affiliate fees” from MVPDs, about the same amount as they generate collectively from advertising sales.
As a result, much of the original programming on pay-TV networks is not currently available online, and that which is often doesn’t appear until well after its original air date. The popularity of portals like Hulu (not to mention illegal sources of TV content), however, has accustomed consumers to expect access to their favorite shows online, putting pressure on the industry to respond. Network programmers and marketers, meanwhile, are also anxious to extend their programming franchises by tapping the broad, online audience.
TV Everywhere, which aims to make subscription programming available online exclusively to current pay-TV subscribers, represents an effort to square that circle. In this report, we look at the players, potential costs, and emerging opportunities of these efforts. Read more »
