Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson continue a long tradition of a couple investors utterly dominating their sectors by betting on what they know, and getting in early before others even know there is an opportunity. Read more »
The purpose of the on-screen guide has shifted. By connecting the guide to content-recommendation engines and advertising platforms, service providers and connected-TV device manufacturers are using the EPG as an access point for understanding consumers and reaching out to them to own the living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Publishers are pushing HTML5 video, despite a lack of real standards around the display and rendering of supported players. thePlatform is addressing that problem with a new offering that enables customers to create one video player that can be delivered through any device or browser. Read more »
Comcast customers will soon find a new UI on their cable box that will look much less like Grandma’s EPG, and more like an iPad app with social recommendations and universal search. But how open will the cable box of the future be for third-party developers? Read more »
GigaOM RoadMap is all about examining how connectedness changes everything around us. CBS Interactive President Jim Lanzone, MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman and thePlatform CEO Ian Blaine will join us to talk about how content is distributed and consumed thanks to the Internet in an all-digital world. Read more »
Cable, IPTV and satellite TV providers are working hard to enable new TV Everywhere services that will allow them to serve up authenticated streams on new devices. Alcatel-Lucent and thePlatform have joined forces to provide a unified solution enabling those operators to do so. Read more »
Today on the Net: Discovery posted higher revenues but a lower net income from a year ago in the second quarter, thePlatform added new features giving publishers more control over where videos are shown and RCN has finished its rollout of TiVo DVRs in all markets. Read more »
White-label video management company thePlatform has expanded the number of connected devices that its customers can publish their videos to, adding features that will enable them to easily add distribution to new HDTV, Blu-ray players and other broadband-connected devices that viewers have in their living rooms. Read more »
Social video firm KickApps announced this morning that it has hired online video sales veteran Trish Iboshi. Prior to joining KickApps, Iboshi was vice president of sales for thePlatform and one of its co-founders, spending the last 10 years helping to build it into one of […] Read more »
Online video management company Brightcove has been chosen by Rogers Digital Media to manage and distribute video assets for the relaunch of its Citytv video site. With the relaunch, Citytv.com will offer up a mix of locally produced content along with full-length episodes of some premium […] Read more »
Brightcove is jumping on the TV Everywhere bandwagon by introducing a new “solution pack” that will give broadcasters and cable networks tools they’ll need to roll out new video services tied to consumer cable subscriptions. The TV Everywhere Solution Pack (TVE-SP) is built on top of […] Read more »
thePlatform is updating its white-label video management solution with new features designed to make TV Everywhere-type services easier for service providers and publishers to deploy. And the company says it is seeing results, with a bevy of new programmers and a big cable firm announced as […] 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 »
Episodic officially launched its white-label video service to the public today, joining the crowded ranks of off-the-shelf video providers already populated with the likes of Brightcove, thePlatform and Ooyala. In the two years that the company has been in development, it has shifted focus. Back in […] Read more »
Cable operators are in cahoots with the networks to provide an online video extension to their cable subscriptions, was the overnight word from the Wall Street Journal, as we mentioned this morning. But where the WSJ quoted anonymous sources, now Comcast (s cmcsa )subsidiary, thePlatform is […] Read more »
