Posts from Television

Foreshadowing Facetime

The Gotham Gal and I went to the Brooklyn Museum today to see the Pierre Cardin retrospective.

Near the end of the exhibit was a small clip from a Jetsons episode where Jane is shopping for dresses in a boutique.

She finds a dress that she likes and decides to call her friend on the TV in the store and find out what she thinks of the dress.

This is a fairly common activity these days. You see people facetiming with friends and family before they purchase something in a store.

But in the early 60s, when these Jetsons episodes were bring written, this was very far from reality.

But they imagined it and wrote it into the show.

That’s pretty cool.

#Television

YouTube TV

Last summer I threw out our twenty year old satellite dish and decided to finally go over the top. I put a bunch of video streaming apps on our AppleTV to replace the “linear television” that we had been getting with the dish.

Almost a year later, I’ve removed all but two of them and the clear winner has been YouTube TV.

YouTube TV is pretty much everything you’d want in a linear television service (except for one thing which I will get to) and the UI is more or less perfect.

The thing I like most about it is that I can run the app with my Google login on all of the AppleTVs in our house plus on our phones and we have the exact same experience, with the exact same library, on all of them.

That seems like a little thing, but after almost sixty years of living with set top boxes that are device specific, it is a big thing.

I’m writing this on my cell phone. Just before starting to write I was sitting in my office thinking that I want to watch the Sixers Raptors game this afternoon but we are going to be uptown at the TEFAF Art Fair.

No problem. I opened the YouTube TV app on my phone, searched for the Sixers Raptors game, and hit the plus sign.

When I turn on any of our TVs in our home, that game will be in the library waiting for me to watch it.

The one app, one subscription, any device thing is pretty cool too. We have a number of AppleTVs in our home but pay for only one subscription.

If you have a ski house, or a beach house, or some other form of second home, you can use your single YouTube TV subscription there too.

So what’s the one thing that’s not perfect about YouTube TV?

They don’t have the Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) on the service. If that Sixers Raptors game was being broadcast on CSN Philadelphia it would not have been on YouTube TV. Thankfully it is the playoffs and it is on ABC.

I talked to a friend of a friend who works at YouTube TV and the RSNs will not sell their content to YouTube TV on a subscriber by subscriber basis. If YouTube TV wants MSG Network on it’s service, it has to pay for it for everyone. And who other than die hard Knicks fans would want to pay to watch the Knicks this year?

So we also have a subscription to FuboTV which seems to have at least some of the RSNs including MSG Network. We have a family plan subscription to FuboTV which allows three of us (me and two of our kids) to have FuboTV in our homes which makes it a bit less expensive to have two streaming services.

I tried a bunch of other services over the last year but I found YouTube TV to be superior in almost every way.

Google did an amazing job with this product. If you put YouTube TV on your televisions (there are a bunch of ways you can do that), you can throw out that set-top box once and for all like we did.

And you will get a bunch of capabilities that you never had with cable. It’s great.

#Television

Functionality Vs Content

I saw some chatter on Twitter this past week about Netflix and Disney in the wake of Disney’s announcement of Disney+:

Disney’s stock was up 11% on the week

And Netflix stock was down 5% on the week

Certainly getting into the streaming game will be good for Disney. But I am less sure that content matters that much when it comes to Netflix.

A friend of mine shared this with me earlier this week:

When I saw that data, I replied to him with this:

It is the frustrations of the prior model (interruptive advertising, by appointment consumption, etc) that open the opportunity for the next model

Given that the new model, streaming, is well entrenched now, I am not saying that functionality alone will save Netflix or anyone else.

But I do believe that the functionality of a service (no ads, binge watching, user interface, curation, notifications, price, etc) are just as important, or possibly more important, than whether or not you can watch The Incredibles on it.

And most importantly, it is the frustrations of the prior model, as I mentioned above, that creates the opening for the new model.

So if you are working on a new model, for anything (it could be crypto, health care, education, finance, etc, etc), you should look very closely at what are the most annoying and frustrating aspects of the current model and focus on leading with features that remove them.

#entrepreneurship#Film#Television

Portable TV and Music

We just packed up an Airbnb that we have been living in for three months in Los Angeles and are heading back east.

This is a photo of my carry on luggage as I was packing it this morning.

That is an AppleTV and a Sonos Connect in between my “shaving kit” and my sneakers.

I brought these two devices out west and connected the AppleTV to the one TV in the Airbnb and I connected the Sonos to the receiver that powered the in ceiling speakers in the main living space in the house.

Even if the Airbnb had come with an AppleTV and a Sonos device, I would have swapped out theirs for ours for the length of our stay because these two devices have all of our services pre-confgured on them and we are logged into all of the services.

That is where the big difference is for me and the reason it is worth schlepping these devices cross country and back. The devices aren’t crazy expensive. The AppleTV is around $150 and the Sonos Connect is around $300. But setting these devices up, connecting them to all of the various services we subscribe to, and logging into each and every one can be an hour or more of work each time you do it.

All I had to do was power them up, connect to wifi, and connect to the TV and/or the receiver, and we were good to go.

It’s kind of magic to have all of your services right there on the device, organized how you like them, and ready to go.

I have friends who do the AppleTV move in hotels when they travel for business. I haven’t gone that far but I might leave the AppleTV in my carry on luggage along with my shaving kit and try that on my next business trip. Plugging in an HDMI cable into a TV is pretty straightforward in most cases.

What this means is TV and music is now highly portable. You can bring your TV and music with you when you travel and connect into the existing infrastructure in your hotel or Airbnb.

If these devices get small enough or cheap enough (or both), or if our smartphones can replicate all of the functionality of these devices, then the hospitality industry can focus on the “dumb” infrastructure and the guests can bring the smart devices.

#mobile#Music#Television

Feature Friday: The AppleTV TV App

In late 2016/early 2017, Apple introduced a new app to the AppleTV called TV. We’ve had it on our various AppleTV devices but have not been big users of it until this summer.

With our recent move to ditch traditional cable/satellite and go “over the top”, we have started using the AppleTV a lot more and the TV app has become our primary way into TV content.

When you launch it, the app shows you what is playing now and what you have been watching recently:

There is a sports tab that is great when a lot of sports is on but not so great at 6:45am:

You connect your various apps to the TV app in settings and then the TV app aggregates the content from all of them:

What I don’t understand is is why some apps are supported and others are not. The awesome YouTubeTV app and Netflix, for example, are not supported by the TV app.

I guess this feature is invite only right now or something like that.

If the TV app was connected to every app that we have on our AppleTV, it would be the Google of TV and that’s a pretty powerful place for Apple to be. I have to believe that it is in their interest to go there.

#Television

Cutting The Cord/Trashing The Dish

Last Sunday I wrote about the over the top video market and made some observations about it in light of the challenges we were having getting our satellite dish working again.

In the week that passed, we had another no-show appointment by DirectTV, more success watching whatever we want on our AppleTVs, and on Friday I called up DirectTV and canceled my re-install order for our beach house once and for all and we are now officially off of traditional “cable TV” out here.

After canceling our re-install order and shutting down the account we have had for twenty years, I paid for a Hulu and a YouTube TV subscription and checked out DirectTV Now.

I was surprised that DirectTV Now has no incentives for existing DirectTV subscribers to purchase it. You don’t get a reduced price or free access. I decided to pass on it and see if Hulu and YouTube TV get it done for me.

Finally, we went out in our backyard and got the 20-year-old satellite dish and tossed it in the garbage truck when it stopped by to pick up the trash.

It feels good to be done with the world of wires and set-top boxes and truck rolls and all of that. I won’t miss it.

#Television

Going Over The Top

I have long had an interest in determining when the video offerings available “over the top” will be sufficient so that customers will no longer need to buy video from their cable providers.

I was writing about this issue in the early days of AVC, fifteen years ago, but certainly, that was way too early for the over the top market to develop.

USV had an investment in this market, the hardware device Boxee, that missed the mark and was beaten by Roku and, most significantly, by AppleTV.

I have not written as much about this topic in recent years as my interests have been elsewhere, but I continue to pay attention to this sector.

Over the last few weeks, we have been moving into a new home where we have broadband internet and satellite television.

The broadband has been working well but we have had installation issues with the satellite.

And so we have been using our AppleTVs to watch video while we wait for the satellite to get installed.

We have yet to find something we want to watch that we could not get over AppleTV.

World Cup – yes, on the Fox app

Wimbledon – yes, on the ESPN app

Summer NBA League in Vegas – yes, on ESPN app

It helps that we have a satellite TV account that we can log into these apps with.

So while we can cut the cord, or the dish as it were, we still need to pay the legacy industry some money every month.

I have heard that the new YouTube TV offering is pretty amazing.

And I have also heard that the DirectTV app on AppleTV gives you everything you get on your dish.

I need to check out both of those things.

I also realize that many people have gone over the top in the last ten years and have not missed cable and our family is, if anything, late to making this switch.

But I like to have redundancy. The internet can go down. The dish can go down. But rarely do they go down at the same time.

But at some point, it may be better to have two internet providers and no video provider.

We may have reached that point.

#Television

Pay Per View Poll

I stayed up until 1am ET last night to watch the Mayweather McGregor fight.

We used the Showtime Pay Per View app on AppleTV to watch the fight.

We paid $99 to watch the four fights, including the main event.

I heard that many were able to watch the fight for free using Twitter’s Periscope feature.

So I ran this Twitter poll this morning. If you haven’t voted, you can here.

It seems like paying $99 to watch at home, as we did, was not the dominant way that folks watched the fight.

“Some Other Way” includes going to a bar to watch it, which may have been the most popular way of all.

#Sports#Television

What Did And Did Not Happen In 2016

As has become my practice, I will end the year (today) looking back and start the year (tomorrow) looking forward.

As a starting point for looking back on 2016, we can start with my What Is Going To Happen In 2016 post from Jan 1st 2016.

Easy to build content (apps) on a cheap widespread hardware platform (smartphones) beat out sophisticated and high resolution content on purpose built expensive hardware (content on VR headsets). We re-learned an old lesson: PC v. mainframe and Mac; Internet v. ISO; VHS v. Betamax; and Android v. iPhone.

And Fitbit proved that the main thing people want to do with a computer on their wrist is help them stay fit. And yet Fitbit ended the year with its stock near its all time low. Pebble sold itself in a distressed transaction to Fitbit. And Apple’s Watch has not gone mainstream two versions into its roadmap.

  • I thought one of the big four (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon) would falter in 2016. All produced positive stock performance in 2016. None appear to have faltered in a huge way in 2016. But Apple certainly seems wobbly. They can’t make laptops that anyone wants to use anymore. It’s no longer a certainty that everyone is going to get a new iPhone when the new one ships. The iPad is a declining product. The watch is a mainstream flop. And Microsoft is making better computers than Apple (and maybe operating systems too) these days. You can’t make that kind of critique of Google, Amazon, or Facebook, who all had great years in my book.
  • I predicted the FAA regulations would be a boon to the commercial drone industry. They have been.
  • I predicted publishing inside of Facebook was going to go badly for some high profile publishers in 2016. That does not appear to have been the case. But the ugly downside of Facebook as a publishing platform revealed itself in the form of a fake news crisis that may (or may not) have impacted the Presidential election.
  • Instead of spinning out HBO into a direct Netflix competitor, Time Warner sold itself to AT&T. This allows AT&T to join Comcast and Verizon in the “carriers becoming content companies” club. It seems that the executives who run these large carriers believe it is better to use their massive profits in the carrier business to move up the stack into content instead of continuing to invest in their communications infrastructure. It makes me want to invest in communications infrastructure honestly.
  • Bitcoin found no killer app in 2016, but did find itself the darling of the trader/speculator crowd, ending the year on a killer run and almost breaking the $1000 USD/BTC level. Maybe Bitcoin’s killer app is its value and/or store of value. That would make it the digital equivalent of gold and the likely reserve currency of the digital asset space. And I think that is what has happened with Bitcoin. And there is nothing wrong with that.
  • Slack had a good year in 2016, solidifying its position as the leading communications tool for enterprises (other than email of course). It did have some growing pains as there was a fair bit of executive turmoil. But I think Slack is here to stay and I think they can withstand the growing competition coming from Microsoft’s Teams product and others.
  • I was right that Donald Trump would get the Republican nomination and that the tech sector (with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few other liked minded people) would line up against him. It did not matter. He won the Presidency without the support of the tech sector, but by using its tools (Twitter and Facebook primarily) brilliantly.
  • I predicted “markdown mania” would hit the tech sector hard and employees would start getting cold feet on startups as they saw the value of their options going down. None of this really happened in a big way in 2016. There was some of that and employees are certainly more attuned to how they can get hurt in a down round or recap, but the tech sector has also used a lot of techniques, including repricing options, reloading option plans, and moving to RSUs, to mitigate this. The truth is that startups, venture capital, and tech growth companies had a pretty good year in 2016 all things considered.

So that’s the rundown on my 2016 predictions. I would give myself about a 50% hit rate. Which is not great but not horrible and about the same as I did last year.

Some other things that happened in 2016 that are important and worth talking about are:

  • The era of cyberwars are upon us. Maybe we have been fighting them silently for years. But we are not fighting them silently any more. We are fighting them out in the open. I suspect there is a lot that the public still doesn’t know about what is actually going on in this area. We know what Russia has done in the Presidential election and since then. But what has the US been doing to Russia? I would assume the same and maybe more. If your enemy has the keys to your castle, you had better have the keys to their castle. And as good as the Russians are at hacking into systems, the US has some great hackers too. I am very sure about that.  And so do the Chinese, the Israelis, the Indians, the British, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, etc, etc.  This feels a bit like the Nuclear era redux. Mutually assured destruction is a deterrent as long as both sides have the same tools.
  • The tech sector is no longer the belle of the ball. It has, on one hand become extremely powerful with monopolies, duopolies, or nearly so in search, social media, ecommerce, online advertising, and mobile operating systems. And it has, on the other hand, proven that it is susceptible to the very kinds of bad behavior that every other large industry is capable of. And we now have an incoming President who doesn’t share the love of the tech sector that our outgoing President showed. It brings to mind that scene in 48 Hours where Eddie Murphy throws the shot glass through the mirror and explains to the rednecks that there is a new sheriff in town. But this time, the tech sector are the rednecks.
  • Google and Facebook now control ~75% of the online advertising market and almost all of its growth in 2016:

  • Artificial Intelligence has inserted itself into our every day lives. Whether its a home speaker system that we can talk to, or a social network that already knows what we are about to go out and purchase, or a car that can park itself and change lanes on the highway automatically, we are seeing AI take over tasks that we used to have to do ourselves. We are in the age of AI. It is not something that is coming. It is here. It may have arrived in 2014, or 2015, but if you ask me, I would put 2016 as the year it had its debut in mainstream life. It is exciting and it is scary. It begs all sorts of questions about where we are all going in the next thirty to fifty years. If you are in your twenties, AI will define your lifetime.

So that’s my rundown on 2016. I wish everyone a happy and healthy new year and we will talk about the future, not the past, tomorrow.

If you are in need of a New Year’s Resolution, I suggest moving to super secure passwords and some sort of tool to manage them for you, using two factor authentication whenever and wherever possible, encrypt as much of your online activities as you reasonably can, and not saying or doing anything online that you would not do in public, because that is where you are doing it.

Happy New Year!

#AR/VR#blockchain#crypto#drones#enterprise#entrepreneurship#machine learning#mobile#Politics#robots and drones#stocks#Television#VC & Technology#voice interfaces#wearables

Streaming, Ads, and Subscriptions

Yesterday’s post on streaming the Olympics vs watching them on TV produced some great comments. 

A lot of them were about the crappy video quality and heavy ad load on the stream. I am not sure what to take from that but it is clear that NBC has not yet made their streaming experience as high of a priority in terms of user experience as they could and should.

But the more interesting conversation to me was about the business model for streaming the Olympics on phones, tablets, and smart TVs. A number of readers pointed out that the streams use the same business model (advertising) as broadcast TV and so the ad loads will be the same and just as annoying.

But I think the broadcasters like NBC have an opportunity to take a page out of the playbook of the streaming music companies like Spotify and SoundCloud and offer both free ad supported streams and subscription streams that are ad free and offer offline sync (record and playback later).

Would you pay for a $19.99 in-app upgrade on your NBC Sports app to remove ads and get offline sync for the entire 17 days of the Summer Olympics? I know I would but I also know that I am less price conscious than most AVC readers. Please weigh in on that in the comments.

The broadcast television companies have been advertising supported businesses for the most part. In recent years they have been able to get retransmission fees and start getting paid for their programming from the cable operators but I think the subscription opportunity in the streaming world is significant for them, particularly when it comes to big events like the Olympics.

I looked around for a subscription based app for NBC Sports and found something called NBC Sports Gold but that looks like an experiment that doesn’t support the main events like the Olympics. I hope we will see the main events make it onto something like that in the coming years. I think it would be great for viewers and for the broadcasters as well.

#Sports#Television