Posts from Television

I’ve written about Josh Harris here before. He envisioned all of the stuff that has happened on the Internet in the early 1990s, roughly ten to twenty years before it happened.  And he tried to bring much of it to market in the mid to late 90s, but the technology and the market weren’t ready for it. I talked a fair bit about Josh in my “history of the NYC Internet community” talk that I gave at Web 2.0 in 2008. Josh was one of the seminal figures of the NYC Internet community and we owe him a lot for what he imagined and what he made.

Josh’s ultimate project was We Live In Public, which is also the name of the movie about Josh that was released in 2009. In the We Live In Public project, Josh put cameras all over his loft apartment in NYC and livestreamed his and his girlfriend’s everyday life, which ultimately led to their breakup. It’s always been unclear to me how unscripted or scripted that project was, but it hardly matters. It was entertaining in a voyeuristic way. It predated reality TV and all that has come since.

I got to thinking about We Live In Public after reading The Verge’s post about our portfolio company YouNow. YouNow is the living breathing realization of Josh’s imagined world where everyone is broadcasting their lives in real time on the Internet. There’s been plenty of media attention to Twitter’s Periscope and also Meerkat, but YouNow has been at this since 2012 and has amassed a huge audience who tip the live broadcasters enabling them to make a business out of livestreaming their lives. If you want to take a look at how all of that works and what goes on on YouNow, give this a read.

I have been watching the livestreaming category emerge for years and it’s been fits and starts for sure. Most of the stuff that is getting livestreamed is hardly entertaining and many of us have more important things to do with our time than watch other people hangingat work or at home. But it sure seems like the category is alive and well and maybe even here to stay. Just as Josh imagined it would be twenty years ago.

Web Summit was this past week in Dublin. I’ve been watching some of the video from the conference and I thought this discussion David Carr hosted about the future of content was particularly good.

I saw on The Verge that HBO is finally going to make its excellent HBO Go service available “over the top” (sometime in 2015)

This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and have written about a bunch here.

It isn’t that I don’t have a cable subscription. I have many.

It is that I want a direct subscription relationship with HBO Go. I don’t want one subscription to be dependent on another.

That is also why I don’t like subscribing to services on my phone via carrier billing.

When its time to end a relationship with a carrier or a cable company, I don’t want to have to think about what other relationships I might be ending.

Direct relationships are best and I’m thrilled to become a direct subscriber to HBO Go.

Well done HBO.

The Supreme Court just issued its opinion in the case between the TV broadcasters and Aereo over the legality of the Aereo service. It was not particularly close. Six Justices felt that Aereo was infringing broadcaster copyrights. Three dissented.

I just read Justice Breyer’s majority opinion (available on the link above). As I read it (recognizing that I am a layman), the majority went with “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck” argument. They felt that, as delivered, the Aereo service is essentially equivalent to a cable TV service and the rules should be applied similarly.

Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion rejects the “it must be a duck” argument and goes further to suggest that it ignores widely recognized “service provider liability protections” and will cause confusion for years to come:

The service provider liability protections are near and dear to Internet startups. Many of the companies we have backed over the years have relied on these protections to avoid getting sued out of business the way that Aereo may have just experienced. These are important protections and it is very unfortunate to see a majority of the Supreme Court set a precedent here that goes against those protections.

It seems to me that the majority opinion creates an incentive for engineers to build hardware that would be operated by individuals to create a similar benefit but that doesn’t look and act sufficiently like cable to be infringing. Our former portfolio company Boxee, which was sold to Samsung last year, built something similar to Aereo but instead of provisioning it as a full blown cloud service, required each user to buy a BoxeeTV to get similar functionality. Boxee was not sued by the broadcasters and is now part of Samsung which may not push forward with that part of Boxee’s business (I have no idea), so it’s not clear if that approach will be legally tested any time soon.

But I do believe that customers want to be able to DVR and stream HD content that they can get for free over the air from the broadcasters and I imagine that engineers are already working on other approaches to give the users what they want.

There’s a discussion of this issue brewing over at USV.com as well if you want to check that out.

So Amazon launched its over the top TV device this week called Amazon Fire TV. I took some time today to look it over.

It looks a lot like the AppleTV and Roku devices that many of us have.

But there is one  feature that Amazon Fire TV has that AppleTV and Roku don’t have and that is voice search.

It is unlikely that any of us have this device in our homes yet, but I thought it might make for an interesting discussion today.

Does talking to your TV sound like a better experience than picking up a remote and pointing it at the TV? Will the experience actually work. Or will it be another Siri that is more frustrating than helpful?

I am going to get one and try it out. But I’m curious what folks think about this voice search feature.

The New Yorker gives high praise for this web video series called High Maintenance. The episodes are short (~5min) and there are eleven episodes in all. It is about a pot dealer who rides around NYC and meets all sorts of strange and outrageous people. This bit from the lead actor in the New Yorker piece rings true to me after I watched a bunch of episodes last night:

The thing about weed is, we didn’t want to use it as a punch line. Instead, it’s this substance that, like chocolate, causes people to expose their own foibles. People become so human in pursuit of this thing. And the interaction they have with the person bringing it is often tragic, because there are a lot of lonely people out there who order it and then that is their human interaction for the day.

But here's the part of the New Yorker article that has me thinking outloud this morning.

When I spoke with Sinclair and Blichfeld recently, they were on the West Coast signing a script deal with a major network, newly on the path to converting “High Maintenance” into a full-length cable show.

It's a bit upsetting to me that the "major leagues" for filmmakers, writers, and actors who make it on the web is still the cable business. Why can't entrepreneurs build something that will work better for emerging web filmmakers than that? We have investments in Kickstarter and VHX, both of which are changing the game for filmmakers. We are also big fans of Vimeo, where High Maintenance is hosted.

But this High Maintenance story tells me that we haven't yet built enough technology, distribution, and monetization systems so that filmmakers can be truly independent and realize their vision and have the financial sucess that should come with great work.

So there is more to do here.

I suspect most of you have seen this by now. It's been coming at me for the past 10 days from all angles. I must have had it sent to me a dozen times and I've come across it in social media another dozen times. But that's because it is spot on and excellent.

This is a 5min edited summary of the talk. For the full thing, go here.

Can't do feature friday this week because Arnold suggested a great fun friday for tomorrow. So we will do feature thursday instead.

I got an update of the Android YouTube app this week and when I launched it, the home screen looked like this:

That is just the first two videos of the "what to watch" feed but you can scroll forever and the recommendations are awesome. After Matt Cohler and Mark Zuckerberg, I got the top 10 Knicks plays of the 2012-2013 season, an Arctic Monkeys video, and a video about a 3D printed prefab house.

This is like the #discover tab on Twitter but for video. It's awesome and I've added the YouTube app on my Nexus7 to my daily content consumption flow now. I don't watch every video, but I watch a bunch of them. I think this is a killer feature.

Strangely enough I don't get the same recommendations when I visit YouTube on the web. I get recommendations but they aren't as good. I wonder if they've rolled out something new on mobile first and will bring it to the web shortly.

I spent some time a few months ago setting up some subscriptions in YouTube and that is certainly a big reason for why the recommendations for me are so good. I would recommend doing that as well.

In any case, if you haven't checked out the new YouTube app and the "what to watch" feature, I strongly suggest giving it a whirl. 

Related articles

YouTube App Now Lets You Search While Watching Videos

YouTube's New Look and Multitasking Player Come to iOS

Google redesigns YouTube for Android with cards, multitasking, and more

YouTube app updated with picture-in-picture and deeper Chromecast integration

YouTube 2.0 for iOS brings picture-in-picture video and better playlist support

YouTube for Android Gets a New Look and a Multitasking Video Player

Last month I made a brief visit to Slovenia and while I was there I did an interview with RTV Slovenia. I have tried for the past twenty minutest to figure out how to embed the video on this blog but I cannot figure it out. 

So if you want to watch a five minute interview with me on Slovenian television, click here.

If any of you are brighter than me and can figure out how to embed the video here, let me know in the comments and I will do that.

Update: Tom Sella hacked this player together for us so now this video is embedded here at AVC. Thanks Tom!