Tag: Amazon

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Technology

New Video Format

alliance-for-open-mediaSix major tech companies have joined together to create a new video format. Google, Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, and Mozilla have combined to create a new group called the Alliance for Open Media.

The goal of this group is create a video format that is optimized for the web. Current video formats were created before there was wide-spread video using web browsers on a host of different devices.

The Alliance has listed several goals for the new format:

Open Source Current video codecs are proprietary, making it impossible to tweak them for a given application.

Optimized for the Web One of the most important features of the web is that there is no guarantee that all of the bits of a given transmission will arrive at the same time. This is the cause of many of the glitches one gets when trying to watch live video on the web. A web-optimized video codec will be allowed to plow forward with less than complete data. In most cases a small amount of missing bits won’t be noticeable to the eye, unlike the fits and starts that often come today when the video playback is delayed waiting for packets.

Scalable to any Device and any Bandwidth One of the problems with existing codecs is that they are not flexible. For example, consider a time when you wanted to watch something in HD but didn’t have enough bandwidth. The only option today is to fall back the whole way to an SD transmission, at a far lower quality. But in between these two standards is a wide range of possible options where a smart codec could analyze the bandwidth available and could then maximize the transmission by choosing different options among the many variables within a codec. This means you could produce ‘almost HD’ rather than defaulting to something of much poorer in quality.

Optimized for Computational Footprint and Hardware. This means that the manufacturers of devices would be able to maximize the codec specifically for their devices. All smartphones or all tablets or all of any device are not the same and manufacturers would be able to choose a video format that maximizes the video display for each of their devices.

Capable of Consistent, High-quality, Real-time Video Real-time video is a far greater challenge than streaming video. Video content is not uniform in quality and characteristics and there is thus a major difference in the quality between watching two different video streams on the same device. A flexible video codec could standardize quality much in the same way that a sound system can level out differences in listener volume between different audio streams.

Flexible for Both Commercial and Non-commercial Content A significant percentage of videos watched today are user-generated and not from commercial sources. It’s just as important to maximize the quality of Vine videos as it is for showing commercial shows from Netflix.

There is no guarantee that this group can achieve all of these goals immediately, because that’s a pretty tall task. But the power of these various firms combined certainly is promising. The potential for a new video codec that meets all of these goals is enormous. It would improve the quality of web videos on all devices. I know that personally, quality matters and this is why I tend to watch videos from sources like Netflix and Amazon Prime. By definition streamed video can be of much higher and more consistent quality than real-time video. But I’ve noticed that my daughter has a far lower standard of quality than I do and watches videos from a wide variety of sources. Improving web video, regardless of the source, will be a major breakthrough and will make watching video on the web enjoyable to a far larger percentage of users.

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Regulation - What is it Good For? The Industry

Should the FCC Regulate OTT Video?

A funny thing happened on the way to make it easier for OTT video providers to get content. Some of the biggest potential providers of online content like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have told the FCC that they don’t think that online video companies ought to be regulated as cable companies.

Of course, these couple of large companies don’t represent everybody who is interested in providing online video, and so they are just another faction to deal with for the issue. For example, FilmOn X recently got a court order allowing them to buy video as a regulated video provider and in the past Aereo had asked for the same thing.

A lot of the issue boils down to companies that want to put local networks online or else deliver them in some non-traditional way as was being done by FilmOnX or Aereo. These kind of providers are seeking to get the ability to force the local network stations to negotiate local retransmission agreements with them. Under current law the stations are not required to do so and are, in fact, refusing to do so.

The FCC is in a tough spot here because they don’t have a full quiver of tools at their disposal. The FCC’s hands are very much tied by the various sets of cable laws that have been passed by Congress over the years – the rules that define who is and is not a cable company, and more importantly, the rules and obligations of being a cable company. It will be interesting to see how much the FCC thinks it can stretch those rules to fit the situation of online programming, which was never anticipated in the rules.

I can certainly understand why the large companies mentioned above don’t want to be cable companies, because there are pages and pages of rules about what that means; the FCC is unlikely to be able to grant a company just a few of those rules without also requiring ones that these companies don’t want.

For example, the current cable law defines required tiers of service. Cable companies must have at least a basic and an expanded basic tier, and those are very narrowly defined. A basic tier includes all of the ‘must-carry’ local networks and the expanded basic carries all of the things we think of as cable channels.

I think what the FCC has in mind is a set of rules that require programmers to negotiate in good faith with online companies that want to buy their content. Certainly any company that wants to put content online today is completely at the mercy of programmers saying yes or no to giving them the content they want to carry. And there is nothing from stopping the programmers from changing their mind if they see an OTT company being more successful than they like.

So I would think that even Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft would like the ability to force the programmers to negotiate with them, but they obviously don’t want other FCC rules that they think will come along with that ability. Of course, these are very large companies with deep pockets and one has to imagine that they get a fairly decent hearing when they talk to programmers. The FCC’s real concern is not these giant companies, but companies smaller than them who don’t have any ability to force the programmers to even talk to them. I think the FCC believes that if online content is to be successful that there ought to be widespread competition and innovation online, not just content provided by a few giant tech companies along with other huge companies like Verizon.

Today the programmers have most of the power in the industry. They are making a huge amount of money from the mega-subscription models where all of their content is forced upon US cable companies. And they have no reason to become more reasonable because most of them are seeing gigantic growth in selling content overseas, so they have no real reason to upset the cart in the US market.

If online content is to become a vibrant alternative and not just be expensive packages foisted on the public by a small group of huge corporations, then something has to change. I just don’t know how much the FCC can do realistically considering how they are hamstrung by the current cable laws.

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What Customers Want

A Few Lessons from Big Companies

I spend a lot of time reading about corporations and I think there are some lessons to learn from them that are relevant to small companies.

Selling Product versus Building Relationships. There are many  large companies that sell products without developing relationships with their customers. In our industry the large cable and telcos come to mind. They are all rated among the worst of all corporations in delivering customer service and they even antagonize many of their customers. This works fine for them until they get competition, and then the customers who don’t like them quickly jump ship to the new competitor.

But there are large businesses that go out of their way to build customer relationships because they believe that loyal customers are their most important asset. Consider car manufacturers. They realized a long time ago that they were not going to be good at customer service, so they created a network of dealers who are local businesses with ties in each community and these dealers have built trust over generations. And there are many other companies that deliver great customer service. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, and Google have been consistently rated among the top ten in customer satisfaction for the last few years – showing that tech firms can put an emphasis on customers and still thrive.

My most successful clients build relationships with their customers and as a result have built a loyal customer base. Many of them are or were monopolies, and there was a time when most of my clients could not tell me who their ten largest customers were. But I rarely see that today and small telcos and cable companies have learned to build loyalty through building relationships.

Growing Fast versus Growing Deliberately. Many large companies need to grow fast to be successful. Once you have taken venture capital money or gone public then the pressure is on to grow profits quickly. But growing too fast almost always changes a company in negative ways. It’s really common to see companies go into the growth mode and then forget who they are. Most tech companies, for example, started with a small core of people who worked hard as a team to develop the core company. But when it’s time to grow, and companies hire mountains of new people it’s nearly impossible to maintain the original culture that made the company a great place to work.

Growth can be just as hard for small companies. It can be as hard economically and culturally for a small company to grow from 5,000 to 10,000 customers as it is for a large company to add millions. Small companies are often unprepared for the extra work involved with growth and find that they overwork and overstress their staff during a growth cycle. Growth creates a dilemma for small companies. If you hire the people needed to staff the growth period your company will be overstaffed when growth stops.

And so a lesson about growth can be learned from large companies. They will often staff growth through temporary employees, contractors, and consultants rather than take on people that they may not need later. Companies of any size are hesitant about hiring employees that they might not need a year from now.

High-Tech versus High-Touch. A lot of large businesses are trying to feign a good customer service experience by electronically ‘touching’ their customers often. I recall last year when Comcast introduced a texting system to communicate with customers. After they sent me half a dozen text messages in the same week, I disconnected the texting function because I really didn’t want to hear from them that often. But there are large companies who are convinced that if they electronically reach out to customers often that they are engaging in relationship building and proactive customer service.

And perhaps they are with some customers. But I am more appreciative of a business where I can talk to a person when it’s needed. Not that I mind electronic communications. I like to know that AT&T has auto-billed me and I like knowing when charges hit my credit cards. But I don’t want to be bothered by a business when they aren’t passing on information I want or need.

The important point here is that you have to touch your customers sometime and whether you reach out electronically or in person it’s better than no-touch and not talking to your customers. I know telecom companies that call every customer at least once a year to ask them if they like the service and if everything is okay. Such calls are welcomed by most customers and this is a great tool for businesses to build relationships. But just be prepared that if you ask your customers how you are doing that you need to be ready to deal with negative feedback. That is how to build happy customers.

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Technology

The Shift To Proprietary Hardware

There is a trend in the industry that is not good for smaller carriers. More and more I see the big companies designing proprietary hardware just for themselves. While that is undoubtably good for the big companies, and I am sure that it saves them a lot of money, it is not good for anybody else.

I first started noticing this a few years ago with settop boxes. It used to be that Comcast and the other large cable companies used the same settop boxes as everybody else. And their buying power is so huge that it drove down the cost of the settop boxes for everybody in the industry. It was standard for large companies to put their own name tag on the front of the boxes, but for the most part they were the same boxes that everybody else could buy, from the same handful of manufacturers.

But then I started seeing news releases and stories indicating that the largest cable companies had developed proprietary settop boxes of their own. One driver for this change is that the carriers are choosing different ways to bring broadband to the settop box. Another change is that the big companies are adding different features, and are modifying the hardware to go along with custom software. Cable companies are even experimenting with very non-traditional settop box platforms like Roku or the various game consoles.

I see this same thing going on all over the industry. The cable modems and customer gateways that the large cable companies and the large telcos use are proprietary and designed just for them. I recently learned that the WiFi units that Comcast and other large cable companies are deploying outdoors are proprietary to them. Google has designed its own fiber-the-the-premise equipment. And many companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others are designing their own proprietary routers to use in their cloud data centers.

In all of these cases (and many other that I haven’t listed here), the big companies used to buy off-the-shelf equipment. They might have had a slightly different version of some of the hardware, but not different enough that it made a difference to the manufacturers. Telco has always been an industry where only a handful of companies make any given kind of electronics. Generally, smaller companies bought from whichever vendors the big companies chose, since those vendors had the economy of scale.

But now the big carriers are not only using proprietary hardware, but a lot of them are getting it manufactured for themselves directly, without one of the big vendors in the middle. You can’t blame a large company for this; I am sure they save a lot of money by cutting Alcatel/Lucent, Cisco, and Motorola out of the supply chain. But this tendency is putting a hurt on these traditional vendors and making it harder for vendors to survive.

It’s going to get worse. Currently there is a huge push in many parts of the telecom business to use software-defined networking (SDN) to simplify field hardware and control everything from the cloud. Since the large carriers will shift to SDN networks long before smaller carriers, the big companies will be using very different gear at the edges of the network – and those are the parts of the network that cost the most.

This is a problem for smaller carriers since they often no longer benefit from being able to buy the same devices that the large companies buy to take advantage of their huge economy of scale. Over time this is going to mean the prices for the basic components smaller carriers buy are going to go up. And in the worst case there might not be any vendor that can make a business case for manufacturing a given component for the small carriers. One of the advantages of having healthy large manufacturers in the industry was that they could take a loss on some product lines as long as the whole suite of products they sold made a good profit. That will probably no longer be the case.

I hate to think about where this trend is going to take the industry in five to ten years, and I add it to the list of things that small carriers need to worry about.

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Technology

The Battle of the Routers

There are several simultaneous forces tugging at companies like Cisco which make network routers. Cloud providers like Amazon and CloudFlare are successfully luring large businesses to move their IT functions from local routers to large data centers. Meanwhile, other companies like Facebook are pushing small cheap routers using open source software. But Cisco is fighting back with their push for fog computing which will place smaller function-specific routers near to the source of data at the edge.

Cloud Computing.

Companies like Amazon and CloudFlare have been very successful at luring companies to move their IT functions into the cloud. It’s incredibly expensive for small and medium companies to afford an IT staff or outsourced IT consultants, and the cloud is reducing both hardware and people costs for companies. CloudFlare alone last year announced that it was adding 5,000 new business customers per day to its cloud services.

There are several trends that are driving this shift to data centers. First, the cloud companies have been able to emulate with software what formerly took expensive routers at a customer’s location. This means that companies can get the same functions done for a fraction of the cost of doing IT functions in-house. The cloud companies are using simpler, cheaper routers that offer brute computing power which also are becoming more energy efficiency. For example, Amazon has designed all of the routers used in its data centers and doesn’t buy boxes from the traditional router manufacturers.

Businesses are also using this shift as an opportunity to unbundle from the traditional large software packages. Businesses historically have signed up for a suite of software from somebody like Microsoft or Oracle and would live with whatever those companies offered. But today there is a mountain of specialty software that outperforms the big software packages for specific functions like sales or accounting. Both the hardware and the new software are easier to use at the big data centers and companies no longer need to have staff or consultants who are Cisco certified to sit between users and the network.

Cheap Servers with Open Source Software.

Not every company wants to use the cloud and Cisco has new competition for businesses that want to keep local servers. Just during this last week both Facebook and HP announced that they are going to start marketing their cheaper routers to enterprise customers. Like most of the companies today with huge data centers, Facebook has developed its own hardware that is far cheaper than traditional routers. These cheaper routers are brute-force computers stripped of everything extraneous and that have all of their functionality defined by free open source software; customers are able to run any software they want. HP’s new router is an open source Linux-based router from their long-time partner Accton.

Cisco and the other router manufacturers today sell a bundled package of hardware and software and Facebook’s goal is to break the bundle. Traditional routers are not only more expensive than the new generation of equipment, but because of the bundle there is an ongoing ‘maintenance fee’ for keeping the router software current. This fee runs as much as 20% of the cost of the original hardware annually. Companies feel like they are paying for traditional routers over and over again, and to some extent they are.

These are the same kinds of fees that were common in the telecom industry historically with companies like Nortel and AT&T / Lucent. Those companies made far more money off of maintenance after the sale than they did from the original sales. But when hungry new competitors came along with a cheaper pricing model, the profits of those two companies collapsed over a few years and brought down the two largest companies in the telecom space.

Fog Computing.

Cisco is fighting back by pushing an idea called fog computing. This means having limited-function routers on the edge of the network to avoid having to ship all data to some remote cloud. The fog computing concept is that most of the data that will be collected by the Internet of Things will not necessarily need to be sent to a central depository for processing.

As an example, a factory might have dozens of industrial robots, and there will be monitors that constantly monitor them to spot troubles before they happen. The local fog computing routers would process a mountain of data over time, but would only communicate with a central hub when they sense some change in operations. With fog computing the local routers would process data for the one very specific purpose of spotting problems, which would save the factory-owner from paying for terabits of data transmission, while still getting the advantage of being connected to a cloud.

Fog computing also makes sense for applications that need instantaneous feedback, such as with an electric smart grid. When something starts going wrong in an electric grid, taking action immediately can save cascading failures, and microseconds can make a difference. Fog computing also makes sense for applications where the local device isn’t connected to the cloud 100% of the time, such as with a smart car or a monitor on a locomotive.

Leave it Cisco to find a whole new application for boxes in a market that is otherwise attacking the boxes they have historically built. Fog computing routers are mostly going to be smaller and cheaper than the historical Cisco products, but there is going to be a need for a whole lot of them when the IoT becomes pervasive.

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The Industry

Who Owns Internet Ad Space?

Google made a very interesting announcement a few weeks ago that led me to find out more about the ad space on web sites. Google announced that for $2 per month they would block all ads on web sites for a customer as long as they browse through the Chrome browser.

I find this fascinating because it means that Google thinks that they have the ability to block an ad, even when they are not the one to have placed the ad in the first place. Google sells a lot of ads, and so it makes sense that they can block ads that they have placed on a web page. But when they say they can block all ads it also means that they think they have the ability to block ads placed by somebody else.

Just to be clear about what I mean by ads, look at this web page. At the top is a banner ad. At the top right of the story is an ad. And across the bottom of the article are four ads. After loading this web site multiple times I noticed that the ads changed.

It turns out that there are two kinds of ads on a web page. There are fixed ads and remnant ads. Fixed ads are placed there by the web site owner or somebody they partner with to advertise for them. Fixed ads embedded into the web page and can only be accessed by the website owner. The other kind of ads are called remnant ads. These are coded in such a way as to be available to outsiders, and anybody that has access to a website before it reaches a customer can change what is in the remnant ad space.

And as you would expect, these remnant ad spaces get changed all of the time. There are a lot of companies that sell advertising into the remnant ad space including Google (DoubleClick), Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, AOL, AppNexus, Openx, Adroll, RightMedia and dECN. It was very easy for me to spot remnant ads in the recent election season, because I swear that every web page I looked at here in Florida had a political ad for Rick Scott who was running for reelection as Governor. So somebody was being paid in Florida to put those ads onto Florida computers.

The first question this raised for me is: who owns this ad space? The web page example is from the TechCrunch web site. TechCrunch chose to make the ads open to the public and I assume they gets revenues from at least some of the parties that use that space, which is their motivation to use remnant ad space. Google thinks they have a right to go in and block whatever is on the remnant ad space on that page, so they are sure that it is theirs to grab. I know that some of the larger ISPS like cable companies are also in the advertising business, through partners, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Comcast that gave me all of the Rick Scott ads.

I was shown a recent legal opinion by one of the companies that advertises in the remnant space who was gracious enough to share it with me as long as I don’t publish it. The opinion says basically that nobody owns the remnant ad space. The legal opinion says that the act of a web site owner in making this available to the public means just that, and it can be used by anybody who somehow has access to the website before it reaches a customer. That generally is going to mean some company who is part of the chain between a web site and the customer. Obviously the web site owner can hire somebody to place ads in the remnant space. If you reach the web site through a browser then the browser owner can place the ad in there. If you get to a web site through a link on another web site like Yahoo News then they can place ads there. And your ISP also would have access to this ad space.

I really like the Google product that blocks ads. I think there are plenty of customers who would love to avoid all of those ads. Further, blocking ads means a faster Internet experience for a customer. I know there are web sites I go to that have multiple videos automatically running that seems like an extravagant use of my bandwidth. I have a 50 Mbps Internet connection and there are still web sites that load very slowly due to all of the extra videos that have been layered into the ad spaces. I also learned that remnant ads are one of the most common sources today of adware and malware and I will talk about that more in tomorrow’s blog.

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The Industry

Beyond a Tipping Point

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog called A Tipping Point for the Telecom Industry that looked at the consequences of the revolution in technology that is sweeping our industry. In that blog I made a number of predictions about the natural consequences for drastically cheaper cloud services such as the mass migration of IT services to the cloud, massive consolidation of switch and router makers, a shift to software defined networks and the consequent expansion explosion in specialized Cloud software.

I recently read an interview in Business Insider with Matthew Price, the founder of CloudFlare. It’s a company that many of you will never have heard of, but which today is carrying 5% of the traffic on the web and growing rapidly. CloudFlare started as a cyber-security service for businesses and its primary product helped companies fend off hacker attacks. But the company has also developed a suite of other cloud services. The combination of services has been so effective that the company says it has recently been adding 5,000 new customers per day and is growing at an annual rate of 450%.

In that interview Price pointed out two trends that define how quickly the traditional market is changing. The first trend is that the functions served traditionally by hardware from companies like Cisco and HP are moving to the cloud to companies like Amazon and CloudFlare. The second is that companies are quickly unbundling from traditional software packages.

CloudFlare is directly taking on the router and switching functions that have been served most successfully by Cisco. CloudFlare offers services such as routing and switching, load balancing, security, DDoS mitigation and performance acceleration. But by being cloud-based, the CloudFlare services are less expensive, nimbler and don’t require detailed knowledge of Cisco’s proprietary software. Cisco has had an amazing run in the industry and has had huge earnings for decades. Its model has been based upon performing network functions very well, but at a cost. Cisco sells fairly expensive boxes that then come with even more expensive annual maintenance agreements. Companies also need to hire technicians and engineers with Cisco certifications in order to operate a Cisco network.

But the same trends that are dropping the cost of cloud services exponentially are going to kill Cisco’s business model. It’s now possible for a company like CloudFlare to use brute computing power in data centers to perform the same functions as Cisco. Companies no longer need to buy boxes and only need to pay for the specific network functions they need. And companies no longer need to rely on expensive technicians with a Cisco bias. Companies can also be nimble and can change the network on the fly as needed without having to wait for boxes and having to plan for expensive network cutovers.

This change is a direct result of cheaper computing resources. The relentless exponential improvements in most of the major components of the computer world have resulted in a new world order where centralized computing in the cloud is now significantly cheaper than local computing. I summed it up in my last blog saying that 2014 will be remembered as the year the cloud won. It will take a few years, but a cloud that is cheaper today and that is going to continue to get exponentially cheaper will break the business models for companies like Cisco, HP, Dell and IBM. Where there were hundreds of companies making routers and other network components there will soon be only a few companies – those that are the preferred vendors of the companies that control the cloud.

The reverse is happening with software. Large corporations for the last few decades have largely used giant software packages from SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These huge packages integrated all of the software functions of a business from database, CRM, accounting, sales and operations. But these software packages were incredibly expensive. They were proprietary and cumbersome to learn. And they never exactly fit what a company wanted and it was typical for the company to bend to meet the limitations of the software instead of changing the software to fit the company.

But this is rapidly changing because the world is being flooded by a generation of new software that handle the individual functions better than was done by the big packages. There are now dozens of different collaborations platforms available. There are numerous packages for the sales and CRM function. There are specialized packages for accounting, human resources and operations.

All of these new software packages are made for the cloud. This makes them cheaper to use and for the most part easier to learn and more intuitive to use. They are readily customizable by each company to fit their culture and needs. For the most part the new world of software is built from the user interface backwards, meaning that the user interface is made as easy and intuitive as possible. The older platforms were built with centralized functions in mind first and ended up with a lot of training required for users.

All of this means that over the next decade we are going to see a huge shift in the corporate landscape. We are going to see a handful of cloud providers performing all of the network functions instead of hundreds of box makers. And in place of a few huge software companies we are going to see thousands of specialized software companies selling into niche markets and giving companies cheaper and better software solutions.

Categories
The Industry What Customers Want

The Young and the Old

I’ve just seen some recent statistics that talk about TV viewing in different demographics. On the young side, Verizon just released a study it did of the TV viewing habits of Millennials, which it defined as those between the ages of 16 and 34. On the older side, there have been some interesting statistics released talking about who watches network TV.

Verizon’s study quantifies what we have already all suspected – that the viewing habits of young people are a lot different than the rest of us. This is not to say that everybody’s viewing habits aren’t changing, but the young have changed to a greater degree. For example, all age groups watch over-the-top video online, but Millennials spend three times as much of their viewing time on line as everybody else.

Millennials have not yet abandoned cable services and 75% of them still watch cable TV. Only 13% of Millennials have cut the cord compared to 9% of the rest of us. But unlike the rest of us, they are also huge subscribers other services like AmazonPrime, NetFlix and Hulu. They simply have a lower tolerance for linear TV programming and want to watch things on their terms when they are ready to watch it. Millenials also like to browse more than watch specific TV shows at set times. Millennials are more likely (64%) to be using some other viewing device like a tablet, laptop or cell phone than everybody else (49%).

Millennials seem to be very brand-loyal and the brands they like are not the same as everybody else. For example, when naming their top entertainment brands, Millennials don’t put any of the broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX) into their top ten brands while all four make it into the top brands for non-Millennials. Interestingly the company that makes it as the top name brand for everybody is Amazon.

Contrary to what other surveys have found, Millennials are willing to pay for multiple kinds of TV services and they are more likely to subscribe to both cable and online entertainment sources. But in looking at their viewing habits, they are more likely to engage in binge watching and more attuned to when entire series of shows are released on line.

Millennials also get more of their entertainment from non-traditional sources like YouTube and social sites. Millennials are more likely to game and to play fantasy sports than others. They also frequent a number of social sites like Reddit, Imjur, 4chan and 9gag that nobody else uses.

Very much as a compliment to the Verizon survey, I was looking through statistics about who watches network TV. The demographics of the major networks is aging even faster than the population. The median age of viewer for network TV is now 54 while twenty years ago it was 41. In 1993 the number one show was ‘Home Improvement’ with the age of the median watcher at 34. Today the most popular show is ‘NCIS’ with a median age of viewers of 61.

Interestingly, the networks still get the majority of the advertising dollars, but the increasing age of their viewers is probably going to change this a lot. Back in the Verizon survey, only 32% of Millennials said they would even miss the major networks if they went away. Advertisers want to find better ways to get to Millennial and other younger viewers, but the way they watch programming makes it hard to get to them in the same was as they can get to viewers with network TV.

The Verizon survey should give pause to anybody in the cable TV business. The Millennials and the following generations will be the majority of viewers in a few decades and once has to ask if it is possible to have a set of products that they are willing to pay for. They are not afraid to spend money for entertainment, but a lot of that money goes to online sources instead of to the local cable TV.

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