Tag Archives: DirecTV

Who is Dropping Cable?

RCA_CT100-hdFierce Cable reports that the average revenues per customer are rising at many cable companies as they lose customers. This seems to indicate that a lot of people that are dropping cable were buying the lower-priced packages.

Here are some of the numbers they reported from the second quarter of 2015:

  • DirecTV lost 133,000 customers but saw the average revenue per customer rise 6.4% to $109.93.
  • Dish lost 81,000 customers but average revenue per customer rose 4.4% to $87.91.
  • Charter dropped 33,000 customers and saw average revenue jump 4.5% to $92.88.
  • Overall the largest cable providers combined saw average revenue per customer in the quarter rise by 6.7%.

Now to be fair about those numbers, a lot of these companies raise rates in the first quarter each year, making the second quarter the first period that sees the full impact of rate increases.

But the numbers do hint at the underlying cause of cord-cutting. I will admit that I’ve always figured cord cutters were coming from the tech savvy and from those who have decided that that they can live with the many alternatives for entertainment available on the web. My perspective has probably been influenced by the cord cutters I know, and it’s always a dangerous thing to take personal experience and extrapolate it to a national trend.

But if it’s true that cord-cutting is more driven by economics then we have a different phenomenon. People are being driven off cable because they are getting priced out of the market. I’ve been predicting for years that this day would come because cable rates have been rising far faster than inflation for a long time. And that eventually has to have an effect.

Just look at the above numbers. I am a bit astounded by the DirecTV numbers. If $109.93 is the average revenue per customer then there are a lot of people spending a lot more than that to offset the low special prices the company offers to new customers.

It’s easy to forget how fast rates can get out of control. But an $80 cable package will cost $105 in five years with a 5.5% annual rate increase or $112 with 7% rate increases. Looking at all of the big companies, one has to wonder how they are going to sell the value of their product 5 and 10 years from now.

I can see how cable rates are becoming unaffordable for lower-income families, but it’s not going to be that long until this starts being out of the range of a whole lot more families. Even without the pressure from OTT programming, the industry is headed down a path of real trouble.

And you have to feel sorry for cable companies. The cost of programming has been skyrocketing. I have a few clients who have seen 15% rate increases over the past two years. They grimace every time they have to raise rates and they are all seeing customers falling off their systems.

Big companies like Comcast are probably going to find a competitive option for the big cable packages. They are already looking at their own version of OTT programming. But unless the FCC can break the monopoly of the programmers the smaller cable companies are going to have very few options other than to watch their customers disappear. Almost all of my clients are losing cable customers at a faster rate than the large ones and I have a number of them already seeing 5% to 7% annual customer dropoff.

But the FCC can fix the problem if they choose. One of the biggest problems today is that the major programmers make cable providers take all of their huge suite of channels if they only want one of them. We all know there are a ton of channels on cable systems that hardly anybody watches but that everybody is being forced to pay for. If cable systems could choose the channels they want, like is possible with products in almost every other industry, then they could control their cost and could get the rate increases back under control.

The Latest Boxes and Gear

roku-3-2I’ve been seeing a lot of interesting product announcements recently.

4K Settop Boxes. Both DirecTV and Comcast have announced new 4K settop boxes. AT&T subsequently said that DirectTV and U-Verse would be using the same settop box going forward. DirecTV was the first major company to release a 4K box, but their first version required a customer to have a Samsung smart TV. The new box is being called the 4K Genie Mini and is the size of a paperback book. DirectTV does not yet have any channels dedicated to 4K although they probably will later this year.

Comcast also launched 4K TV last year and their first box also only worked with Samsung TVs, but the new box should work with any 4K capable television. Both of these announcements continue the trend of large ISPs developing their own proprietary boxes rather than buying off the shelf from the normal industry vendors.

Around 15% of new televisions sold now have 4K capabilities and smaller cable providers are going to have to decide if they want to support 4K programming. The new settop boxes represent a new capital outlay, but the real issue with 4K is that the channels eat up a lot bandwidth in a network and will require upgrades at the headend.

Over-the-air Tuner. Microsoft recently launched an Xbox One Digital TV tuner that will work with its game console. This means that an Xbox owner can use their game console along with an HDTV antenna to receive local programming directly through their game platform. The platform allows for multiple options such as watching TV and gaming at the same time. There is also a built-in channel guide, giving this the feeling of being a basic cable offering. I look at this as just one more tool making it easier for people to cut the cord.

Google’s Wireless Router. Google has released its WiFi router they call the OnHub to the general public for $199. This is a high quality WiFi router as well as a platform for integrating IoT devices within the home. The box supports WiFi as well as Bluetooth, Smart Ready, Weave, and 802.15.4, making it ready to talk to most Internet of Things devices.

Early reviews say it’s a great WiFi router that gives a user easier accessibility than many other routers, particular those from cable companies that are black boxes to the consumer. But the real promise is that the device also will provide a base for talking to a wide variety of off-the-shelf IoT devices that you might want to integrate into your house. This is obviously a play for Google to become the standard for home networking of devices.

Very Thin TV. LG this year released a TV screen that is only four hundredths of an inch thick. A 55 inch TV at this thickness only weighs about 4 pounds. It’s so thin and light that it can be hung on the wall with magnetic fasteners and peeled off like a sticker. The TV uses organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) which can produce sufficient bright light only one layer thick. This is the first use for OLEDs I’ve seen outside of cellphone screens.

This is the first look at a whole new generation of TVs that can go anywhere and be of almost any size. Want a TV in the bathroom? No problem. Put one in the garage? Not an issue.

And, finally, some statistics for you.

OTT Streaming Devices. At the end of 2014 Roku was still the most popular OTT streaming box with 37% of the market. Chromecast came in second with 19% of the market. Amazon Fire had climbed to 17% of the market while Apple TV fell to fourth at about 14% of the market. These four products represented 86% of the total market.

A little over 20% of US homes now have a streaming device. Another large chunk of the market is relying on smart TVs.

AT&T to Add Rural Broadband?

Satellite_dish_(Television)There is one part of the AT&T and DirecTV proposed merger that really has me scratching my head. Buried within the announcement was a statement that AT&T would use this merger to add 15 million broadband subscribers over the next four years, mostly in rural areas. That goes in the opposite direction of what AT&T has been saying for the last several years. For instance, AT&T told the FCC last year that it was going to be asking for permission to cut down the copper lines from millions of rural customers.

And it goes against the trend of AT&T’s broadband sales. Let’s look at the numbers. In 2011 AT&T reported 16,427,000 data customers. At the end of 2013 it was virtually the same number at 16,425,000. So overall, AT&T has been totally flat in the total number of data customers. But looking beneath those numbers we see something else. During that same two years AT&T added almost 1.5 million customers to its U-Verse product, a bundled data and cable product using two bonded copper wires. Assuming that most of these new U-Verse customers are buying data, then AT&T lost a lot of traditional DSL customers at the same time it was growing the U-Verse product.

So AT&T has been losing traditional DSL customers and it has plans to cut down millions of copper wires. And yet the DirecTV merger is going to somehow help it almost double its data customers, particularly in rural areas? How might they do that? I can think of a couple of scenarios.

One possibility is that this part of the announcement is all fluff intended to help get the merger through the FCC. Nothing gets a better ear these days at the FCC than the promise to bring broadband to rural customers. So AT&T might be blowing smoke and hoping that this helps to get the merger approved. But let’s suppose they are serious about this and that they really are going to vigorously chase data customers again. How might they do that? I can think of two scenarios.

First, they could use the DirecTV merger as a reason to reinvigorate their investment in copper. The fact is that AT&T has always had it within its power to do better in rural broadband. Most of its rural DSL electronics are first or second generation equipment, and for a relatively moderate investment they could beef up rural DSL to become competitive. Perhaps bundling it with a TV product that brings a profit stream from numerous rural homes changes the business plan and makes DSL look attractive again as a long-term investment. But I have a hard time believing this. Their rural copper plant is old and I believe them when they say they want to tear it down and get out of the landline business.

The only other option that makes sense to me is that they use a DirecTV bundle to entice people off their copper and onto wireless data. In doing so they would also be furthering their goal of getting out of the copper business. I have written a number of blogs talking about how rural cellular systems cannot take the place of landlines for the delivery of data. Cellular systems are great at delivering bursts of data, especially after being upgraded to 4G, but they are not designed, nor can they be designed to support multiple people watching streaming video. It doesn’t take many video customers to lock up the typical cell site. And this is a matter of physics as much as anything, so there is no easy way to fix this other than to move to really small cell sites with a few customers on each cell. And that would require a big investment in rural fiber.

So I am skeptical of the AT&T announcement. This announcement might have made sense if AT&T wanted to buy Dish Networks, which owns a significant amount of spectrum that could be used to deliver point-to-multipoint data in rural areas. But DirecTV has no broadband assets or plans. My best guess is that they will use this merger as an excuse to move people off copper, something they are already working hard at. But there is also the chance that this is all smoke and mirrors to help get the FCC to approve the merger.

Google and the NFL

The new NFL logo went into use at the 2008 draft.

The new NFL logo went into use at the 2008 draft. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google has announced that it is interested in buying the Sunday package from the NFL to stream over the web. For those of you who are not sports fans, this means every regular Sunday football game (just not the Sunday or Monday night games or the mid-week game).

The Sunday package today is available today only on DirectTV. A sports fan must buy a DirectTV regular programming package in order to buy what DirectTV markets as the Sunday ticket. DirectTV simulcasts all Sunday games, so there are a number of games playing at one time.  DirectTV owns the rights through the end of the 2014 season and the package comes up for bid again.

The football programming currently costs DirectTV $1 billion per year, and one has to imagine the price is going to go up in a bidding war. But obviously Google can afford this.

I would think that losing football would be devastating to DirectTV. As a serious sports fan, I know of a lot of sports fans who subscribe to DirectTV just for the right to buy the football package. If that goes away, DirectTV is going to see a number of subscribers melt away over the first year.

The whole idea of Google buying the NFL package raises all sorts of different issues:

  • This would give major legitimacy to OTT programming and could form the core of a Google on-line TV offering with some teeth. One has to think that Google is going to bundle this with other programming to get enough revenue to pay for the package. This could turn Google into a serious player in the content provider war.
  • One has to wonder if Google understands the lack of bandwidth in much of the country. DirectTV delivers football in high definition, and most fans routinely watch multiple games at the same time or want to quickly flip between games. This country is divided into a lot of broadband haves and have-nots. Certainly customers on fiber like Verizon FiOS will love football on the web. But there are still a significant number of rural households who can’t get real broadband. And even more importantly, there are a whole lot of towns that don’t get enough broadband to watch multiple football games in HD.
  • Interestingly, the FCC has been tracking the availability of broadband by letting the service providers tell the FCC what they offer where. And everybody knows this process is highly flawed and that a lot of the reporting is very far from reality. Moving football to the web is going to more effective than any broadband map at showing who has and does not have adequate broadband. All we need to do to track where broadband is inadequate is to follow the complaints about Google football.
  • On the other hand, Google would be opening up the Sunday football package to a lot of new households. There are a lot of people today that can’t get DirectTV, either due to a clear look at the right part of the sky or else from living in a place, like a high-rise that doesn’t allow satellite TV.
  • And Google football is really perfect for somebody like me who is not always in the same place every Sunday. I would assume that if I am a subscriber that I am going to be able to watch as long as I can find a good broadband connection. I think there will quickly be web boards that track which hotels have good or poor internet and business travelers will be going to the good ones and avoiding the poor ones.

Sports programming is the one wild card in the programming world for which there is no substitute. To any sports fan there is the NFL and then there is everything else.

It has also been reported that ESPN is considering a web-package that they would only sell to web-providers who bundle it with a larger programming line-up. And one has to think that if ESPN works out this kind of deal that the college football networks will follow suit. If NFL football, college football and ESPN become available on the web, then landline cable TV is going to have lost its grip on a lot of households. This has to be a concern for the big cable companies.