Tag Archives: Television

Should You Carry OTT Programming?

Every cable provider today needs to consider carrying Over-the-Top (OTT) channels on their cable system. OTT programming is content that is available on the web and includes such things as Hulu and Netflix. There are a number of reasons to consider this:

  • I have discussed the phenomenon of cord-cutters in other blog posts. The large organizations that track cable customers report that a lot of customers are dropping traditional cable. Nielson reported that at least one million people dropped traditional cable last year and that number is expected to increase. The cable industry appears to be at the same place that the telephone industry was ten years ago and everybody expects more and more people to drop cable TV every year much as has happened to land line telephones. To the extent that you can give customers easy access to OTT programming on your cable system you may convince some of them not to leave your system.
  • There are a lot of customers buying OTT boxes, which are devices that let them watch OTT programming on their TVs and also on other devices using WiFi such as pads and smartphones. These are devices like Apple TV, Roku, Boxee and Playstation.  Once a customer has an alternative box in their home sitting next to your settop box they have mentally started the process of dropping you. If you can give customers easy access to the OTT programming they want you will have lowered their incentive to buy an alternate box.
  • You can use OTT programming to develop new products. Nobody makes much money today with cable TV. You can create a new bundle of programming by combining OTT, the basic network channels and local programming that can be more profitable than the large packages you sell of many channels. I will discuss this more below.

There are a number of ways to get OTT programming onto your cable system. You can gather the OTT program sources yourself and put them onto open channels on your system. There are devices available that will let you create a channel out of web content. For instance, you can create a channel that would have buttons for the most popular web content.

But an easier way is to use somebody who has already done that aggregation. There are several vendors who have packaged OTT channels together to make a ‘channel line-up’. Probably the best of these right now is a company called AIOTV (All-in-One TV). This is available on the web to anybody, but they also have a version of their programming that is designed to be used as a web channel.

AIOTV will supply the feed to you for free to get onto your cable system. They sell nationwide advertising and they insert ads at the beginning of each show that a customer watches. If you put them onto your cable system they will send you a small revenue sharing check each month for carrying their ads. It’s not a lot, and the revenue is not the primary reason to do this, but it’s still nice to get a check.

The other nice feature of AIOTV is that their platform gives you an easy way to create additional web channels of your own. There innumerable ways for you to use this capability and you could add additional web content to your line-up that is not already on AIOTV. However, the best use of this capability is to use it to create local programming. You can use AIOTV or other platforms to create a channel for every school, church, non-profit or other entity in your area. The programming would be up to the entities who have channels and they can use it to put items of interest to your community onto your cable system. For example, this is the easiest and lowest cost way to get things like little league games and high-school sports onto your network.

With AIOTV or some similar provider you can create some sense out of local programming. The platform gives you a way to create a traditional looking channel line-up so that people can find the local channels they want. Each local channel supplier also has the ability to operate their channel so that it is continuous feed or on-demand.

Local programming is a way to get and keep customers on your cable network. Other communities that broadcast a lot of local content say that this becomes one of the more popular things on their network. People want to watch local sports and graduation ceremonies and other local events. Most cable systems today carry local city-council meetings, but there is a lot more events of local interest in every community.

Finally, you can use OTT and local programming to create a new product. For example, every cable provider has a basic product that consists of the broadcast networks such as ABC and NBC along with a few other channels. You can create a pretty robust package that includes your basic line-up, OTT programming and local programming. Priced at something like $20 per month this would be the most profitable product on your cable system. Today most companies are lucky if they break even with the larger cable packages after paying for all of the programming.

This kind of line-up offers customers a ton of programming including web access to many of the most popular shows they watched on traditional cable. I have anecdotally spoken to several people who have dropped traditional cable for a Roku or Apple TV box and they say that they don’t feel like they have suffered any big drop-off in options. If you can add live network TV and local programming to this mix you have a robust line-up that many of your customers are going to see as an attractive alternative.

I think that cable systems are on the verge of pricing a lot of customers out of being able to afford their services. Expanded basic packages are now $60 to $70 per month in most markets and continue to increase in price every year. So consider a preemptive strike and give your customers a pre-packaged lower cost alternative rather than waiting on them to go find this on their own.

Should You Build a Cable TV Headend?

I still meet new businesses all of the time who are just entering the cable TV business for the first time or who are opening up remote markets from their service core. In the past it was a no brainer to build a new headend for a new market as long as that market had enough potential customers to justify the capital outlay. But I find myself hesitating today when I am asked the question of whether one should build a new headend. I don’t think the answer is an automatic yes any longer and there are a number of reasons for this.

Transport. One huge consideration is bandwidth transport. It always makes more sense to use the signal from an existing headend somewhere as long as you can get the signal there for less ongoing cost than building a new headend. The amount of bandwidth needed to transmit a full channel line-up is huge and can easily require at least 100 Mbps. The bandwidth varies a lot depending upon the specific method that is being used to send the TV signal to customers. For example, the bandwidth needed to send a lineup that has both analog and digital tiers will be larger than a lineup that is all IPTV. And the amount of bandwidth is even greater if you want to transmit video on demand.

The price of transport varies widely by location due to the availability of fiber, but overall there has been a big reduction in transport prices. The long-haul transport business has gotten very competitive and there are a host of companies that sell not only bandwidth, but also dark fiber or fiber lamdas. Also, a number of new middle-mile networks were built with federal stimulus grants and those networks, by definition, have to offer reasonably priced bandwidth. In many cases I am seeing transport as a good alternative to building a new headend, whereas a few years ago building a headend almost always looked like a lower-cost alternative.

Aggregators. You also should consider using a network aggregator. One that many of my clients use is Avail Media. Avail has aggregated a channel line-up that comes from the satellite directly in MPEG4 format, meaning that it can be taken directly from the satellite and used in an IPTV distribution network. The advantage of doing this is in the cost savings for the headend. A lot of the capital cost in a traditional headend is spent for equipment that translates TV signals from one format to another. The cost, size and power requirements for a headend drop significantly if the TV signals don’t have to be translated.

Of course, Avail and others aggregators charge a premium for getting the signal to you in the right format and you need to do the math to make sure that there is a net savings in equipment compared to their ongoing transport charges. But many of my clients have found aggregator arrangements that have saved them money.

Headend Sharing. Before I would build a new headend today I would always look around to see if there is an existing headend in the area that I could share. Generally, almost anybody except for the major cable companies would be interested in sharing a headend. Sharing a headend can help a headend owner offset the cost of running their headend while requiring very little ongoing effort after the initial connection.

There are a number of issues to consider when thinking about sharing a headend, but I have dozens of clients who have figured out ways to share. The biggest issue is the signal format. For example, it would make no sense to share an analog headend with somebody who is operating an IPTV system. The cost of translating channels from analog to digital would be almost as costly as building a new headend. There are also contractual issues with some of the programmers who make you jump through extra legal hoops before they will agree to let you transport signal from an existing headend to a different operator in a different market. But headend sharing makes a lot of sense and today, and sharing would almost always be my preference over building a new headend.

Other Issues.  There are always other considerations to consider. For example, if you share a headend or buy content from an aggregator you are still going to have to somehow insert the local must-carry networks onto your system. So you will need to a ‘mini-headend’ of some sort that lets you add your own content to the content that comes from somebody else.

Even if you share somebody else’s headend you might want to consider operating and inserting your own video-on-demand. This will cut down on the transport needed between the locations. If the market is large enough you also might want to consider inserting your own local advertising rather than inflict ads from some distant market upon your customers.

Will There Be a Tipping Point in the Cable Industry?

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make ...

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is not a book review, but a few years ago I read a book called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell. This booked looked at examples of tipping points – when minor events reach a level which triggers a more significant change. In the book he looked at a number of popular culture events such as how Hush Puppy shoes went from being something worn by New York hipsters to being in every mall in America in a short period of time. It was a thought-provoking book that looked in particular at how certain types of people are able to effect much bigger changes in the world than ought to be expected.

What made me think back on this book is that I have been thinking a lot lately about the cable TV industry. There are a ton of those ‘minor’ events happening in the industry and I have talked about some of them in my blog before. And I have been thinking about whether these small trends can accumulate together to fundamentally change the industry or if it will just change more slowly over time. I’ve been trying to think about what it might take for the whole industry to reach a tipping point.

We have a parallel to what might happen with cable TV service by looking back at what happened to home telephone service. Fifteen years ago about 98% of households had a traditional home telephone. But then Vonage and other VoIP carriers came along a little over a decade ago and whittled into the home phone market. But the VoIP carriers collectively did not do that great and after a couple of years in the business had captured only about 3% of the total market. But then other factors began hitting the industry. For instance, companies like Skype arose allowing people to make calls over the Internet without even using a phone. But the number one factor that has killed many home telephones has been the meteoric rise of cell phones. In looking back I think the landline phone industry really started losing lines when the cellular industry introduced family plans and all of the members of a family could have a cell phone.

In a study done in the first half of 2012, the Center for Disease Control asked many questions including ones about telephone usage. They found that the number of households with landline phones has dropped below 65%. In looking at the statistics in that study I conclude that the landline telephone industry never reached a tipping point. The industry certainly declined over a fairly long period of time and will almost certainly continue to do so. But there has been no tipping point such as was seen in the music store business which went mostly bust within just a few years after iTunes got popular. And so I ask myself if there will be a tipping point with the cable TV industry or if it will instead go into a long steady decline like the landline telephone business?

There are a number of factors that are affecting the cable TV industry, and most of them are relatively new. Some of these include:

  • Over-the-top video where programming is available on the web instead of by a traditional cable TV subscription.
  • Cord-cutting. Neilson has estimated that there are now 5 million homes in the US that don’t watch any form of TV and that this number grew by 1 million last year.
  • Cord-nevers. These are young households who get their entertainment from cell phones, pads and other methods and who do not sign-up for traditional cable TV packages when they start a new household.
  • Rate fatigue. The ever climbing cable bills that are pricing cable service out of the range of many households. This leads some customers to leave cable but others to downgrade to smaller packages.
  • Ever increasing programming costs. To a significant degree the cable TV rate increases are being driving by the programmers who charge more each year to cable operators for carrying their content.
  • Tons of companies competing for cable’s customers like NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and many others. And to some degrees the broadcast networks are helping them by making programming available on the web soon after it is aired live.
  • Companies like Aereo making it easier for customers to watch TV on any device.
  • Really simple devices like Roku, Apple TV, Playstation and many others making it easier for the non-technical household to get alternate programming onto the TV.
  • Unique programming being created just for the web. NetFlix and others are now developing programming directly for the web. There is also a movement to pick up popular shows that get cancelled and to continue them on the web.

There are a few experts that believe that the cable industry will be able to hold its own, even with all of these trends going on. But there are a lot more experts who are positive that the industry will decline, but the predictions of how fast vary from a slow decline like telephone service up to predictions of a fiery crash like what happened to CD stores due to iTunes. And there is ample evidence that the decline has begun. I saw a statistic that said that in 2012 the cable industry as a whole added a net of 50,000 new customers, wherein past years that would have been millions. And there is evidence that every one of the above trends is hurting the industry.

And there is more disruption to come. Wireless connections have gotten faster making it easier to watch TV while on the go. John McCain just introduced a bill that would promote (but not guarantee) a la carte programming. Comcast just increased their cable modem speeds nationwide. It just becomes easier and easier for a household to elect something other than the traditional cable TV packages.

Like many I certainly foresee an industry that is going to lose customers at a faster and faster pace over time. But I just don’t know if all of these little factors can somehow produce a tipping point for the whole industry. With that said, I believe that the effect of these changes will differ by market and I expect that there will be companies and markets that reach a tipping point long before the whole industry does.

What is Behind the Aereo Controversy?

Image representing iPad as depicted in CrunchBase

The Aereo ruling on April 1 certainly has the cable industry in an uproar. In that ruling a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that Aereo’s wireless streams to customers are not a ‘public performance’ and thus do not constitute copyright infringement. On Friday Glenn Britt, the CEO of Time Warner, said that his company was considering pulling the broadcast networks off of his cable TV systems and sending them to customers over a radio in the same way that is being done by Aereo. And recently, in response to the Aereo ruling the broadcast networks threatened to pull all of their content off the air and move their programming to cable TV. So what is up with Aereo, and can these companies do what they have threatened?

Aereo has an interesting product that seems to have found a market niche, at least in New York City where it is now operating. Aereo sets up a radio link to each customer and sends them a 28 channel packagethat includes the major networks, some other low-cost networks and some spanish and asian-language channels. Aereo can be installed on any Windows or Mac computer and can then be streamed to iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. It can also be made to work with a Roku box. And one would imagine it will soon be made to work with other pads and tablets. The service also lets a consumer record some programming for later playback. The pricing is cheap compared to cable TV with a $1 per day plan, monthly or annual plans, including a monthly plan for $8 that lets a customer watch everything live plus record and play back 20 hours of programming per month.

Why does this controversy even exist? Can’t people just receive the broadcast networks over the air? On June 12, 2009 all full-power analog television transmissions ended and starting with that date the full-power television stations, which include all of the major networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox could only broadcast in digital. Customer now need a Digital Television Adapter (DTA) to receive the signals and any home that is near to a station can receive it for free. But it is not easy for the average consumer to get these signals from the TV to mobile devices, and Aereo’s real marketing niche is providing signals to computers, iPhones and iPads.

Why are Time Warner and the cable companies so stirred up over Aereo? Aereo seems to have found the niche of people who want to watch mainstream programming without being tethered to their TV. If Aereo was limited to New York City this probably wouldn’t be a huge deal, but they have announced that the service is coming to 22 other major markets in 2013.

As is the case with all big business controversies it all comes down to money. In the 1992 Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, Congress required that all cable operators obtain the permission from broadcasters before carrying their signals on their cable systems. For a while this permission was granted for free, but in recent years the broadcasters have asked for significant fees and it is not unusual to see each local broadcast network charging $1 or more per customer per month for retransmission consent. So a cable system now has to pay that much each for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, and in some markets multiple stations of some of these. This has driven large increases in cable rates and is now a point of huge contention between broadcasters and the cable companies.

The broadcasters are angry that Aereo is able to bypass their fees since retransmission fees currently make up as much as 10% of their revenue. And the cable companies are angry that Aereo has gotten out of paying the same fees that they must pay. And they are worried that Aereo will accelerate the trend of customers who are ditching traditional cable TV in favor of programming from the web and elsewhere, the trend referred to as the cord-cutters.

Can Time Warner really do the same thing that Aereo is doing? Certainly Time Warner or anybody could form a company that does the same thing as Aereo and compete with them. Such a company could sell the same sort of line-up and do it using radios like Aereo has done. But they first must recognize that it’s important that Aereo is using radios because this is what allows them to not be a cable TV company, which is defined as somebody who delivers cable content using cables. So Time Warner would have to use radios also. And Time Warner is still hoping that the Supreme Court will look at the issue so it’s not entirely certain that Aereo, or anybody, has the legal last word that this is okay.

So Time Warner could establish an Aereo-clone company and do exactly what Aereo is doing. But they could not do this as an alternative to putting the network channels onto their cable system. In the aforementioned 1992 Cable Act, Congress set forth the rules for cable systems to carry broadcast channels, referred to as the must-carry rules. Congress said that a cable system with 12 or fewer channels must carry at least three local broadcast channels. Larger cable systems must carry all local broadcast channels, up to a maximum of 1/3 of their system. This means that Time Warner could not pull the local broadcast networks off of their cable and deliver it in a different way. But Time Warner could probably sell an Aereo-like product to somebody if that is the only product they sell to that customer.

Finally, can the broadcast networks pull their signals off the air and move them to be cable only? I can’t think of any reason why not. At that point they would no longer be a broadcaster and they would avoid all of the FCC rules applicable to over-the-air broadcasters. But if they do this they would become like any other cable network, and so ABC would be treated the same as HBO or TBS or any other cable network. It is likely that such a change would infuriate Congress since around 15% of the people in cities still receive free TV over the air. There would certainly be political repercussions from a broadcast network deciding to become just another cable network. For instance, might they lose their ability to carry professional football?

At the bottom of this controversy are huge dollars and also the underlying fear of the cable industry that Aereo is one more factor that is accelerating the bypass of their systems. It seems like Aereo might be in a similar position to MCI back when they broke the long distance monopoly. Aereo has stuck a sharp stick in the eyes of both the cable companies and the broadcasters and there is one hell of an interesting fight yet to come.

Cable TV Trends

There are a number of trends affecting the cable TV industry that all add up to an industry that is going to be seeing big changes over the next decade. These are what I see as the biggest trends affecting the industry:

  • Cord Cutters. The number of people who are completely dropping cable is growing and the speed of that drop is accelerating. I have seen several different recent estimate that 5 million households will have completely dropped all cable service by the end of 2013. And only the cable providers know how many other million households that have cut back on the size of the package they buy rather than drop service totally. I anecdotally know many people, myself included, who have gone from the big cable packages to something less – in my case I now have only the basic package of about 20 channels.
  • Higher Programming Costs. Programming costs have been rising steadily for the last decade and until the last few years were climbing between 6% and 7% per year. Costs have climbed even faster in recent years due to the high fees being demanded by local network channels in each market (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox). Local network programming was free for cable companies until a few years ago, but now they paying as much as $1 per month per customer for each major network channel. Many contracts between cable providers and programmers are for multiple years and those contracts show the price increases are going to continue to come.
  • Even Higher Rate Increases. The large cable companies have increased rates around 7% per year for many years. The programmers have usually blamed the size of the increases on increased programming costs, but until the recent increases in local network programming the increases were generally about twice what was needed to cover programming cost increases. If the rate increases continue at that level, then a $70 package today will cost $129 in ten years. Prices are already at a point that are forcing households off the network.
  • Very Solid Cable Modem Business. To a large degree the cable companies have won the war with DSL. However, they have stiff competition from Verizon and FiOS on fiber. There is limited competition outside the Verizon footprint, but with Google building fiber in Kansas City and having announced Austin and Provo there is going to be more competition for the residential business.

What do these trends add up to? I see them resulting in the following:

  • Ever decreasing cable customer base. The most dire trend for the industry is that young people are not interested in traditional cable, and as that demographic ages the percentage of households wanting cable is going to drop faster and faster. Add to this the households dropping due to never-ending price increases and most experts see cable subscribership going down the same path as landline telephones. Subscribers are dropping somewhat slowly now, but every prediction I have seen believes the rate of disconnects will accelerate over time.
  • Cable Providers Become Data Companies. As cable penetration decreases the cable companies will become more and more reliant on selling data. This is going to lead them over time to maximize their networks for providing bandwidth for data rather than cable TV. And I predict it also means that they will start raising data prices over time, something that we just started seeing in the last year. There is not much profit in selling cable packages and the cable companies could be more profitable selling data eventually (assuming they are in markets where they don’t have stiff competition).
  • Winnowing of Cable Networks. As the industry loses subscribers and as people downgrade from larger packages to smaller ones, the demand for some of the networks is going to diminish. One way for cable companies to control costs is going to be to whittle away at their line-up, and that is not that hard to do with 300+ channels on many cable systems. So some of the marginal networks are going to either die or greatly reduce the fees they charge if they want to stay in business.

There is one change that might affect the industry that could upset these trends, and that is a la carte programming.  There are a lot of barriers to make that happen, but cable companies might get new life if they are able to sell only those channels that people want to watch. It’s certainly possible that they could sell a package of 20 channels to a family at an affordable price and make more profit than they do today with the large expensive packages. But this is going to require a major change in an industry that is currently controlled by the programmers and not by the cable companies.

What Do Households Want?

The telecom industry has spent decades bringing residential customers the products we think they want. This has resulted in the ubiquitous triple-play bundle of telephone, data and cable TV. But one has to only spend a little time with a Millenial to know that customers are no longer satisfied with what we have been selling them. While many customers are still buying the traditional products, more and more people are actively looking for alternatives.

And alternatives are showing up. I have one client who has been serving over 20,000 cable TV customers for many years. But for the last year they have been steadily losing 200 customers each month and it doesn’t take a lot of math to see that in a decade they won’t have any cable customers left.

So I am advising clients to start looking at delivering products that people want today and into the future. To help figure out what those products might be, I think you have to start by understanding what customers want today.  I offer the following list of I have made a list of what I think households want today from their telecom provider:

The ability to use multiple devices shared across multiple networks. Customers want to a variety of devices to access the web. They want to seamlessly move from desk top to cell phone to pad to TV to game box. Customers want to be able to move back and forth between the cellular and home WiFi network for voice. Anyone who can facilitate this ability will have an edge.

Faster download and upload speeds. Households want to ability to operate multiple devices at the same time. This requires faster speeds and in some cases QOS.

Mobility. Customers want mobility in both directions, both into and out of the house. They want to be able to start a phone conversation on a cell phone and seamlessly transfer it to a landline when they get home or to the office. They want to be able to access data and do work at home or wherever they are.

Choice of video. Customers want the option to buy only the video they want to watch. And they want to watch it on multiple devices.  

Security and alarm services. Many households want reliable alarm services. They also want to easily operate cameras they can watch remotely.

Integrated entertainment. Customers want to share entertainment content. They want to watch what they want in different rooms and on different devices. They want to be able to move seamlessly from TV to PC to pad to phone. 

Use of cloud-based services. As more and more data is stored in the cloud, customers want an easy way to access and manage the cloud.

The ability to make impulse purchases. Customers want to be able to buy a TV show, a movie, a song and then experience it immediately. People are shifting from buying large monthly subscriptions (cable TV packages) to buying entertainment in small doses.

Help making things work. Households are faced with a confusing array of possible technical solutions and they will value anybody who can make their video, computers, wireless networks and other devices work seamlessly together.