Cablevision, New Jersey Transit and the Rise of TV Everywhere

There's news today that Cablevision and New Jersey Transit have just signed a deal for Cablevision to introduce WiFi service onto all NJT trains. (By 2016, but hey, you can't have everything.)

Now as a daily NJT commuter, I was thrilled to read this on a personal level, but it's the potential impact on the TV industry that's really got my interest piqued.

What this offers is one of the first examples of a legitimate use case for regular out-of-home TV viewing. As I've noted in previous posts, outside of live sports, there just aren't that many places where you'd watch TV away from home. (It's not like you are going to go down to Starbucks to watch "Game of Thrones" on your iPad. And most people don't travel for work as much as the readers of this blog likely do.)

Countries where out of home viewing is popular tend to have public transportation systems with either WiFi or really good 4G. The US has neither. That's why the Cablevision/NJ Transit deal could really be the start of something. Most NJT riders have fairly lengthy rides (upwards of 30 minutes) and so plenty of time to sit and either watch live TV or an entire program that they'd recorded on their DVR.

A lot will depend on how much bandwidth you're getting, as anyone who's ever tried to fire up HBO Go in a hotel room can attest to, but assuming it's good quality and doesn't have multiple dead zones, we could be seeing the start of a whole new behavior pattern.

In New Jersey, anyway.

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The Not So Secret Life of the American Teenager

There’s been so much written lately about teenagers in the age of social media, so much of it patently ridiculous (e.g. I talked to my sister and her friends and thus extrapolated what all teenagers were up to) and/or posited by people who haven’t actually seen a teenager since they themselves were one, that I felt a tirade was in order. So here goes:

What’s the one constant about teenagers, of any generation, beyond the whole horniness thing? The fact that so many teens are constantly trying on new personalities and new identities just to see what it feels like or to see what fits. And so what apps they are into varies wildly from day to day, from school to school, from clique to clique and (especially) from girls to boys.

Facebook is the one constant. They may tell you they don’t really like it, don’t like seeing the dumb things people post on it, but reality check: so do most adults. And like teens, we may gripe about it, but we still use it.

Why? Because it’s its own self-contained theme park. You can chat, you can play games, you can look at pictures, listen to music, stalk old friends-- there’s a whole world of things you can do on Facebook depending on your mood. And everyone you know is on there, from Grandma to the kid you sat next to in kindergarten, so it’s got the same repellers and attractors as home. Especially if you’re 15 and undecided whether it’s comforting or mortifying that your mom “liked” your picture from soccer practice.

Apps are like teenage fashion choices. One day you’re wearing Ugg boots because they’re cool and trendy, the next day you decide they’re stupid and pretentious and want nothing to do with them. Substitute Pinterest or Twitter or Snapchat and you get the picture. And that shouldn’t be the least bit surprising: teenagers are like that, they’re capricious about pretty much everything from friends to music to the mood they’re in when they get home. And they have been like that since we invented them back in the 1950s.

So let’s stop trying to define them and assigning them a specific taste in apps. Vine is hot this month because comedians are making funny videos/hipsters are making cool artsy videos/someone was playing with it in study hall and everyone started watching/my older brother and his friends said it was cool.

Next month it’ll be something else.

Which is not to say that every teenager is doomed to spend their middle school and high school years in a permanent state of app flux. Sometimes it feels right and so you stick with it. But what that “it” is varies so widely, it’s foolish to try and define. The one thing we do know is that the next Facebook isn’t here yet. Facebook still feels like “home” and with the possible exception of Instagram and Snapchat, all the other apps are about interacting with others or about being entertained. None of them are the new Facebook, either singly or in combination.

The new Facebook won’t be here for a while: sea changes like that don’t come about very often. But when it does, don’t worry about trying to identify it: like the Supreme Court said about pornography, you’ll know it when you see it.

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The Perils Of DIY Development

“We’re just going to build it ourselves.”

There are few words more disheartening to a tech company than a potential client who decides to build something on their own.

It’s easy to understand why: there’s an IT director who’s constantly having to battle the impression that his only function is to fix the printer when it breaks down. Who looks at the product, gets a sense of what it does and decides he can figure out how to build it for half the price the external vendor wants to charge him.

There’s the marketing team, who wants to bring in their preferred design team and who want to be able to control the look and feel of the site/app, control they believe they’ll lose if they bring in an outside vendor.

Then there’s the CFO, who looks at the bottom line and sees a significant savings from taking things in house.

So what’s the catch?

Building things internally can be very cost effective... if you’re going to leave your site or app up for two to three months or less. After that, it’s not. You’ve got to factor in the cost of maintaining, upgrading, updating and keeping everything up to date with the current operating system. That means every time Apple upgrades the iOS, you’ve got to upgrade your app or site too. New functionality (e.g. voice commands) suddenly becoming popular and a must-have? Your problem.

And the reason why it’s truly your problem is that you likely don’t have a full time staff of engineers on hand. So you’ve had to outsource pieces of the project, if not the whole thing, and now you’ve got to hire new engineers and hope that they can figure out the code the first group wrote.

That’s particularly true if you hired a design shop to design the site and let them do the buildout for you. The UX may be beautiful and the design cutting edge, but if the underlying code isn’t up to snuff, you’re in trouble once you move to version 2.0.

That’s why it makes sense to hire a company that specializes in building and maintaining whatever it is you’re launching. Because then all those updates are their problem. Or not so much of a problem, since they anticipate those sort of changes and are able to roll out updates more efficiently and cost-effectively since they’re writing the code for a range of projects, not just yours. That keeps costs down and makes sure you stay up to date in a timely fashion.

One caveat here is that many of the these builders and/or systems integrators view design and UX as a necessary evil, which is the last thing you want to hear if you’re in the entertainment business. That’s why (shameless plug alert!) KIT has invested in a top-notch UX and design department: we want to be the ones who help design the app or site, build it and maintain it.

Which makes us a rarity: most design shops don’t excel at building, most builders don’t excel at design. To get both in one company is a luxury, but that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice: rather than give short shrift to one of these options, you’d do well to hire two companies, one to design and one to build and maintain. It may not sound like the most cost-effective move, but it the long run, it will be worth it as you’ll have a well-designed site that operates and updates smoothly.

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Maybe The Meteor Is Inside A Roku Box

We talk a lot about how it’s going to take a meteor to disrupt the way we watch television, so tightly bound are the legal arrangements that impede innovation. But maybe that meteor is already here and we don’t know it yet.

Maybe that meteor looks a lot like a Roku box.

Roku is far and away the most successful of the streaming devices, both from a sales perspective and from a usability perspective (I test them out both in the office and at home and Roku is the winner hands down - more content, easier to use and cheaper.)

And now, in addition to all the network apps, there are MVPD apps: Time Warner introduced an app a few months back that has over 300 channels - including all the good ones - housed in a far more user friendly interface than we’ve ever seen from an MVPD.

Which raises the issue of network apps versus MVPD apps.

To date, most of the activity around second screen apps has come from the networks, HBO GO and Watch ESPN being two of the more prominent examples. But there’s a limit to how many apps we can open - imagine if your TV experience consisted of 150 apps, each for a different network with a different navigation and different experience.

Which is where the MVPD can come in. Live viewing aside, there needs to be some sort of organizational framework for the various network experiences, a common discovery engine and a way to personalize each user’s experience on a macro level, not just network by network.

So here’s where the MVPD can come in. Imagine Time Warner didn’t just have an app but that the Roku OS was their app. They would handle discovery, wish lists, recommendations and the like, and they’d enforce standardized ad units and ways to measure the success of both ads and programming.

But once you crossed that line, once you moved from the home screen to the show of your choice, you’d move into the world the network created.

That would, in turn, give the networks a renewed sense of purpose. The loss of brand identity is what's keeping network executives up at night. (They’ve fallen rapidly since the days of “must see TV.”) A unique second (and/or first) screen experience would help each network to maintain its identity and connect with the user, while the MVPD would still be able to create a framework with the program guide, controlling things like discovery and channel flipping along with any DVR functionality (which is likely to take the form of catch-up TV.)

Is it the system you’d design if you were designing TV from scratch? Probably not. But then again you probably wouldn’t design networks or production companies into the picture either. We work with what we’ve got, and this seems like it could be a very good solution. It doesn’t necessarily require Roku-- you could create it on any streaming device, and the only caveat is that you’d need a decent sized pipe to ensure that picture quality was the same as it is on broadcast TV.

But that’s it. The pieces are all there. Someone’s just got to put them together. And start killing off the dinosaurs.

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Heresies

Every so often it's a good exercise to examine some of the core beliefs of a company or industry and call out the ones that don't make any sense. In the short run, saying out loud what a lot of people have been thinking pisses off  those who are heavily invested in these now outmoded ideas, but in the long run, it's healthier for all involved to recalibrate.

TV Everywhere Wasn’t Worth The Battle. It sounded like a great idea at the time: you can take your television with you anywhere you go and watch it on your tablet or smartphone. The reality, however, shows a very limited number of use cases beyond sports and live events.

Because seriously, when are you going to have a half hour to an hour to watch live TV outside the house in a place where you have a decent 4G or WiFi connection?

It’s not like you’re going to leave your bedroom or living room to go down to Starbucks to spend an hour watching Game of Thrones. Sitting in the park may sound appealing, but anyone who’s ever tried to use an iPad outdoors knows it’s not a pleasant experience. Hotel rooms? Maybe, if you want to watch something off your DVR, but for most people, travel is a once or twice yearly event.

Commuting is the one use case that makes sense, but here again: (a) what percentage of Americans commute 30 minutes or more each way via public transportation, and (b) moving from cell tower to cell tower does not create an optimal condition for video reception. So even if you solve for B, A still makes it a niche product.

TV Everywhere does make sense inside the house for personal viewing: using the iPad as the bedroom or kitchen TV. But that’s it and it certainly doesn’t seem worth the amount of money the networks and the MVPDs have spent in legal battles over it.


Cord Plussers Are More Common Than Cord Cutters/Nevers: A Nielsen study that came out this week confirmed something I’d suspected all along: Netflix and other OTT subscription video on demand (SVOD) services are far more popular with upper income households who use them as an add-on to their existing Titanium Level pay TV packages. Let’s call this group “Cord Plussers” as they’re looking for options beyond what their cable package offers and for $8/month each, they think it’s a steal to add on Netflix and Hulu Plus.

Never mind that the success of Netflix and Hulu is a huge fumble by the MVPDs, many of whom maintain extensive VOD libraries that could compete with Netflix and who should be enabling the kind of 7 day catch-up TV you find in Europe, but who have outsourced that function (and then some) to Hulu, Amazon and Netflix-- the price of these additional services and the value add they bring is enough for people to add them without feeling the need to drop their existing pay TV service.

As for cord nevers, we’ve been through this already, but to reiterate, it’s not that surprising that certain busy, single, tech savvy 20somethings don’t feel the need for a cable subscription: at some point, as they grow older and settle down, they probably will. That, and study after study fails to find any evidence of cord cutting outside of the anecdotal evidence offered by tech bloggers.

Another recent study showed that 18-24 year olds watch an average of 5 hours of TV online each week. What's important to note is that’s not 5 hours they chose to watch TV on their laptops instead of a big screen TV, but 5 hours they carved out to watch TV online in the absence of an actual television set. People really do like watching TV.


Twitter Is Not The Future of Second Screen. This is another seemingly obvious one: most people are not on Twitter, so why do we expect Twitter to become the dominant medium for second screen?

If you’re Fox, and (to use an extremely generous figure*) 30% of your American Idol audience is on Twitter, but 100% of that same audience can take part in a second screen poll, which one are you going to go for?

It’s a win for Fox if the 30% who are on Twitter start tweeting about the poll, but it’s crucial to remember that they are just talking to each other: the 70% who are not on Twitter will never see what they're saying.

Here's the problem: Right now, Twitter has a much larger install base than any second screen app. It's also free to implement, since the only real cost is whatever "tweet about our show" promotion the network decides to run. So in Spring 2013, the numbers work in its favor.  But that won't last for long: as second screen becomes more ubiquitous, the percentage of people using Twitter will be dwarfed by the number using second screen. If MVPDs and/or TV manufacturers go ahead and make second screen the primary program guide and remote control option, you're looking at close to a 100% adoption rate.


Second Screen Engagement Will Never Replace Marketing.  Like it’s cousin, social media, second screen TV is really good at two things: (a) making hard core fans even more hardcore by giving them an outlet for their obsession and (b) moving casual fans up a notch by fleshing out the experience.

This does not mean every hardcore fan and every casual fan: it means just a few of them.

Because really, how many shows can you be a hardcore fan of? 3? 6? In any season, there are only a handful of shows people can fully devote their energy to. Second Screen interaction can help make sure a show remains one of those handful, but that’s it: it can’t create interest where previously there was none.


Aereo Is Not Worth Worrying About. While the networks are all up in arms about Aereo, it's worth thinking about why someone would want it: while Aereo plus Netflix may be a way to replace cable for $20/month, the resulting experience is not all that desirable. Aereo has a less than ideal UI (see my review on VideoNuze) and, like Netflix, you don't get the "always on" option - you've got to make a choice every time you use it and as this piece from Nilay Patel at The Verge points out, that creates an experience that's very different than just turning on the TV and flipping the channels.

That, and the notion that Aereo plus Netflix is a perfectly good replacement for a full cable package is debatable. Lots of people still want their MTV. And ESPN and Disney and Nick and Comedy Central. So the question remains - is it worth it?

UI and content issues aside, all Aereo offers is a very basic cable package for $8/month. There's no reason the MVPDs couldn't replicate this (and then some - throw in some cable only channels) at the same price point and drive Aereo out of business. So it's all sounding like much ado about nothing. Or much ado about retrans fees, which winds up being about nothing.


TV is the one medium that has not yet been disrupted by the digital revolution... yet. That's why it's so fascinating to watch the various pieces as the industry slowly changes and important to keep track of what's a wish and what's reality.

 *Extremely generous. According to a recent Pew report, only 14% of Millennials use Twitter. And that’s use Twitter period, not "use Twitter regularly to chat about the TV show they're currently watching."

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From VideoNuze - Aereo: The Hands On Review

I’ve been testing out Aereo for the past two weeks (see video above), ever since they expanded their service area to include the entire New York metropolitan area. I tested it at home where I have a blazing fast 50 Mbps FIOS connection using both their new Roku app and my iPad 3, and outside the house, where I rely on a Verizon Wireless iPhone 5 with 4G service. (Well, when 4G is available, that is.) 

Interface: The interface on the iPad and iPhone are fairly similar. There aren’t that many channels: Aereo has fleshed out the over-the-air offering with iON and a couple of foreign-language offerings, but most users are going to be looking for content from the Big 4 networks and PBS. On the Roku app, the channels are arranged in Roku’s linear filmstrip layout, so that getting from one end to the other is quite a hassle. 

Changing the Channel: This is Aereo’s biggest fail: changing the channel is a monumental hassle on all their devices. On the iPad or iPhone, it’s a multi-step process: Minimize the screen, hit “done”, go back to the channel guide, find the channel you want to switch to, go to that channel’s screen, hit “play” (versus “record”), go to the first screen, maximize the video.

READ THE REST AT VIDEONUZE

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From NPR: Why Are TV Remotes So Terrible?

I made my debut on NPR this morning, and part of Neda Ulaby's piece on the issues that are holding back tech advances in the TV industry.

Let's call it the baby sitter's dilemma.

If you go to someone's house and pick up the TV remote, chances are, you won't know how it works. You know the situation's bad when even a tech writer who also majored in physics at an Ivy League school is confused by her own TV remote.

"It's unbearable to me," moans Ars Technica writer Casey Johnston, of her remote's many cryptic buttons. "Sub.code? Comp/mix? I couldn't even tell you what one of those things do, but then assign them to the same button? It just doesn't make any sense."

So why, at a moment when both technology and TV shows are so terrific, are interfaces so clumsy and counterintuitive? 

By interfaces, I mean both the actual, super-inscrutable remote controls and the unwieldy grid on our screens that many of us are forced to navigate to find what we want to watch.
And I have to confess the entire idea for this piece was inspired by Alan Wolk. His official title is global lead analyst at KIT Digital, and he writes a terrific blog called The Toad Stool. That's where I read his essay, "The TV Business: A Primer For The Uninformed," which elegantly points out how inelegant our TV interfaces are.

READ THE REST AND HEAR THE INTERVIEW AT NPR.ORG 

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New On Digiday: Second Screen Is Not Social TV

While the terms “social TV” and “second screen” are often used interchangeably, they are, in fact, two different experiences: Social TV is a subset of second screen — and a somewhat minor one at that.  

As technology and adoption advance, every show will need to come up with its own unique spin on what constitutes valuable second-screen content. For a baseball game, it may be a very graphics-intensive take on statistics; for a reality game show, it may be online voting. Those decisions are up to the networks and the individual show runners, who’ll need to balance their goals (e.g., increase tune-in or cement loyalty) with what their budget allows.  

READ THE REST AT DIGIDAY.COM

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