Posts for 'Time Warner Cable'

Google announced late yesterday plans to extend its Google Fiber service to a second city, Olathe, KS (population 125,000), in Johnson County, about 30 minutes from Kansas City, where Google Fiber has been initially deployed. With the news, the question once again arises, if Google Fiber isn't a "hobby" (as Google executives recently stated), then what is it exactly? And by extension, what are its real implications for broadband ISPs, consumers and over-the-top video?

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Last week, when Time Warner Cable and the L.A. Dodgers sealed a deal creating a new regional sports network to carry the team's games, the Dodgers' CEO Stan Kasten released a statement that read in part, "Our fans deserve the best - the best players, the best baseball and the best experience - whether that's at the newly renovated Dodger Stadium or on television."

That's a wonderful aspiration, but there's one significant problem with it: the reality is that non-fans (or at least those that don't tune in regularly to watch the team play) will be paying the lion's share for all of these "bests." Given the reported terms of the new Time Warner Cable - Dodgers deal, by my calculations, the non-fans' tab could amount to a staggering $6 billion over the life of the deal, making it the single biggest non-fan "tax" the pay-TV world has yet tried to assess on beleaguered non-sports fans.

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Digitalsmiths has announced deals this morning to power personalized video search and discovery across all platforms for Time Warner Cable, and for i.TV, the TV guide app for iPhone/iPad, Nintento Wii U, AOL, Huffington Post and others.

Ben Weinberger, Digitalsmiths CEO, also told me this morning that the company's "Seamless Discovery" technology is now powering over 1 billion transactions per month, which consist of user requests for search, recommendations and other data. At this level, Ben believes Digitalsmiths is now the largest provider of search and recommendations in North America, its main geographic customer area.

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You gotta love Roku. In the insanely competitive world of consumer devices - where the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and others have enormous retail, financial and existing customer base advantages - little Roku just keeps on cranking out inexpensive, yet solid products, meaningful partnerships and scads of content deals, establishing itself as a leader in the connected TV space.

The latest evidence of Roku's momentum are two announcements at CES today; first, that it has signed up another 6 "Roku Ready" TV manufactures as partners whose models can accept the company's "Streaming Stick" device and second, that it has signed new video channel partners Blockbuster on Demand, Dailymotion, DISHWorld, Flingo, Fox Now, PBS, PBS Kids, Syfy and VEVO. All of these channels bring to 700 the number of video and audio choices in the Roku Channel Store, a breadth that easily rivals - though is clearly distinct from - today's pay-TV services.

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Talk to any pay-TV operator executive these days and you'll get an earful on the relentless rise in their programming costs - what they pay to deliver both cable and broadcast TV networks into their subscribers' homes. Programming costs drive up subscribers' rates, in turn exacerbating pay-TV's affordability crisis, which in turn exposes the industry to cord-cutting, cord-shaving and over-the-top alternatives.

As I've written numerous times, scratch the surface of the programming cost issue and the focus quickly turns to sports networks and more specifically Regional Sports Networks ("RSNs") which have the geographic rights to air their local professional teams' games. One pay-TV executive who's attempting to take a hard line on RSNs' escalating costs is Michael White, CEO of DirecTV, who, on the company's earnings call on Tuesday, once again said that "regional sports networks' structure in the industry is broken" and that "we are taxing most of our customers who wouldn't be willing to pay for that content."

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Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group and I are back for the 148th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG podcast.

First up this week we discuss Microsoft hiring former CBS Entertainment executive Nancy Tellem to develop original content for the Xbox platform and other devices. Colin thinks it's a odd choice because of the apparent mismatch between the type of programming CBS has excelled at vs. the type of programming that will likely resonate with Xbox owners. In particular, Colin notes that 40% of Xbox owners are age 18-24, whereas Nielsen has found that CBS's average viewer's age is 55. Clearly Microsoft is betting that Ms. Tellem can extend her significant programming skills to different formats, audiences and devices.

Speaking of confusing, we then turn our attention to comments that Time Warner Cable's COO Rob Marcus made this week in reference to the company potentially working with Apple on a set-top box. On the one hand he said that TWC is "open to giving up control of the user experience" to new devices, but on the other, that this does not mean it is willing "to give up the customer relationship." Both Colin and I find the two objectives at odds with one another, particularly when introducing a UI powerhouse like Apple into the living room. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, if cable operators partner with Apple and its set-top, it will be akin to allowing the fox into the henhouse. We know how that story ended.

Lastly, as frequent flyers, both of us were excited to read about Delta's new in-flight VOD plans, and JetBlue's forthcoming high-speed WiFI rollout. We discuss implications briefly.

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Peter Stern, Chief Strategy Officer of Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable operator in the U.S., spent time with me at the recent Cable Show, explaining a concept guiding the company's content distribution strategy he calls the "4 Any's." This refers to any content, any device, any time and anywhere. In the interview, Peter discusses how TWC is executing against each of the 4 any's and why they're so important.

In particular, Peter notes that all 255 linear cable networks TWC carries are now available for streaming within subscriber homes to certain devices. Next up is layering on VOD and out-of-home access. Peter talks about the roles of TWC's app for aggregated viewing experiences vs. how "super-fans" will gravitate to the networks' own apps (e.g HBO GO, WatchESPN, etc.).

Beyond content distribution, Peter also describes the strategy behind "CableWiFi," a new roaming collaboration announced at the Cable Show among 5 cable operators, totaling 50K hotspots nationwide (note WiFi usage is uncapped, which TWC believes is a real differentiator relative to wireless services) as well as why business services is a growing part of TWC's services portfolio.  Watch the interview (7 minutes, 34 seconds).

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