television

Dec 10, 2014 ∞

HBO without cable confirmed for April 2015

Finally, although HBO’s decision to use MLB Advanced Media instead of HBO’s own streaming tech prompted CTO and former Xbox executive Otto Berkes to resign.

Oct 15, 2014 ∞

HBO without cable coming in 2015

Peter Kafka reports at Recode:

[HBO CEO Richard] Plepler said the company will go “beyond the wall” and launch a “stand alone, over the top” version of HBO in the US next year, and would work with “current partners,” and may work with others as well. But he wouldn’t provide any other detail.

Plepler has been pondering this possibility for a while, and a couple of years ago I did some back-of-the-napkin math which suggested there is a lot of money to be had in a web-only subscription.

I’m not known for my math skills, but it looks like I was on to something.

Correction: This post has been updated because I originally stated the year HBO plans to launch its web-only offering as 2014 in the link at the top, instead of 2015, which is the correct year. Sorry folks.

Aug 26, 2013 ∞

Kevin Spacey knows what viewers want

Actor Kevin Spacey, speaking at the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival:

Clearly the success of the Netflix model – releasing the entire season of House Of Cards at once – has proved one thing: the audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House Of Cards – then we should let them binge.

It’s so simple, and while Netflix and a few others have learned the lesson the music industry so painfully failed to learn for so long, the television industry still fails to recognize and adapt to the dissipation of distinctions between which piece of glass is glowing with their product.

Mar 22, 2013 ∞

HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscription

This is progress, although MG Siegler is right to doubt whether cable companies, many of whom are also internet service providers, would even consider such a deal.

At least HBO recognizes that the math won’t hold up against a la carte models forever.

Dec 6, 2012 ∞

Tim Cook tells Brian Williams TV is "an area of intense interest"

Tim Cook tells Brian Williams TV is “an area of intense interest”

Ronnie Polidoro, writing at NBC:

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

This is the only interesting bit of the article. I’m not sure why he would tease it in an interview like this one, that will ostensibly reach a large viewership of non-geeks, unless they were close to their TV solution.

As an aside, “assembling” some iMacs in the US is not the same as “making” them here, and it’s a distinction I suspect will be lost on many.

Nov 26, 2012 ∞

The Release Windows Archaism

Frédéric Filloux at Monday Note:

As for the TV shows such as Homeland and others hits, there is not justification whatsoever to preserve this calendar archaism. They should be made universally available from the day when they are aired on TV, period. Or customers will vote with their mouse anyway and find the right file-sharing sites.

I’ve been preaching this line for a while, but Mr. Filloux articulates, by far, the best argument I’ve heard.

Jun 12, 2012 ∞

Pirates of Westeros: the untapped half-billion dollar market for Game of Thrones

Ernesto at TorrentFreak:

It’s clear that HBO (and others) prefer exclusiveness over piracy, which is a dangerous game. They might make decent money in the long run by selling subscriptions. However, this limited availability also breeds pirates, and one has to wonder how easy it is to convert these people to subscriptions once they have experienced BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak is unabashedly pro-torrent and, some might argue, pro-piracy if necessary. And they don’t exactly divulge great detail on their methodology for determining downloads and viewership. But, let’s assume for the sake of a blog post that their numbers are accurate.

Game of Thrones pulled an estimated 4.2 million legitimate (read: cable-subscribed) viewers per episode and 3.9 million illegal torrent downloads per episode during its second season. You could even, as Gizmodo's Casey Chan did, pull legitimate viewership numbers from Wikipedia and use those alongside TorrentFreak’s download numbers to come ot the conclusion that more people pirated the second season than legally watched it. I don’t think you need to massage the numbers, though: