Posts for 'HBO'

I'm pleased to present the 246th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

HBO's big OTT announcement generated massive coverage this week. Following my initial 8 reactions I shared on Wednesday, in today's podcast, Colin and I hash out whether HBO OTT will be a seismic event (as many people want to believe) or whether it will be a complete dud.

Given the scarcity of details HBO shared, it's still a lot of guesswork. But Colin and I do our best to frame things, including the all-important questions of what content will be included in HBO OTT and what the price point will be.

These decisions put HBO executives in an extraordinarily sensitive position. It's no exaggeration to say HBO OTT has the potential to reshape HBO's future as well as its parent company Time Warner and more broadly, the contours of the entire TV, Hollywood, OTT and sports industries. Note however, that "potential" is the epically operative word here.

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Between HBO's OTT announcement yesterday and CBS's this morning, there're intensifying buzz that the demise of pay-TV, with its expensive multichannel bundles, may finally be upon us. But here's a contrarian thought: what if all of the SVOD activity we're already seeing - plus more that's sure to come - is actually very good news for pay-TV? Before you scoff at me as a head-in-the-sand pay-TV defender, stop and consider the following.

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HBO has dropped a bombshell, announcing plans to launch a standalone over-the-top service in the U.S. in 2015. The announcement was extremely short on details, except to say it was targeted to the 80 million U.S. homes that do not currently subscribe to HBO. Here are my 8 quick reactions to the news. Many more thoughts to follow as more details are released.

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I'm pleased to present the 234th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we touch on a few different topics that caught our attention, including Yahoo's deal to pick up another season of "Community," after NBC dropped it (plus we discuss Yahoo's other video moves). Then we turn to CBS's research head's reveal that the network generates up to 20% more revenue per viewer online than on TV.

We also review whether HBO premiering the first episode of its new series "The Leftovers" on Yahoo (plus similar efforts by other premium networks) will succeed. Finally, we're both impressed with Jerry Seinfeld's new Acura ads and how they blur the lines between content and advertising. Seinfeld is a huge online video enthusiast as I noted earlier this year.

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I'm pleased to present the 224th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This was an unusually busy week with many industry announcements, so today's format is a roundup discussion of four items that seemed most significant to us.

First up is HBO's exclusive new licensing deal with Amazon, which is the latest evidence of the surging value of high-quality content libraries. Second is Apple's reveal that it has sold 20 million Apple TVs to date, making it more than just a "hobby." Next, we turn to Netflix, which reported stellar Q1 results earlier this week. Finally, we look at Comcast's Q1 and Time Warner Cable's Q1 results. Both companies reported healthier video subscriber numbers (though Verizon reported a much smaller quarter for FiOS video subscribers). The question still looms how meaningful cord-cutting is in reality.

(Note, we had major technical issues with Skype this week, so in the last one-third of the podcast I sound like I'm in a fish tank. Apologies in advance.)

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Comcast has announced that it will acquire Time Warner Cable in an all-stock transaction valued at $45.2 billion. Comcast is already the biggest video and broadband provider in the U.S. and will now get even bigger, assuming the deal is approved. Comcast has committed to divest around 3 million of TWC's video subscribers to stay below 30% of the total U.S. pay-TV market, so the combined company would have approximately 30M video subscribers. Broadband subscribers would be a little less than 30M.

For me, the big takeaway from the deal is that in the broadband era, scale matters a lot - and to compete effectively, a company simply has to have it. Nearly ubiquitous broadband and wireless connectivity, plus massive proliferation of devices, have enabled online-only players to have easy access to massive global audiences. This context has helped fuel the rise of companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Twitter and many others. With innovative services and solid execution, it's now possible to create huge businesses quicker than ever.

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I'm pleased to present the 177th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Earlier this week, Netflix reported solid results for Q1 '13, adding a total of about 3 million new subscribers, 2 million in the U.S. and a million internationally. Netflix projects it can ultimately obtain 60-90 million U.S. subscribers, which would be 2-3 times as many as HBO, the biggest "premium TV" network.

As I wrote earlier this week, if that were to occur - and it's still a big if - it would mean Netflix would have to get a lot of middle and lower income American homes to layer on another $8/mo or more to their already substantial pay-TV bills, OR there would have to be material cord-cutting that essentially frees up household budget for SVOD subscriptions. Colin suggests a third way, which would be "cord-shaving" - subscribers cutting back on existing pay-TV services like sports networks or premium channels to make room for Netflix in their budgets.

That of course leads to the question of what HBO might do as it observes Netflix's continued growth. It's hard to see HBO standing still, yet, for reasons HBO has discussed in the past, unbundling itself from pay-TV would be a huge step for the company. Last but not least, Amazon - which become Netflix's biggest U.S. SVOD competitor - is rumored to have a set-top box introduction planned, which could also shift the competitive balance in the U.S. Bottom line, there are a lot of twists and turns yet to occur in SVOD in the U.S.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 136th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG Report podcast (our podcast's new co-branded name, going forward).

This week we first discuss a fascinating new web site, TakeMyMoneyHBO.com that invites visitors to submit how much they'd pay for a standalone HBO GO service. It's the latest in the larger dynamics around HBO going direct-to-consumer, rather than solely via pay-TV operators. In my video interview with HBO's co-president Eric Kessler 6 months ago, he explained the rationale for HBO sticking to its roots with HBO GO, which Ryan Lawler at TechCrunch enumerated this week. While Colin and I understand the reasoning, we contend that changing consumer expectations and a strong desire for viewing flexibility will inevitably pressure HBO - and others - to re-think traditional approaches. This is a topic I explored at length over a year ago.

Then Colin offers his reactions to E3 and what the major gaming console providers announced with streaming video apps this week. Last I discuss my video interview with top Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett that I posted yesterday, in which Craig states that the TV industry is so "ossified" that re-invention can only come from outsiders.

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There's lots of online buzz right now about an apparently massive amount of online piracy for HBO's hit show "Game of Thrones." To better understand HBO's online strategy with its HBO GO app, I recommend watching the interview I did with co-president Eric Kessler at last November's VideoSchmooze event, which I've re-posted below. This interview is the primary source for a lot of the back-and-forth going on about the GOT piracy issue and what's behind it.

In the interview Eric is very clear in explaining why HBO is focused on maintaining exclusive distribution through pay-TV providers, which means the HBO GO app is only available to HBO/pay-TV subscribers. Coincidentally, this week's podcast touches on how restrictive access to popular programming helps breed piracy.  In this case HBO has rabid GOT fans, but many aren't cable subscribers as Forbes points out, and therefore can't subscribe to HBO. I explained this conundrum back in March, 2011 in "Could HBO be the Next BLOCKBUSTER."

By limiting its distribution, HBO is adhering to a traditional model that still works reasonably well and is very rationale, yet also leaves lots of opportunity on the table and encourages illegal behavior. It's yet another one of the many dilemmas arising as analog era business models collide with digital era distribution realities.

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HBO announced yesterday that it will offer online access to premiere episodes of its two newest shows, "Girls" and "Veep" to non-subscribers on HBO.com, YouTube, Dailymotion, TV.com, and via distributors' free VOD platforms. "Veep" will also be offered as a free download on iTunes. Access will begin the day after the shows launch on HBO and run for a month. The initiative is savvy on a number of different levels, and continues to show how HBO is tapping new online video opportunities while cautiously adhering to its traditional distribution model.

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