Premium cable network Epix has had its library of Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate movies available for streaming for nearly two years.
Since its launch in 2009, Epix has added original programming to its library of 3,000 film titles and has expanded its number of distribution partners.
“The channel is now available through Dish Network, Verizon FiOS, Cox, Charter, Mediacom, Suddenlink and the National Cable and Telecommunications Cooperative,” reports GigaOM. “Together, those distributors have more than 30 million subscribers, of which Epix has managed to sign up 9 million to its network.”
But now that TV Everywhere has become the trend with other networks, Epix is looking to differentiate itself in additional ways.
Epix is building apps for new devices (the network is already available on more than 100 devices), producing more of its own exclusive content, adding video that complements its library of movies, and leveraging partnerships that provide original video content.
Clearly, premium cable (and perhaps all television) needs to look beyond traditional practices to survive. Is Epix becoming the model of what a premium cable channel needs to be in the era of TV Everywhere?
What’s next for mobile devices now that capacitive touchscreens have become the standard?
According to Synaptics technology strategist Andrew Hsu (and inventor of modern touchscreen technology for mobile handsets), the answer could be haptic technologies that allow us to feel individual touchscreen elements.
“Where I see the next frontier of user interface control is that we now want to try and recreate the tactility we lost from traditional hardware interfaces,” says Hsu. “Now that we’ve gotten dynamic touch and visual interfaces, it’s time to look towards dynamic touch feedback.”
Hsu hasn’t make any final judgements on 3D technology yet, although VentureBeat sees it as less significant than haptics at this point: “There’s plenty of potential in mobile gaming (imagine actually feeling buttons and joysticks again), and it would also make modern touchscreen phones more accessible for the disabled and elderly. I’d much rather the mobile industry move towards screens that can dynamically generate braille text for the blind to touch, rather than focusing on making us cross-eyed with tiny 3D screens.”
As smartphones gain greater market penetration, and data-intensive applications become more popular, cellular carriers are creating limits on how much data customers can consume, and raising the price of that data.
T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have all phased out their unlimited plans, and introduced tiered plans that charge customers based on how much data they consume. Only Sprint still offers an unlimited data plan.
Some developers worry that the caps will stifle innovation of data-intensive applications, and that customers may blame the applications if they go over their limits. This problem is compounded by the fact that consumers have no intuitive sense of how much data a given application may be using.
Industry analysts predict that the availability of data will become an increasingly important profit stream for cellular carriers, and a key point of competition between them.
If you haven’t already seen the flood of reports online (including a number of related stories on ETCentric), Google announced it will acquire Motorola for $40 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion. The deal has led to a great deal of speculation this week regarding the future of the Android ecosystem and other enterprises such as Google TV.
“This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business,” stated Larry Page in the official Google blog. “Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.”
Page believes the acquisition will also serve as a buffer to anti-competitive patent attacks on Android: “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”
This deal raises a number of compelling questions (see thoughts by Robert Scoble, Peter Kafka and others in the related posts listed below), but first I have to ask: Can Google have its “open platform” and compete with its licensees too?
Variety reports that ESPN remains enthusiastic about 3D technology, despite its slow adoption (and AT&T’s recent decision to drop ESPN 3D from its U-Verse TV service).
ESPN is pushing its 3D effort by focusing on combining 2D and 3D production (nicknamed “5D”), which the network says brings costs down substantially. 2D/3D production includes slower cutting and more use of robotic cameras. As the production crews gain more experience in shooting sports beyond HD, the equipment, camera placement and general approach continues to improve.
“Some innovations created for 3D have even made it over to the 2D side,” reports Variety. “For example, 3D cameras need to be closer to the action than 2D cameras, so the high 50-yard-line shots that are a staple of football coverage are problematic. To get closer, ESPN put a 3D camera on a 22-foot mast on a small vehicle that goes up and down the sideline.”
ESPN stands by the technology, explaining that Twitter feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. And some play-by-play announcers have even indicated they don’t want to go back to watching 2D.
The introduction of games to Google+ potentially threatens both Facebook (which also has games) and Apple (which takes a 30 percent cut versus Google’s 5 percent).
Google+ sees games as being core to their mission: “We don’t consider ourselves experts at making compelling games, but we can bring a lot to the party,” explains Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+. “There were some internal debates about whether Google was well-suited to have games in our repertoire and what is the value of games to the users. There’s tremendous value for users. They provide a way for people to connect, discover and interact with each other… We don’t see games contrary to our mission, or a diversion. We see them as being core.”
If HTML5 unifies the Web and mobile, it could become possible “for software to be written once and run across multiple devices.” And if Google+ games were to run via a browser on the iPhone or iPad, this could be an additional concern for Apple.
What do you think? Should Facebook and Apple be nervous?
You’re probably tired of reading about it, but as the tablet wars continue it seems little traction can be made against Apple’s market leader. The Wall Street Journal offers the latest look at the iPad’s impact.
HP announced it will lower its price on the TouchPad by 20 percent, only a month after the tablet hit the shelves. Motorola cut the price of its Xoom tablet following the February launch and offered a cheaper model, with little response.
Samsung has stopped reporting how many Galaxy Tabs they are shipping — and is now stuck in a patent dispute with Apple that threatens its European sales.
Motorola and RIM don’t say how many tablets they have sold and, as recently reported on ETCentric, RIM’s PlayBook is in carrier trouble since Sprint Nextel pulled its support.
Meanwhile, Apple has sold some 28.7 million iPads since April 2010. According to WSJ, Apple “says it is having difficulty keeping up with demand and selling every iPad it can manufacture. Five months after its release, its iPad 2 can be hard to find in retail stores. The company said it shipped 9.3 million iPads in the June-ended quarter.”
Despite price changes, many consumers seem to view the iPad as the tablet leader and others as imitators. As a result, the tablet market is essentially divided into two sectors at this point — Apple’s iPad…and everyone else.
Do any of our readers have a different take on this trend? Does anyone recommend using a tablet other than the iPad?
Verizon FiOS customers could potentially lose service due to ongoing litigation between Verizon and ActiveVideo Networks, a company that builds interactive TV applications.
A U.S. District Court in Virginia awarded ActiveVideo Networks $115 million based on patent infringement involving interactive applications and VOD elements. Now ActiveVideo is also seeking to shut down the entire FiOS network.
Based on the nature of the specific patents, Verizon could possibly shut down a portion of its services while finding a practical workaround. Verizon also plans to appeal the verdict.
“The ActiveVideo CloudTV platform is currently being utilized by one of Verizon’s competitors, Cablevision,” reports Digital Trends. “ActiveVideo was an early developer of video-on-demand technology over the last two decades and has turned to developing platforms for interactive applications as of late.”
Founder of TwitPic Noah Everett has released a new photo-sharing service called Heello (pronounced “he-low”), just in time to compete with Twitter’s newly announced photo feature.
Everett told Digital Trends that the microblogging site has been in development for the past year, and the timing of its launch is a coincidence.
“The idea for Heello for what it is now came out of hearing user’s frustrations (and even our own) of not being able to post text, photos, videos or do check-ins from one single service; they were all spread out among different sites and this confuses a lot of uses,” he explains.
The post compares Twitter and TwitPic: Tweets/updates are referred to as “Pings” while Retweets are called “Echoes” and viewing the Twitter stream is known as “Listening.”
“The jury’s still out on the future of Heello,” reports Digital Trends. “There have been a handful of Twitter clones that have been DOA, but Heello does seem to have a little more steam to ride off of for now. You do have to think that Heello is giving TwitPic some competition at the same time that Twitter introduced what’s seriously going to impact the photo-sharing platform.”
August 6 marked the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first website at CERN. Techdirt provides a few guesses regarding where we might stand today had Berners-Lee sought and received a patent for the World Wide Web.
The article suggests that innovation would be dramatically limited and rather than an open World Wide Web, we would be using proprietary, walled gardens such as AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. The idea of open Internet development would be hampered by lawsuits.
Search functionality would most likely be dismal (no Google, for example), and limited to proprietary systems. We may also not have seen the meteoric rise of smartphones without the Web.
And try to imagine this: “Most people’s use of online services would be more about ‘consumption’ than ‘communication.’ There would still be chat rooms and such, but there wouldn’t be massive public communication developments like blogs and Twitter. There might be some social networking elements, but they would be very rudimentary within the walled garden.”
What are your thoughts? If Berners-Lee had not been so generous, would innovation be stalled in patent hell? Or would we have moved forward with other systems in development at the time?
Boxee launched a free iPad app this week that aggregates video content from social feeds such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
If the user has the Boxee Media Manager client on a Mac or PC, the new app can stream video from the computer to the iPad.
The company also designed a bookmarklet that allows users to mark video content for later viewing.
“One criticism of the iPad application is that it doesn’t offer access to premium applications like Vudu, Netflix and Hulu Plus,” reports Digital Trends. “Missing premium applications is attributed to companies like Netflix preferring to keep content within its own application as well as Flash content on the Web that’s incompatible with the iPad.”
Twitter has made uploading photos possible for its users with a feature that shares images (up to 3MB).
Users can access the new feature on the Web version of Twitter by clicking on the camera icon (support for the mobile version is still in the works). Images are hosted by Photobucket and appear as links within the Twitter feed.
Hashtags can be added to the tweet to include images in Twitter’s search function. Users will also have the ability to comment on images.
“The founder of TwitPic, who turned down a $10 million dollar offer for the company in 2009, can’t be too happy about today’s feature launch from Twitter,” comments Digital Trends.
The six largest cable and satellite TV providers lost 580,000 customers in the second quarter. This marks the largest such decline in U.S. history.
The number of pay TV subscribers has declined in three of the past five quarters.
“Rising prices for pay TV, coupled with growing availability of lower-cost alternatives, add to a toxic mix at a time when disposable income isn’t growing,” explains Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. “For younger demographics, where in many cohorts unemployment is north of 30 percent, and especially for those with limited or no interest in sports, the pay TV equation is almost inarguably getting less attractive.”
Netflix and Hulu provide lower cost options. Competition from AT&T and Verizon is also having an effect.
Providers are struggling to deal with the trend. Dish, for example, is re-positioning itself away from lower income customers. Instead, the company plans to focus on more expensive offerings to increase average revenue per user.
Runco has unveiled a single-chip 1080p projector based on the DLP chip from Texas Instruments.
The LS-1, the latest addition to Runco’s LightStyle Series, will be available this month for $3,995 (MSRP).
The company claims the unit offers “exceptional color and detail,” due largely to the Digital Light Processing technology.
The projector also features Runco’s SuperOnyx with ConstantContrast, ViVix digital video processing, and the ISF calibration suite for adjustments based on room and lighting conditions.
The unit’s exterior can be customized via Runco’s FinishPalette, offering a wide range of custom prints and colors. Additionally, with a simple touch of a button users can switch from 16:9 content to 2.35:1 content, without black bars.
Similar to the approach Fox announced last month, Disney is negotiating TV Anywhere deals for ABC-TV shows with distributors. Access would require authentication with a cable ID.
Fox provides next day access to viewers who log in with cable IDs, and makes others wait for eight days to view content on Fox.com or Hulu.
Disney already has deals with Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS to access ESPN content using a mobile app.
“Our overall approach…has been to make deals that increase revenue while at the same time protect and respect the channel distribution value that we see today,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said. The company is looking to build authentication into future deals, which Iger explains would “allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.”
