Verizon FiOS views cord-cutting as a potential game-changer that could launch a new revenue stream through a la carte content.
Cord-cutting “is not stopping. It’s growing. The question is: Is it growing enough for us?” asks Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, Verizon’s director of interactive video services, responsible for the company’s FiOS TV.
Verizon is planning a Netflix competitor with Redbox to launch later this year. GigaOM notes that “cord cutting is fundamentally changing the parameters of Verizon’s TV business.”
“Is the migration to a-la-carte enough that we can go that route?” says Krishnaswamy. “It impacts how we negotiate TV contracts with studios. It’s not something we can do overnight, but definitely something we’ve been looking at.”
“Krishnaswamy didn’t spell out all the details, but here is what I read between the lines of this statement: Cord cutting isn’t just about some people not paying for TV anymore, but also about enabling new and innovative business models, including unbundled subscriptions to individual channels,” suggests Janko Roettgers, writing for GigaOM. “And Verizon is apparently ready to take the plunge as soon as the wave is big enough.”
According to new data from Ericsson, 62 percent of people each week participate in social media activities during their TV viewing time, an increase of 18 percent over last year.
Four in 10 of those consumers are using social media to discuss the TV content they are watching.
Additionally, 67 percent of consumers are using tablets, smartphones or laptops for “their everyday TV viewing, both for video consumption and to enable a social media experience while watching TV,” according to Ericsson.
“But despite the growing popularity of on-demand viewing across many platforms, watching broadcast TV programming live is still the dominant viewing preference, the study found. Pair that insight with the social TV stat and you can see why a social TV strategy is so vital,” reports MediaPost. “Yes — consumers are watching on other devices, but by and large they’re watching on TV and they’re often also talking about the show thanks to social networks on their phones or mobile devices.”
“This research underscores how deeply habits are changing, and how essential it is for programmers and marketers to capture the TV viewer not only on the ‘first screen’ but also on the screen they use for interaction — the mobile one in most cases,” explains MediaPost.
Smart TVs have become more advanced with high-speed processors, built-in cameras and Internet connections. Even so, consumers are still opting to use their set-top boxes to access the Internet and other services because of the poor user experience on smart TV interfaces.
“While many TVs now offer the same functionality and connectivity that previously only existed in such set-top boxes as Apple TV or Roku, most consumers simply aren’t connecting this way,” reports Fortune. “Jupiter Research predicts that by 2017 some 650 million users worldwide could be connected online via a TV, including through set-top boxes.”
Some TV interfaces are not intuitive and there is no standard among the various manufacturers. “Imagine if each computer you used had an entirely different operating system, one of eight or 10 types, rather than simply Mac or Windows,” the article suggests.
“Set-top boxes have other benefits over smart TVs,” the article adds. “For one, most larger screen HDTV sets can cost upwards to $2,000 and have an eight to 10 year life cycle, while a set-top box costs far less to replace.”
“The TV stays in the house for eight years or more, and it can’t keep pace with the changing technology of the Internet,” says Colin Dixon, senior partner of The Diffusion Group.
Dixon “noted in a recent study that this fragmentation could result in $1 billion in lost ad revenue alone,” explains Fortune. “Advertisers are struggling to decide which smart TV platforms to support.”
“The problem with Smart TVs is they aren’t smart, not by a long shot,” suggests Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. “They are more of an oxymoron.”
Fox Filmed Entertainment is planning a new digital window for its films by offering HD versions at newly lowered prices about three weeks prior to disc and VOD availability.
The new model will begin this month with director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller “Prometheus,” which will be made available via digital purchase on September 18. The film is slated for DVD, Blu-ray and VOD release on October 11.
Fox will join the UltraViolet digital locker system used by Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures and others.
“The new system is an aggressive bid to revive consumers’ interest in the purchase of movies, by giving them an earlier shot at films for about $15 each, down from a purchase price that is currently about $20,” reports The New York Times.
“That will nibble into what has been a waiting period of roughly four months in which pictures play exclusively in theaters before their release in home entertainment formats,” notes the article.
Home video sales have dropped from a $21.8 billion high in 2004 to $18.4 billion in 2011.
“According to figures from the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry consortium, digital sales of films and television shows — as opposed to revenue from rentals or on-demand viewings — rose almost 22 percent in the first six months of this year, to $329.4 million, from $270.3 million in the first half of 2011,” according to the article.
We’d like to remind our readers that Silicon Beach @ USC is scheduled for this week. USC’s Marshall School of Business and the School of Cinematic Arts will host the event on the USC campus September 12-13.
For those attending the conference program on Thursday, September 13, please note the start time has been changed to 9:00 AM (with registration and coffee at 8:00 AM).
Presenters and panelists for the September 13 conference will include Andrew Stalbow of Rovio, Paul Bricault of Amplify.LA, Chris DeWolfe of Social Games Network, Mitch Singer of Sony Pictures Entertainment, David Wertheimer of Fox and others.
The event will also feature the first-ever Silicon Beach Award competition (September 12, invitation-only) for new ventures pursuing opportunities in innovative media platforms and digital content and services, in which teams will compete for three awards totaling $50,000 in prize money.
Silicon Beach @ USC — led by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Institute for Communication Technology Management, and the Entertainment Technology Center — will focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in digital media and technology.
Keynotes and panels will focus on the intersection of technology and digital content, the future of media, and the monetization of new applications, devices and services.
For more information or to register for the September 13 conference, visit the Silicon Beach @ USC event website.
Each month, SMPTE presents a one-hour, online, interactive webcast that addresses a hot-topic technology.
“Each educational webcast is designed to address specific technology and technical challenge facing the motion imaging industry,” explains SMPTE. “These convenient, non-commercial webcasts provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about highly relevant technology related topics.”
ETC members may be interested in the September 13 session with Jim Whittlesey of Deluxe: “High Frame Rates — A Technical Discussion on the Impact it Will Have on Motion Imaging Workflows.”
The session will address how HFR technology affects production, storage, delivery, distribution and the theatrical experience.
You can register via SMPTE. The sessions are offered for free to members and for $49 to non-members.
Cambodian police have arrested 27-year-old Gottfrid Svartholm Warg in Phnom Penh, months after his one-year prison sentence was due to begin in Sweden.
Svartholm, one of the individuals behind file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, was arrested in connection with the alleged illegal use of information technology. The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 by Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.
“In 2009, Messrs. Svartholm and Neji were tried in Stockholm with Peter Sunde and businessman Carl Lundstrom for facilitating the breach of copyright law,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The four men were found guilty, and each was sentenced to one year in prison. They appealed, and all except Mr. Svartholm received reduced prison terms.”
“Svartholm left Sweden before the appeal verdict, and an international warrant for his arrest was issued when he failed to return to Stockholm to serve his sentence,” notes the article.
WSJ suggests the case could potentially reignite “the debate over how the Internet should be used to share copyrighted material.”
General Keith Alexander, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and head of the National Security Agency, stresses the importance of an Internet infrastructure redesign. He wants automatic triggers to help the NSA track hacking efforts against both public and private infrastructure.
Alexander emphasizes denial of service attacks — a common tactic used by groups like Anonymous to disrupt websites. “My concern is that it’s going to flow into destructive attacks that could have consequences for our critical national infrastructure and the Internet itself,” he notes.
The Internet is currently a web of independent networks. This makes it difficult for agencies like the NSA to easily track activity and catch offenders.
The NSA has implemented a plan to help prevent attacks, including development of the Defense Industrial Base Cyber Pilot to automatically alert the agency when a company’s security has been breached.
Many people are critical of the NSA and their attempts to control the Internet. Alexander dismisses these privacy concerns, explaining that when “you go down the highway, and you go down the EZ Pass lane, what you’re doing is sending that code. That system is not looking in your car, reading the e-mail, or intercepting anything, it’s just getting that code.”
MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd ventured to Tampa and Charlotte for the Republican and Democratic national conventions, conducting meetings with lawmakers and speaking about intellectual property protection.
“Dodd issued a statement Tuesday praising the Democratic party platform, which calls for protections of Internet freedom as well as protection of intellectual property. He also praised the Republican platform language last week,” reports Variety. “But neither platform gets into the specifics that would trigger the kind of outcry that greeted the Stop Online Piracy Act anti-piracy legislation, which stalled in the face of an Internet protest in January.”
Dodd said that SOPA had some issues, but he hopes that the tech businesses and movie industry will be able to work toward a “balance between a free and open Internet, and simultaneously protecting the intellectual property of this creative industry.”
“I think there’s a growing effort in the industries themselves to find some common ground on how we manage to satisfy both industries going forward, and also some thought that if we need some sort of legislation, we are going to do it cooperatively if we can,” he noted.
Dodd has stated his support for President Obama but he doesn’t think a Republican president and Congress would affect how he does his job. During his years as a senator, Dodd made many connections with notable Republicans and worked hard to collaborate with Republicans on bills.
His visits to the conventions were fairly brief, contrasting the tech industry’s strong presence at the events. “Google has a giant pavilion made of shipping containers, and Facebook and Twitter have a heavy presence,” the article notes.
A California judge rejected Hulu’s motion in August to dismiss a lawsuit regarding the sharing of its users’ viewing habits. “The Hulu privacy case is now one step closer to trial, and the question of who can share your video playlist is about to break wide open,” according to ReadWriteWeb.
“The plaintiffs, a handful of Hulu users in what is now a class action suit, argued that by contracting with a tracking company called KISSmetrics to install code that revived deleted cookies and shared viewing records and personal data with the third parties like Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Scorecard Research, the video streaming service went beyond expected uses of browsing data,” explains the post. “Instead, the plaintiffs argued, Hulu’s actions amounted to a ‘hack’ of their online experience.”
Companies like Hulu and Netflix are currently trying to get the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) changed. “The VPPA, the argument goes, puts video streaming businesses at a serious disadvantage on the social web, especially when you compare them to, say, audio streamers like Pandora and Spotify,” notes ReadWriteWeb.
According to Hulu, even under the current VVPA, providing companies like Google with user data is just “incident to the ordinary course of business,” which is permissible under the law.
However, the judge “decided that whether Hulu’s sharing of user data is an ‘ordinary’ part of its video streaming business is a question of fact, not law — precisely the sort of thing trials are meant to determine,” suggests the post.
The Internet has led to an information revolution. And while the changes make access easier, it also makes hiding personal information more difficult.
A new crop of businesses have launched with one task in mind: helping people hide their mistakes from the Internet. Companies like Reputation Changer specialize in helping to hide negative search results.
Individuals pay Reputation Changer to release a stream of positive content about the individual. As the new stories flood the Internet, they eventually will flush the negative stories further down the search results, and off the first page. Since 89.7 percent of Google’s click-through traffic comes from the first page of search results, this method greatly reduces the risk of people uncovering the undesirable content.
But Reputation.com CEO and founder Michael Fertik explains that his company does more than simply spam the Internet with positive reviews and press releases. His company uses databases of social expectations to determine how to craft the press releases for each individual customer.
Fertik stresses that his company typically helps only people looking to change their image, or those who have unfairly been the victim of a cyber attack. He does not help people cover up criminal activities, he says.
“Like many other things on the Internet, online reputation management is moving towards self-service solutions,” explains ReadWriteWeb. “Last week, Reputation Changer announced dashboard software designed to let its users monitor their own reputations. Other reputation management companies have similar tools in place or in the works.”
“Using an ultrathin wafer of silicon and gold to focus lightwaves, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have created a revolutionary new kind of camera lens that completely eliminates the image distortion created by traditional glass lenses,” reports Gizmodo.
This could pave the way for lighter cameras as capable as the swappable lens models available today. This could even create an environment in which a camera phone could produce images as impressive as a DSLR.
The new lens measures 60 nanometers thick and is “made by plating a thin wafer of silicon with a layer of gold that’s then etched away to create a series of V-shaped structures across its surface,” explains the post.
The light hits the structures and is slightly slowed, changing its direction. Then, “by carefully tuning the angle, size, and spacing of these V-shaped structures across the surface of the lens, it can capture wide-angle or telephoto images without the distortion that’s seen from something like a traditional fish-eye lens,” notes Gizmodo.
The invention has the power to serve as “a death blow” to the heavy cameras currently used by professional photographers, according to the post.
The U.S. Patent Office has published a new Apple patent that suggests the company is developing an advanced graphics application that could take on Adobe’s popular Photoshop and Illustrator programs.
“The new app will also be aimed at Macs and the iPad,” reports Patently Apple. “The system is being designed to work with both the mouse and touchscreen gestures.”
The detailed report includes sections describing an overview of the virtual drawing space application, the proposed graphical display system, the display system related to object layer management and more.
According to the report, the “invention relates to systems, methods, and computer-readable media for changing graphical object input tools.”
“Apple is patenting a way in which someone using an illustrator of digital image editing program can adjust the settings of the current tool they are using — such as a brush’s size or opacity — by using gestures at or near that tool, which would then visually change the tool to represent the changes,” notes Cult of Mac. “You would also be able to change tools with gestures. And these gestures would work using a mouse, a trackpad or a touchscreen.”
Following Nokia’s launch of two new Lumia models, the 820 and 920, Engadget interviewed the company’s CEO Stephen Elop about the Windows phones and his expectations for consumer adoption.
“I think Windows Phone 8 allows us to deliver the most personalized smartphone experience,” Elop said, adding, “more and more personalized information can be brought to the home screen.”
The compatibility with the upcoming Windows 8 OS will also provide users with a better overall experience, he said. “It shares that same design language in terms of user experience… which leads us to an environment where we can have greater sharing between a PC, a tablet, a phone, the Xbox gaming platform… rounding out that digital experience for consumers.”
As Engadget notes, the Nokia-Windows Phone partnership has yet to have strong commercial success, begging the question why Nokia didn’t opt to pair up with Google’s Android OS.
“The fundamental reason that we went to the Windows Phone… was for one word: differentiation,” Elop said. “And I think this is an example in the industry where people realize that differentiation really does matter.”
He expects the user experience created on the Lumia devices to convert consumers. In addition to the Windows Phone 8 personalization, the devices have wireless charging and a great PureView camera for low-light pictures and shake-proof videos. The phones also offer an augmented reality program called Nokia City Lens that shows users what the camera sees with added information about their surroundings — restaurants, transportation, etc.
Elop added that Nokia remains committed to their older devices, even as technology progresses. The current Lumia models will be able to upgrade their home screen and add City Lens.
Motorola announced three new, practically identical handsets Wednesday, which strongly resemble the Droid Razr in both name and looks.
The Droid Razr HD and Razr Maxx HD are expected to sell over the holidays for $199 and $299 respectively. The slightly smaller Razr M is a mid-range device that will retail next week for $99.
“But while largely unexciting on their own, the three phones mark a new direction for Motorola, which was scooped up by Google earlier this year,” VentureBeat writes. “Recently appointed CEO Dennis Woodside called the devices the beginning of a ‘new’ Motorola, which is one that’s betting heavily on three key areas: 4G LTE, battery life, and, most predictably, Android.”
Motorola has determined that these three elements as well as durable hardware are most important to consumers. Its consistent design means the company, like Apple, is “focusing on hero devices with a design language that can only belong to one company,” the article states.
“That, ultimately, is good for consumers, because it ensures that the devices that Motorola releases will be of higher quality and will be more likely to get updated to future iterations of Android,” the post continues. “It also means that Motorola (and Google, of course) will be able to focus less on redesigning hardware and more on improving the user interface (again, like Apple).”
