Cable Penetration Hits 13-Year LowIn the latest PR move made by the Television Advertising Bureau (TVB) they are blitzing the ad agency community with the message that more American households are receiving subscription TV programming (TVB’s lingo for Cable TV) via an alternate delivery system (ADS) than ever before. MSOs lost 1.4 million subscribers and wired cable's penetration percentage hit a 13-year low, according to a TVB analysis of Nielsen Media Research data for November 2005.Nielsen’s NTI data reflects national ADS penetration to have reached 20.8% in November 2005, up from 19.2% in November 2004. Over the same period, wired cable penetration fell from 66.4% to 64.8% - the last time wired cable was any lower was in February 1992. The number of wired cable subscribers dropped to 71.4 million in November from 72.8 million a year earlier.Direct broadcast satellite (DBS) delivery, the largest component of ADS, is now estimated at 20.2%, up from 18.9% in November 2004. ADS now represent 24.5% of subscription television customers. As a 20-year veteran of the Cable industry, this is certainly not surprising. This is the first small bit of red witnessed by an industry that has been blessed by decades of double-digit growth. What is important is make moves now to integrate this tend into the industries future business model. Satellite penetration will continue to chip away but the biggest threat looms in new distribution technology. As the telcos gain footing and begin to offer more TV services over wireless, phone lines, fiber. ADS penetration will grow at a rockets pace. Although cable Interconnects consolidated DMA’s and helped advertisers make cable a part of their media mix in the first decade of the century. I expect the waters to be murkier in the not too distant future. The MSO’s may not be allowed to own and operate alternate distribution systems but that doesn’t stop their ad sales companies from representing them and keeping “Cable” simple and easy to purchase by advertisers and agencies alike. Review ADS penetration by DMA
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TVs turn into vending machines for programsUSA Today - David Lieberman writes: "Here are two key questions for anyone who wants to run a TV network: Ten years from now, who'll pay for your new shows? And how will potential viewers discover that they exist? The answers got murkier in the past several weeks. Three major networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — took small but important steps away from a business model that has served them for about 50 years but is being stressed by new technology. For the first time, they agreed to let viewers see for a fee current prime-time hits on cable and satellite video-on-demand (VOD) and via Internet download. ..." Link: USA Today.
iTunes gets more Hit TV ShowsAdding to the deal with ABC in October, Apple Computer struck a deal with NBC Universal to sell television shows a la carte on its online iTunes store. More than 300 episodes from NBC prime time, late-night and classic TV shows are now available for 1.99 each. This includes Law & Order, The Tonight Show, The Office, Surface, Late Night with Conan O'Brien and a number of "classic" popular shows of the past. NBC also recently signed a deal to begin selling replays of its most popular shows on an On-Demand basis with DirecTV and Last month announced a deal with Sprint Nextel to make Leno's monologues and sketches available on their mobile services. ABC may have been first to travel this path but NBC followed up with a larger content deal. I have no doubt that we will not see more deals like this soon. Viacom/CBS anyone? More on this topic: Disney, ABC & Apple announce deal, USA Today - ABC affiliates feeling uneasy, SMM Oct Post - TV That you'll want to Pay For? and Reinvent TV's - Steven Jobs stars...
The Internet’s New Frontier - Video SearchYou may not realize it but there is a high-stakes technology arms race going on for control of your living room. Broadband growth has been the catalyst for the Internet as it has matured into more of an entertainment platform and video is playing a key role. Although it is becoming more routine for consumers to load audio, video and other data to our new network of Internet-connected gadgetry the key to success will be in finding relevant files.
The current technology used by today’s most popular search engines look for text like ".mov" or ".avi," and for keywords or links that might be in a document which give a sense of what type of content is there. Unfortunately this identifies only a small percentage of the video that’s currently available. Yahoo is trying to address the problem with new standards like “Media RSS” however how much can we rely on video providers to “submit” feeds. Google’s plan to search the closed-caption text is fine for present and future video but that is still text based and relies on a technology that is not used in many video productions. At best these approaches are workarounds and are only going to scratch the surface when it comes to identifying the millions of video files (growing exponentially) on the web.
AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have each been quietly developing new search tools for digital video. They all realize that searchable video is an extremely attractive new market and this new tool is extremely relevant to consumers hungry for multimedia. From a financial standpoint it also helps the companies appeal to brand advertisers, which spend about $60 billion annually on TV commercials. Recently I have taken notice of Truveo.com. They’re approach to video search is new an unique and its generating quite a buzz. It’s worth some research and perhaps a follow up post on this topic. I’d be interested in hearing your POV. Link: ZDNet Nov 29, 2005 – Striking up Video Internet Search, Previous SMM Posts: Oct 6, 2005 - Video over the Internet
