Group items tagged

Whether you watch TV via cable, Internet, or rabbit-ear antenna, you’ll see the same thing — a massive industry-wide upheaval, as new technologies and business models reshape what we view, and how we view it. “The television industry is in transformation,” said independent media analyst Jeffrey Kagan. “This entire space is going to be a completely different space in five years.”

Boxee rebranded its box from Boxee TV to Boxee Cloud DVR and changed the services it offers.

“Our pitch to them is if we move the DVR to the cloud, we can do dynamic ad insertion, so instead of losing the ability to monetize that audience if they’re watching a week later or binge viewing if they’ve recorded the entire season, if you could serve fresh ads whenever somebody is watching it … that is a better way to monetize DVR.”

ed us to believe the future of TV is not apps, it’s the experience and the content.”

Apple TV is reportedly developing ad-skipping technology so owners of a set-top box can watch shows commercial-free. The propsed deal with cable companies would reimburse programmers for skipped ads.

Google is really just hoping to beat Apple to the punch, despite the fact that the company already has its Apple TV streaming product on the market, according to The New York Times "Apple’s thinking… is that any next-generation television service must be set up in partnership with existing distributors, in part for quality assurance reasons. A future Apple service could include a user-friendly interface layered on top of Time Warner Cable or Cablevision’s channel lineup."

Adoption from the major networks is "very unlikely to support any service with their linear feed that allows for commercial messages to be skipped even if they get some form of compensation," Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for WPP's GroupM, told AdAge. "This is not a viable economic model and subscribers to the system would not pay an adequate premium to compensate for it." 

The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – still watch television using traditional cable or satellite options, according to Nielsen. But the number of households that choose to opt out of cable or satellite TV is on the rise, from 2 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2013, Nielsen’s data show.

“This scares the bejesus out of the cable and satellite people,” said Jim Barry, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va. “I think it’s going to change the business model.”

A main driver behind the high cost of cable and satellite in recent years is the expensive license fees networks pay sports leagues to broadcast their games. The cost gets passed on to consumers to pay for the “bundles” of channels they get with their cable satellite subscriptions, whether they plan to watch sports or not.

. In keeping with the company’s emphasis on being the go-to platform to collectively share experiences in real time, Costolo hinted, at a recent appearance at the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C., that Twitter is testing a feature that would allow users to essentially “replay” live events and pinpoint peak moments that can be viewed if missed the first time around.

Yet another form of video that will be coming to more and more Twitter feeds is TV Ad Targeting, a clever tool the company took out of beta last week that identifies someone who tweets about a show as likely to have just seen a commercial, and streams to them an accompanying digital promotion.

Twitter is also looking a lot like a venue for programming: Several innovative new episodic shortform series have used Twitter as a distribution platform in recent months.