That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air.
The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.
When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either.
With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.
During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1/6 the cost of a cable subscription.
All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.
The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don't really care about just to get ESPN. There's nothing else on TV that I can't wait for other than sports.
> With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.
I really don't think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2015/03/25/are-...
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-television-espn-househo...
ESPN and professional sports are way over valued and forcing everyone to subsidize sports fans. This is literally the reason why people are becoming cord-cutters, they're tired of paying for things they don't want. Right now 1 in 6 cable subscribers watch ESPN but 6 in 6 cable subscribers pay for it. Cable companies really need to move to an a-la-carte pricing model if they want survive but they're afraid of the large networks pulling their bundles. It's almost like we need a cable monopoly or union to break the network monopolies.
Except that the marginal cost of providing ESPN service to people who do not watch ESPN is nearly zero.
A-la-carte pricing makes sense if the corporation is spending a-la-carte costs, but they're not: the cable hookup and maintenance costs almost the same either way. There are some issues with a cap on the number of channels that can be simultaneously transmitted in a cable pipe, but it's perfectly feasible to launch a few hundred simulcast channels on current tech. You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch; Providing the selection of things that you can refuse to watch, is basically free.
Source:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/dish-espn-trial-off...
$10/customer/month to Channel A, which has 100k viewers who only watch it
$10/customer/month to Channel B, which also has 100k viewers who only watch it
...
In 2018, consumer activists manage to break up SECC and institute an a-la-carte system.
In 2019 they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel A (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month), or they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel B (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month).
On top of that, to secure either channel you're going to need a $10 subscription fee to the service provider for hookup (which is going to charge enough to keep its systems operational).
A-la-carte pricing is a zero sum game for the median viewer, so long as the content and the infrastructure keep getting paid for. It is nothing like "But I just want to be able to buy an appetizer, why are you making me pay for an entree!", because appetizers and entrees are both real goods which cost money to produce, while additional permissions to change the channel to something else, are not real goods. Food prices will not drastically rise for the same dish, if the customers order less of it, while entertainment prices will.
I think people are hanging their monopolistic concerns, which are valid for the most part, on a-la-carte pricing, and it's just nonsense.
Non-zero marginal costs would further favor a la carte pricing as it would reduce actual waste, but even with zero marginal cost there is still subsidization.
On top of this, pricing has already been set and normalized in this market.
Netflix is 7.99
amazon prime is around 8$
hulu is around 9 for ad free
hbogo is 14.99 and is seen as premium in the marketplace
I cant see any network pricing themselves above HBO and being successful.
If the service remains the same, the total that consumers pay will necessarily have to remain about the same. Instead of getting the freedom to change channels, they'll be stuck with the limited selection they have subscribed to. The bundling business model is a natural best fit for the technology that permits channels to be streamed simultaneously over the same lines; Anything else is a waste for the consumer and for the company.
You guys are chasing illusory discounts: "If I just had to pay $5 to ESPN and I could drop everythng I don't watch..." cannot mathematically happen, because ESPN has to crank up their prices or end most of their production to survive as soon as their customer base drops by 90% due to the end of bundling.
It doesnt matter what ESPNs current revenue is, and it doesnt matter how many subscribers the lose when the shift towards a la carte.
The fact is that the pricing for sports content has already happened; if ESPN wanted to weigh in on how much sports should cost, they should have gotten to market before the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.
ESPN can launch at whatever price they want, but if that price exceeds the price of the official league packages that i intend to watch, there is absolutely 0 chance that i subscribe to ESPN
You're chasing illusory revenues, "If I just set the price at X$, we could drop everyone who doesnt watch" cannot mathematically happen, because NFL et al would have to crank down their prices for ESPN to remain competitive.
>or end most of their production to survive
DING DING DING - this is exactly what will happen when espn finds out people dont value their more recent tabloid/drama centered content
An actual example:
I currently pay $150/year for NFL gamepass. This allows me to watch every single NFL game in HD live, including pre and post season games.
150/year is 12.50/month. IF ESPN released a service costing 13/month, i wouldn't buy it. What value does ESPN add to my existing NFL gamepass package? Do they think i would pay 13/month purely for sportscenter? purely for their terrible discussions of the latest drama in the sports world? Maybe if they offered some kind of sports news and debate like they did a decade or so ago.
This is ESPN's competition. They have to compete with existing services that already fill the need for watching sports.
I imagine ESPNs current broadcast contracts do not specifically allow them to move to a la carte structure, nor do i imagine it allows them to begin any kind of streaming service. I very much doubt the leagues are going to be very kind when renegotiating those contracts now that they all have their own streaming services.
A la carte that avoids ESPN, doesn't exist from the major providers (it's part of everyone's basic packages but ATT that I have seen). That was the point (6 of 6 pay for it).
I wish there was an unbundled option so I could buy just ESPN. That is literally the only thing cable companies have that I care about. Even better for me would be to just cut the cable companies out entirely and let me pay $20 a month or something directly to ESPN for WatchESPN access.
That subscriber will be worth a lot more once they can be targeted with individually personalized marketing content based on previous TV-watching habits, augmented with third-party data from other digital channels, web browsing history, purchasing history, etc. It's coming; YouTube proves it can be done. It's only a matter of time before we see different business models for the monetization of streaming content on more 'traditional' TV channels as well.
The alternative is a subscription model that would price out many sports fans, or obsolescence followed by slow death for want of revenue.
when i got my friends to watch the world cup at home i attached a $5 antenna to the DVR (i build a computer with a $120 TV-in card, and had never used until then!)
the image was not the best, but for live sports, who cares?! oh and it got worse every time a plane passed above.
anyway, the antenna was a very easy solution for the impromptu need for live sports.
For college sports, they're also the biggest player. The "big" matchups of the week (usually the highest ranked or most interesting teams) in each market are usually played on the major networks that you can pick up with an antenna from the local affiliate. But the rest of the games being televised are carried exclusively* on cable, usually on ESPN channels.
Keep in mind there are 128 Division 1-A (major) programs, and many more 1-AA and lower programs, so there are a LOT of games going on each week. Some games are played during the week, but the very large majority of them are played on Saturday. So there's way more going on then could ever conceivably be carried over the air.
During college football season, there are something like 7 or 8 games playing simultaneously on the various ESPN channels, not including the "Plus" channels that are only available digitally by WatchESPN.
There are a couple others out there (NBC Sports Network and FoxSports come to mind) but neither are bigger in sports than ESPN.
* Depending on where you live, you can also sometimes get radio broadcasts if you live close enough to the school in question that there's a local affiliate that carries the game. Rights for those are handled differently.
You can use your Sling membership credentials to sign into ESPN's app. The app does not crash from my experience - works a charm.
That's a nice use case for multicast. Worked for me over a decade ago. I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.
With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast.
Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology hasn't gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don't scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I'm not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.
However BT (one of the big ISPs) uses multicast to deliver their TV service, so I assume BT their connections are capable of receiving multicasts if properly configured.
Surely at least some of the blame can be shared with the total abdication of the educational mission on the part of thousands of university administrators. The athletic tail has been wagging the academic dog for decades longer than Tivo has been around.
I'm a Clemson grad for example and 15 years ago, Clemson's athletic department budget was about $30 million a year (for all sports combined). Since Tivo, it's gone up to about $70 million a year but it's totally self sufficient as well. It's all fueled by donations, ticket sales and TV revenues. TV revenues account for about $20 million of that budget so half of the increase is purely from TV.
If you can identify another reason why TV contracts for the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12 and PAC 12 suddenly skyrocketed in the last 15 years I would love to hear it.
I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.
But every time I'm about to cancel, there's a big matchup on ESPN that makes me say "just one more month". And then since I have it I throw it on as background noise again. It's a vicious cycle.
Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.
But 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams that happen to contain the same thing still seems slightly easier than 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams with different content.
I'm taking it as a given that the technology and infrastructure is already there to support millions of people watching different streams simultaneously, since that seems to be what Netflix does.
The equivalent of a CDN where each ISP has a box receiving the broadcast so that all of their local customers don't have to stream direct from ESPN will make it more tolerable, but the big hit will be on people trying to do it from cell networks.
When Netflix does it they are working with pre-optimized content. They get to prepare all of the video to stream in advance, optimize it for each screen size, transfer each variant it down to each ISP and then turn it on when it's ready. With a live feed you've got to do all that on the fly to each ISP appliance that you've got in place.
I'm sure it can be done, somehow, but I have serious concerns about the technological cost of scaling that for a huge audience. Just as a comparison here, the college football title game that just happened garnered about 29 million viewers on TV and about 800,000 streaming with WatchESPN. That was the most streaming traffic ESPN had ever had.
Yup. Unfortunately, even just getting ESPN (and similar channels like FS1 etc) means buying huge bloated bundles. I'm hopeful this will change in the next couple of years though.
It's stupid easy, streams straight to VLC.
I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque.
It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?)
Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...
Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.
You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information.
That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.
They really shot themselves in the foot with this move.
As for Israel, I feel like Al Jazeera isn't one-sided; there simply are more articles about Palestinian deaths because there are more Palestinian deaths. Even when around 20 Israelis across a few attacks died at the end of last year, with each death heavily reported around western media, a comparative death toll puts it into perspective: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping.... It seems that one side simply has better weapons, and so, causes more deaths.
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy.
RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.
So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid.
AJ and BBC have their biases but at least they try.
PS - I moved to the US from abroad and was genuinely shocked not by the obviously ridiculous cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) but by the "news" pretending to be unbiased while in reality being a US government mouthpiece.
One is backed by the government and runs propaganda. The other is more pro-US than you like, but can and will be very critical of government officials and practices.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...
They also develop a theory, more of an explanation, that this is essentially because mainstream media is funded through advertising which then naturally biases it towards the interests of the business elite. That is how we get thought control in a democratic society.
See Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions for numerous cases. Wonderful books. See also Alex Carey's work on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.
I think Noam would prefer if they were government mouthpieces instead of corporate mouthpieces, as he's socialist.
Regardless, I don't think "Noam Chomsky wrote a book" is an argument with evidence. It's rather an appeal to authority. But if it were, the book should actually be about the argument you're making.
Also, thinking that socialists are willing to blindly trust government sources is pretty wrong as well. Far left and far right both share a distrust of the state.
I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.
>I said that some US news is "as bad as" them.
I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT?
How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?
Yes.
Additionally I didn't say Obama was running anything, I was more thinking the DoD. They likely fund, produce, or have produced specific bottled segments.
Which isn't to say they have direct editorial control, just that propaganda is a common sight on US TVs.
Plus I can back up what I am saying, here's a program from 2002:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_prog...
So from 2002 to 2008 I can prove that this occurred. But since then it has definitely continued, I'm sure they renamed it, and retooled it, and involved more private entities to act as legal buffs, but it definitely still goes on to this day.
> How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?
I don't understand the question.
It's not like there is a party line on everything. You are allowed to have differing opinions on benign issues, such as cooking, celebrities, or football.
The Democrat-Republican spectrum spans the spectrum of opinion that is fundable by the business community. There is plenty of vigorous debate within that spectrum. But money wins elections and funds advertising-dependent media, so that's how non business friendly perspectives get filtered out.
It's not a conspiracy, it's more "unnatural selection" by money in the media and political systems.
The working class press of a century ago had a much broader spectrum of opinion, for example. But it didn't rely on advertising.
I don't think money is close to playing the key role. If that were true it would only take a few billion to buy a presidential election.
Money is definitely necessary, but I don't think it's sufficient.
Here, read this: http://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-are-both-politica...
Here you go:
βIn her comment Ms. Martin also noted that she does not possess a deep knowledge of reality of the situation in Crimea."
RT then used this one piece of dissent against the normal pro Russia coverage of Crimea to parade around as example of their openness.
You'll also notice that less than a year after saying that she was off the network.
Fair point, but I wouldn't say the US networks were much better...
They often attack and upset the government, including leaking government secrets and sometimes getting prosecuted for it. I don't think it's at all comparable. Is Fox a mouthpiece for Obama? Was MSNBC a mouthpiece for Bush? The NY Times, to its credit, is criticized by all sides a being on the 'other' side.
Anything else is just reporting publicly-available information from some official source.
Notice that that's also the first line item to get slashed when budget-cuttin' time rolls around.
To put it another way, imagine the Guardian vs. the Daily Mail, but on television instead. No one, I hope, would pick up a copy of those newspapers expecting the unbiased facts; same deal here.
An important point, I think: The propagandists, most prominently today the News Corp outlets such as Fox and the WSJ, want to portray the whole world as ideologically driven. It innoculates their followers against anything anyone else can say (e.g., 'it's all left-wing propaganda, don't even bother') and justifies their own propaganda.
But everyone is not ideological. MSNBC is, at least it was the little I saw of them awhile ago, maybe NPR is, but I disagree that the rest are on the left. They are mostly straight-ahead journalism without significant ideology (though of course nothing is perfect in the world, and I'm omitting the unconcious ideology of the US popular perspective that people like Chomsky observe.)
I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons. The best one can hope for is a news organization that is a) straightforward and open about its political viewpoint and b) reports in a sober and accurate manner with a minimum of flinging partisan red meat around. There are a fair number of American news sources that are a), but b) is much harder to come by, especially on television. Given this, I can understand why some Americans flock to the BBC or Al Jazeera or whoever, even if I personally despise their editorial positions.
It's more straightforward than you might think, you just have to give airtime to conflicting views, and make sure discussion of news stories are conducted respectfully.
I understand what you're saying about it being possible to show bias just by what news stories you choose to cover, but inviting on dissenting voices helps tackle that issue. If you expect intelligent debate from your news sources, you'll spot it when it's absent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind...
"Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"
http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2013/08/hard-evidence-...
To give a recent example, there was a story a week or two ago where they held back on an interview with a politician they knew was going to resign until just before a parliamentary debate, which appears to have been a move to undermine the leader of this politician's party, which they've been making efforts to discredit.
BBC is fine for left-leaning Anglosphere types, but it's not very broad in terms of the views covered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
If you see anyone use it unironically, run away.
And actually, that's not what Marxism is or means at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.
Although with Russia Today, it takes a pretty large effort to filter out the information from between the propaganda. Al Jazeera on the other hand has a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.
Apart from what the others replied(those networks will show stuff that isn't 'interesting' for some demographic), having the 'your' and 'mine' sides of the story is pretty much necessary to approximate the 'true' side.
Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryingly non-electable to people who are mildly left-of-centre.
My current approach to getting the UK news is to interpolate between the Guardian (pro-Labour, but less so of its current leadership) and the Telegraph (Torygraph).
It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.
I find it baffling that people still believe this rhetoric, especially after Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election by a huge margin. The whole 'unelectable' thing certainly gets repeated enough in the media, but I'd hoped more people would've seen through the concerted effort to attack him by now.
This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen:
Al Jazeera seems to have a problem with Jews in general ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and... says so ). They also don't like the Shia - not without editorial bias so to speak.
That said, I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.
[0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archf...
[1] (~467k pdf) http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAS...
I don't see this as a good fit for Netflix as I'm not quite sure what they would bring to the news cycle table that isn't already being done. Commercial free broadcasts? Infrastructure? Most quality, public media stations already upload full, commercial free shows to their Youtube channels (and often with quick turn-around from the original broadcast date.) You just simply need to subscribe to their channel (something that I can't do in Netflix).
By who, please, people who don't watch the BBC? The BBC has been in opposition to the UK government once in living memory, back in 2003, and it's still being talked about.
[1] https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-...
I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success dependent on the existing way of doing content business in the US (cable channels), but the number of cord cutters keeps increasing, the most valuable segment for advertisers (younger folk) are the most likely cord cutters (or cord nevers), and the cable business depends heavily on bundling. For example Disney owns ESPN (most of it), so they can make the cable companies to take a portfolio of channels, or get none of them. Al Jazeera had no such leverage.
Their business model was a big gamble, based on the past, and didn't work.