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Tool Kit: Streaming Devices Lead the Way to Smart TV

August 21, 2013 by NewsMaker

Someday, our televisions will be smart. With a flick of the wrist or a voice command, couch potatoes will be able to binge-view “Scandal” or children will watch any episode of the Disney series “Dog With a Blog.” Maybe just thinking about Walter White will bring up “Breaking Bad” on the big screen.

But for now, most television sets are dumb. They do a good enough job handling the signals coming through an antenna or a set-top box, but to take advantage of the wealth of programming available through online services and apps, you generally need to attach a streaming device to the TV.

These devices are like portals to a parallel universe of television programming, one that is getting bigger all the time. They provide access to all the episodes of the Emmy-nominated “House of Cards” and stockpiles of timeless black-and-white films, courtesy of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, as well as to the Web comedies and endless viral videos on YouTube. This year, Netflix cited the proliferation of these devices — “inexpensive smart TV adapters,” it called them — when it predicted that on-demand and mobile TV would replace the older, scheduled way of watching shows.

The company also stated that “smart TV sales are increasing and eventually every TV will have Wi-Fi and apps.” Many of the new sets on display at Walmart and Best Buy already do. But until all TVs get smart, it falls on the backs of these streaming devices — most of them handy, but none of them yet perfect — to help a staid TV dip a cord into the future.

THE GAMERS Millions of Americans already have a streaming device connected to a TV. Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Wii video game consoles offer streaming video options and are among the most popular ways to tap into Internet TV.

With a few simple clicks, the consoles can download apps for services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. Downloading them is free, but many require a paid subscription to actually stream video. (An Xbox also requires a subscription to the Xbox Live service for use of its Internet interface.)

The consoles’ controllers make navigating through lists of TV shows a breeze. And with the Xbox and PlayStation, there is also the option of buying an individual episode or season of a show through the Xbox Video Store or the PlayStation Store, in case it is not available on one of the streaming services.

THE BEAMERS A problem with the gaming devices is that they tend to take a couple of minutes to boot up. (And with all the video available, time is of the essence. After all, there are hours and hours of “The Walking Dead” to catch up on.) That is not the case with a couple of other popular options, including Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast, that can also beam videos from a phone or laptop to the TV screen.

Why “beam”? You might start watching a YouTube video on your iPhone and decide that you want to show it to your family — in that case, you would click a button on a smartphone and stream it on the TV set. Or you might be curious about a concert streaming live on YouTube. You can find the live stream on a laptop and push it to the big screen.

When it comes to Apple TV, probably the most powerful of the beaming devices, the name can be misleading. It is not a television set or a cable channel or a full-blown competitor to Netflix. Rather, it’s a sleek black box, shaped like a hockey puck, that connects to a TV set. Not surprisingly, given Apple’s penchant for design, Apple TV is probably the most attractive of all the Internet TV adapters on the market.

Apple promotes the device’s $99 price, but it is actually more expensive — you will need to buy an HDMI cable to connect the box to the back of your TV. And the device’s AirPlay beaming function works only with Apple phones, tablets and computers, so it’s not as appealing if you are not in the Apple family already.

The newest way to “beam” comes from Google’s $35 Chromecast, which looks like a flash drive and plugs into an HDMI port on your TV. Using your home Wi-Fi, it will project on the TV whatever you are watching on your mobile device or computer. Google Android, Apple and Microsoft Windows devices are all welcome here.

But Chromecast does not come with video apps the way Apple TV or the video game consoles do. So finding TV episodes or films is all done on the mobile device or laptop being used, which can make Chromecast feel too constricting.

On the other end of this plug-in spectrum are boxes like the Roku, which can be found online for as little as $40, and the slightly more expensive WD TV Play from Western Digital. These boxes have apps galore, even for streaming services you’ve never heard of. But the Roku, the best known of this bunch, is just beginning to enable beaming from other screens.

There are surely more of these boxes to come — Amazon is said to have
one in the works, for example.

THE FUTURE Of course, truly smart TVs with Internet connectivity will increasingly negate the need for special adapters. But in the meantime, the adapters are the best window into the television revolution.

After a short while with Netflix via Apple TV or YouTube via Xbox or Hulu via Chromecast, you might wonder why anyone pays for cable or satellite television anymore.

But the truth is that many of the best, freshest TV shows and films are still protected behind cable’s high walls. All the evidence until now suggests that for most people Internet streams are a supplement to cable, not a replacement. But they’re a really useful supplement — they provide convenience and a sense of control that cable cannot currently match.

Soon our definition of the very word “cable” may change: Sony, Intel, Google and other companies are interested in selling a cablelike package of channels via the Internet, challenging incumbents like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Apple seems to be taking a different tack, collaborating with those incumbents to make it easier for viewers to watch TV on their own terms.

For now, it may be best to think of the streaming devices as Trojan horses for the technology giants that manufacture them. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon all want to make TV smarter, and these devices are a start.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/technology/personaltech/streaming-devices-lead-the-way-to-smart-tv.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: flick of the wrist, hulu, voice command

Tool Kit: Devices Lead the Way to a Smarter TV

August 21, 2013 by NewsMaker

There are surely more of these boxes to come — Amazon is said to have
one in the works, for example.

After a short while with Netflix via Apple TV or YouTube via Xbox or Hulu via Chromecast, you might wonder why anyone pays for cable or satellite television anymore.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/technology/personaltech/streaming-devices-lead-the-way-to-smart-tv.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: couch potatoes, hulu, voice command

Novelties: PlayLater Offers an Online Answer to the DVR

November 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

But streamed shows can be ephemeral — they depend on a good broadband connection, and they pass by as they are viewed, unlike downloaded videos that can be watched later offline. And some shows can’t be found again at a site that once provided them, because they are meant to have a limited run.

Now, for $5 a month, a new service called PlayLater lets subscribers copy streaming video as it shows up at 30 sites, including Netflix, Hulu, PBS, ESPN and CNN, so they can watch it later.

With PlayLater, viewers can stockpile episodes of their favorite television shows on their hard drives and thumb drives, just as they copy programs on a digital video recorder for later viewing.

PlayLater has many restrictions — it works only on PCs, and the videos made with the software may be watched only on the PC licensed by PlayLater to record the show, or on another PC that shares the license. And it doesn’t work with iPhones, iPads, or mobile Android devices, although Jeff Lawrence, the chief executive of PlayOn, the Seattle company that offers the subscription service, said these apps would be available soon.

The number of people who watch streaming video is climbing, said Radha Subramanyam, an executive at Nielsen, the ratings firm, “and so is the time they spend watching.” Netflix subscribers spent an average of nearly 8.5 hours doing so in June, she said.

“Everyone streams across all ages,” she said, “but some age groups stream more than others.” She said that there were strong numbers for both the 18-to-24 and 24-to-35 age groups.

PlayLater is among many new services that aim to take advantage of streaming’s popularity, said Dan Rayburn, a New York-based analyst at Frost Sullivan, a market research firm, and an executive at StreamingMedia.com, a Web site devoted to covering the streaming media field.

Mr. Rayburn called the subscription service “a great idea” but said it had many weaknesses. “Most important,” he said, “it doesn’t work on Macs.”

I signed up for a free trial offered by PlayLater and installed the software on my PC — a painless process that took about 10 minutes. There is no central schedule of streaming choices at the bare-bones PlayLater home page. Instead, I went to each participating site and shopped for shows I might want to copy. The software records in real time, so it takes 30 minutes to copy a 30-minute show — though you can skip the commercials when you watch the recordings later.

I listed in a queue all the programs I wanted, then PlayLater recorded them one after another. But I couldn’t program the software to record on future dates, as can be done with DVRs. (Mr. Lawrence of PlayLater says the company is working on creating this feature.)

Streaming quality, of course, will be affected by the Internet connection. PlayLater’s site recommends a broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits a second, the same speed that Netflix recommends.

Even with a decent connection, you should be sure that other people on your home network aren’t downloading large files or playing an online game, taking away needed bandwidth.

The quality is also affected by computer hardware. You’ll need a laptop or desktop PC bought within the last five years to avoid problems, Mr. Lawrence said. Each hour of video being recorded requires about one gigabyte of storage space.

The picture quality of the shows I stored on the hard drive was similar to that of the movies I stream from Netflix or Amazon — sharp and clear when tiny, and grainier when I enlarged the image. That is how it should be, said Ara Derderian , co-host of the HDTV and Home Theater Podcast.

“Don’t expect high definition, or the quality of a Blu-ray player,” he said. “The copy of what’s streamed should look identical to what you’d get if you were streaming it.”

SUBSCRIBERS might also be worried about the legality of copying video content. Mr. Lawrence said PlayLater is following the path set earlier by VCRs and DVRs.

“PlayLater is legal for the same reason that using a VCR and a DVR is legal,” he said. “There is a well-established legal precedent that consumers are allowed to record videos for time-shifted viewing.” (In time-shifting, people make copies for their personal use that they can view later.)

Denise M. Howell , an appellate, intellectual property and technology lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., says she isn’t so sure that software like PlayLater’s will succeed without a legal challenge. She pointed out that the terms-of-service agreements that users have with companies like Netflix and Amazon limit a video’s viewing.

“If the streaming sites let this go, ignoring it, they will irritate the people who provide the content,” she said. “They are not going to be able to sit back and look the other way.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

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Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: espn, frost sullivan, hulu

Hulu and Netflix Gain an Advantage With Anime

October 29, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The show, “Naruto: Shippuden,” a Japanese anime set in a fantasy land reminiscent of Okayama Prefecture in Japan, represents a growing business for Hulu, the streaming video service.

As Hulu and other streaming services like Netflix grapple with Hollywood studios and TV networks to acquire rights for expensive prime-time series, they’ve found easy-to-get content in anime and other niche foreign programming.

What the stylized form of Japanese animation lacks in mass appeal it makes up for in price. Hulu typically pays anime distributors only a portion of advertising revenue. Netflix pays a relatively small licensing fee.

In contrast, earlier this month Netflix announced a deal worth an estimated $1 billion to gain access to shows on the CW network. On Friday, Hulu struck a five-year deal worth significantly less to broadcast CW shows like “Gossip Girl” and “Vampire Diaries.”

Typically shown with subtitles and known for characters with wide glimmering eyes and elongated bodies, anime stands at the center of Hulu’s strategy to differentiate itself from TV watched the old-fashioned way. “Networks might be happy to get a show that 20 million people kind of like,” said Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president for content. “We’re more interested in finding a show that a million people love to death.”

In Japan, anime varies from children’s programming to sports, romantic comedies and even public service announcements and pornography. The shows that resonate in the United States tend to be action-driven, with lots of violence, as well as sexually provocative shows. The small but avid audience is made up of mostly male viewers aged 18 to 34. Distributors said comedies, sports shows and anything aimed at women tend to not work.

Hulu has 9,500 episodes of anime titles. Earlier this month it signed a deal with the anime distribution company FUNimation Entertainment to show five new subtitled series within 48 hours of their original broadcast in Japan. Netflix offers 4,000 anime episodes for streaming.

This month four of the top 40 titles on Hulu and its subscription service, Hulu Plus, are anime. “Naruto: Shippuden,” a continuation of the popular “Naruto,” which shows the young ninja leave his village to train, is the sixth most popular series on Hulu Plus, competing with episodes of “Family Guy” on Fox and “The Office” on NBC.

Hulu is expanding its offering of foreign shows with similarly devoted audiences. In May, a Hulu executive flew to Seoul to attend a presentation by South Korean broadcasters and producers. Held at the luxurious Shilla Hotel, the lecture, titled “The Potential for Korean Drama in the U.S. Market,” reinforced Hulu’s push into Korean dramas. It now offers 90 different shows.

They appeal largely to non-Korean viewers who listen to Korean pop music or love soapy dramas, according to Suk Park, co-founder of DramaFever.com, a Web site that streams Korean dramas in North America and struck the deal with Hulu. The company is seeking other trendy Asian programs to bring to the United States. (Hulu, coincidentally, has Chinese roots. The company was named after the Mandarin words that roughly translate to the “holder of precious things” and “interactive recording.”)

This month, Hulu, a joint venture of the NBCUniversal division of the Comcast Corporation, News Corporation, Walt Disney and Providence Equity Partners, announced a deal to carry Spanish-language telenovelas and other shows from Univision, the most-watched Spanish-language network in the United States.

Internet streaming services have upended the business model for Japanese animation. A decade ago when the genre exploded among the young comic book set in the United States, viewers mostly watched pirated versions. These online videos posted on fan Web sites with sloppy English subtitles left the Japanese anime industry powerless to profit from even the most popular titles overseas.

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Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: hollywood studios, hulu, senior vice president

Media Decoder Blog: Deal With Time Warner Brings the CW to Netflix

October 13, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

2:01 p.m. | Updated Once a Netflix skeptic, Time Warner has struck its biggest deal yet to allow the online service to license its television content.

On Thursday, the Warner Brothers Television Group of Time Warner and the CBS Corporation announced a $1 billion deal that will give Netflix the rights to stream shows broadcast on the CW network for at least the next eight years.

Eight dramas currently shown on the youth-oriented CW network, a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros, will be available for streaming beginning as early as Oct. 15. They include “The Vampire Diaries” and “Gossip Girl.”

The deal results from a yearlong evolution at Time Warner in which the chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, established a set of guidelines for monetizing content via subscription streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.

“Our rules included bypassing the quick and easy money,” Mr. Bewkes said in an interview on Thursday. “We established a strategy to responsibly work with Netflix.”

That strategy included not separating the rights to TV shows so that the same show could be sold into syndication on a traditional TV network and, then, at a diminished rate, to an online subscription service.

Mr. Bewkes came under criticism last year when he argued that Netflix’s potential was overhyped. He compared the Web service to “the Albanian Army” taking over the world.

The Warner Brothers-CBS deal speaks to a continuing evolution, Mr. Bewkes said, adding that the way media companies were cheaply licensing content to online video-on-demand services did not make sense.

He said he envisioned Netflix and other services as a means to make money on shows like those on the CW, which are heavily serialized and would not lead to multimillion-dollar traditional syndication deals like those for CBS’s “Big Bang Theory” or “Mentalist,” both produced by Warner Brothers.

At any point while the Netflix deal is in effect, Warner Brothers and CBS will have the opportunity to shop CW shows around for traditional syndication deals.

The CW’s audience of viewers ages 18 to 34 prompted the companies to explore an online on-demand deal, since younger viewers often prefer to watch TV on laptops or iPads or via streaming. The concept fits what Mr. Bewkes has dubbed “TV Everywhere,” an industrywide push to make money off content while making it available on any device.

In a statement, Leslie Moonves, chief executive at the CBS Corporation, said the deal opened a new revenue stream for CW shows. “It also further illustrates how new distribution systems are providing premium content suppliers with additive revenue streams while still preserving traditional monetization windows.”

But don’t expect CBS or Warner Brothers to make its hit big-tent sitcoms or dramas readily available online. Syndication deals for network shows represent a huge revenue stream for Warner Brothers and bring in big dollars to networks. Last year, Warner Brothers sold “The Big Bang Theory” for a record $2 million per episode to Time Warner’s TBS and Fox.

“We’re talking billions of dollars, so to go and put those shows out essentially on a table in the street is not a good idea,” Mr. Bewkes said.

Between an unpopular price increase, the removal of some popular films and a botched plan to separate the DVD-by-mail arm of its business, Netflix has had an exceptionally hard few months. The price increase, which affected about half of its subscribers, was intended in part to raise more money for content licenses like the one announced on Thursday, a company spokesman said.

“We’re always negotiating with networks and studios,” said the spokesman, Steve Swasey.

He rebuffed a suggestion that the deal with the CW was quickly completed to counter some of the recent bad news headlines. “These deals take a long time to consummate,” he said.

At midday Thursday, Netflix stock had risen about 2.2 percent, to $116.11.

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Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: cbs deal, hulu, netflix

Fox to Limit Next-Day Streaming on Hulu to Paying Cable Customers

July 27, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Starting Aug. 15, the Fox network will limit next-day streaming of its shows to paying customers of approved cable and satellite distributors. Those customers will be able to log in and watch episodes of “Bones,” “The Simpsons” and other shows the day after they appear on TV; all others will have to wait eight days.

The limitations, announced on Tuesday and bemoaned by fans of Hulu, are a significant change to the online television system. At least one of Hulu’s other network partners, ABC, is contemplating setting a similar limit, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

For Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, the new limitations are driven by a desire to protect lucrative deals with cable and satellite distributors. Increasingly, distributors are paying monthly fees for Fox programs through retransmission agreements, and they dislike the fact that many of the programs are free online.

By putting an eight-day delay in place, Fox is appeasing the distributors and supporting what is known in the TV industry as an authentication model for online streams of shows. Cable channels like ESPN and CNN are implementing a similar model, which requires an individual to authenticate that they are a cable or satellite customer before streaming a show or a channel. Through authentication, traditional distributors hope to keep customers paying for monthly TV service while making it possible to access a wealth of content online.

Fox’s announcement marks the first instance of authentication by a broadcast network. To make authentication work, programmers and distributors have to work together and in some cases sign new contracts; that’s why Fox announced only one distribution partner on Tuesday, Dish Network, which has a subscriber-only Web site for streaming TV, DishOnline.com.

All other cable and satellite customers will be affected by the eight-day delay until Fox lines up other participating distributors. Network executives declined interview requests on Tuesday, but they acknowledged privately that many viewers would be disadvantaged, at least temporarily, by the strategic shift.

Mike Hopkins, the president for affiliate sales and marketing for Fox Networks, said in a statement that the change was about providing a product to “enhance the value of pay television to subscribers.”

While the four-year-old Hulu, a joint venture of the parents of Fox, ABC, NBC and the investment firm Providence Equity Partners, is profitable, retransmission agreements with big distributors are much more profitable for the networks. With the eight-day delay, Hulu, which is known to be for sale, is effectively being placed second in line behind the traditional distributors.

News Corporation executives had signaled previously that they were considering placing limitations on the free episodes that Fox supplies to Hulu. This summer, Fox signed a contract to continue supplying Hulu; the terms were not disclosed, but analysts believed the contract allowed for further delays of episodes and heavier ad loads.

Hulu declined to comment on Fox’s announcement on Tuesday. The Web site has both a free service and a paid service, Hulu Plus, that includes full seasons of many series. Hulu Plus, which costs $8 a month, has almost one million subscribers.

A Fox spokeswoman said Hulu Plus would not be subject to the eight-day delay. But the company’s news release notably did not mention Hulu Plus, as if trying to discourage that option for next-day viewing.

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Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: distribution partner, hulu, television system

Drilling Down: Caught Up in the Online Video Stream

March 28, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Online video gained few viewers over the 12-month period ended Jan. 31. The number of people who watched videos online in January was only 3.1 percent higher than in January 2010, according to the Nielsen Company.

But the average viewer spent far more time glued to the screen. On average, viewers of online video spent 4 hours 39 minutes watching in January, an almost 45 percent increase from the period a year earlier, according to Nielsen.

The change appears to reflect the growth in popularity of sites including Netflix and Hulu that stream long-form video to viewers.

Those two sites fed about 232,000 more streams in January than in the period a year earlier. ALEX MINDLIN

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Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: hulu, netflix, popularity