Commentary

Imagine! Cable Companies Competing! Against Each Other! Online!

I’ve had a couple of chances to choose my cable carrier. When I lived in Chicago and New York, I had a chance to subscribe from an “overbuilder,” the word for cable companies that exist (marginally) where a dominant cable company...dominates. But otherwise, in other cities, I had to take what was offered, or not get cable.

But with over-the-top services now growing like kudzu, Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG LLC in New York, predicts that someday, I might actually want to send dollars to Comcast or some other “cable” company that will start offering OTT services of their own.

Bloomberg reported last week that Greenfield predicts there will be a “nationwide war” as cable companies fight each other. Radical! Big media, whenever possible, chooses not to fight each other when it is much tidier to form regional monopolies, so that each giant corporation can accumulate its own mound of money.

Ask Gannett, which was a giant newspaper company (when there was such a thing), and did it largely by never, ever competing with another newspaper.  

But Greenfield sees a day that, according to Bloomberg, “Regardless of where they live, customers could choose from among such providers as Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and Cox Communications Inc. The fight could endanger cable industry profits as consumers switch to cheaper online offerings."

That’s where this dream sequence loses me. A scenario that “could endanger cable industry profits” is impossible to imagine. 

But Sling TV, and CBS All Access and Sony and Apple and more and more and more, will offer consumers ways to get a lot of content without spending more, at least in theory.  And so, to some, a future in which cable competes against cable is an inevitability, making its core service much of a thing.  Bloomberg reports that Charlie Ergen, the CEO of DishTV,  admitted in a cable interview that his Sling TV offshoot, priced at about $20 a month, will eventually harm the main product.

The growth business now is OTT. It’s hard to believe cable will be there--like I said, OTT is the competition--but hard to believe it can’t be there--it’s where the audience is, and cable controls the broadband connection that enters most homes.

“As OTT TV gets bigger and more viewers come to rely on it, providers like Dish (and anyone else who wants to get into the OTT TV business) must step up to the plate and ensure that the software and equipment tasked with getting a live broadcast from courtside to Roku is up to the task,” writes Alan Wolk for TDG Group, which has just issued a report on the future of OTT advertising.

“Streaming live video is not as simple as pointing a camera and uploading it to the Internet. That’s why entrusting streams to companies that can handle the vicissitudes of the medium is a critical first step for anyone thinking of entering the space,” he adds.

The wording of a Comcast Corp. blog about the success of its Xfinity live stream of March Madness basketball makes you understand just how beyond-cable Comcast is becoming.

“Across Xfinity TV platforms, the Big Dance drew record-breaking consumption once again with 1.6 million live streams of tournament play ...up 119%  from last year,” the blog reports. And the Final Four games? Comcast reports “viewership across Xfinity TV Go platforms skyrocketed, up 292%  year over year. . .” The blog concludes, that Comcast is  “focused on providing more access to more content across platforms, making it easy for our customers to watch sports content when, where and how they want.”

Which is what Greenfield is thinking, but still, it is hard to fathom the time my cable company won’t want hundreds of dollars from me every month for providing 30 channels in Spanish, 20 Music Choice wastes, and 100 non-HDTV channels that are identical but drab duplicates of 100 HDTV channels.  Still, maybe someday, that will happen, online.  

pj@mediapost.com
1 comment about "Imagine! Cable Companies Competing! Against Each Other! Online!".
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  1. Leonard Zachary from T___n__, April 10, 2015 at 3:49 p.m.

    Funny how the the cable networks and TV newtorks adopting the "me-too" app, "me-too" digital platform and the "me-too" Wi-Fi as a mobile solution expect results that are better than the next guy. This is a business case study ofr how the TV industry has transformed itself into the app store and app customer acquisition problem of how to differientiate to win the day and please do not ask how the marketing strategy will work for the same content being sold on multiple digital platforms. P.S. Do not ask about what the uptake is on the digital platforms right now and Ignore the Big Elephant in the room called P-I-R-A-C-Y which has become an entitlement of the younger more informed technology generation.

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