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Category Archives: Telecoms

Cable Unbundling Thankfully Continues, As Do Pitfalls

Attribution and All Photo Credits: Gannett Corporation

More on ESPN’s Woes Due To Cable Unbundling: Andrew Logue’s August 12, 2015 Des Moines Register Piece, “Cable unbundling makes college power brokers uneasy”.

ESPN Still Widely Watched & Loved
Like tens or even hundreds of millions of viewers in this country and around the world, I love ESPN and always have. The network has covered historic games and matches; has uncovered countless numbers of stories, athletes and teams around the country since the early 1980s; and has driven greater sports media from other providers, while introducing us to great American sports communities like no media before.

Ways of Watching ESPN Evolving
ESPN came to us only through cable television for its first 25 years or so, but with the advent of web streaming for at least a decade, viewers have subscribed to EPSN’s wide variety of sports web channels, or have simply put up with cable costs sometimes five times the cost to subscribe to widening digital ESPN and many other web streaming choices, what the industry calls “over the top” services, like Netflix, Hulu and HBO.

Why Is ESPN So Important?
As viewers flocked to ESPN over the years, cable companies used the very popular ESPN as a battering ram to gain and retain viewers to continue paying the cable monster. Cable companies — awash for decades in subscriber money while still enjoying revenues from commercials, which subscribers are forced to watch, although we already pay for cable! — provided some other popular content (examples include Comedy Central, Disney and Fox channels among them). But beyond these rare good channels, the rest have been what many Americans might politely describe as crap. Thus, the flood to find cheaper and better web streaming alternatives.

Current Cable Unbundling Trends Put ESPN At Risk
ESPN has reportedly lost more than three million cable subscribers in a little over a year, and its parent company Disney has demanded deep cuts into ESPN’s budget for 2016 and 2017. Current web streaming is gutting the cable industry, the same industry that brought ESPN to all of us many years ago. And given ever-widening digital alternatives, no signs indicate this trend will change.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Media, Thy Name Is “Acquisition”

Need The Talent? Buy The Company!

As heads swirl over the growing number of media acquisitions in 2015, last year’s predictions for these trends have proven true and then some. Although federal regulators rejected Comcast’s recent bid to acquire Time-Warner, now Charter wants Time-Warner, — and will likely get it.

I’ve found VentureBeat’s acquisition page with clearly marked abstracts topped with headline links pretty well sums up a media buying trend that has not happened since the last months of the Clinton administration. We all hope innovation drives this trend, and not “buy this week and sell the next” approach among those who stand to make solid dough, especially paper dough.

Not Just Tech Is Buying Up Tech
Not only have tech companies come after boutique media companies in droves not seen since 2000, traditional companies are continuing to beef up media talent they don’t have internally, and simply buying companies that do have the talent. Call this latter trend of “tiny tech acquisition” ongoing preparation for The Internet of Things.

According to Jacob Mullins of Exitround, today we continually have big, strong companies clamoring for relatively small buys (under $100 million):

Do You Take Your Yogurt With New Media?
“UnderArmour acquired MapMyFitness. Hearst acquired BranchOut. Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. Walmart acquired over 15 tech companies in the past four years. There are more corporate buyers in the market than ever, and as detailed by The Economist, “25 of the 30 firms that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average” which include everything from The Coca Cola Co. to Caterpiller Inc. have a corporate-venture unit. Even Chobani, the Greek yogurt company, has a tech incubator. These are all attempts to assimilate technology into the businesses of large companies whose core business or focus is not technology.”

But we still have large tech and media companies going hard after smaller tech companies, again according to Mullins of Exitround:

“This year we’ve seen an inordinate number of billion dollar venture-backed exits such as Nest (acquired for $3.2B by Google), Beats (acquired for $3B by Apple), Minecraft (acquired for $2.5B by Microsoft), Oculus VR (acquired for $2B by Facebook), Twitch (acquired for $970M by Amazon) and of course the largest venture-backed exit of all time with Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp.”

Four Additional Top Headlines During This Age Of Tech Media Acquisitions & Mergers

“Amazon Trumps Apple’s Beats Acquisition With Music Streaming”

“Three Strong Reasons Why Regulators Will Let Charter Buy Time Warner Cable”

“2015 Will Be The Year Of The Tiny Tech Acquisition”

“AT&T still throttles unlimited data, and FCC isn’t promising to stop it”

Verizon Purchase Of AOL Shows That Mobile Marches On — And On, And On

Photo Credit: The New York Times

“…the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.”
–Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, “For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word”, May 14, 2015

In a twist from the past, 2015 cellphone giant Verizon is buying 1990s “World Wide Web” America Online for $4.4 billion, in an additional sign that big telecoms don’t want to be known simply as “dumb pipes” to customers.

Who knew that “You’ve Got Mail!” and a nearly 30-year-old dialup provider would still appeal? (Amazingly, AOL once purchased AOL-Time Warner for $162 billion during clownish times at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000, so the new $4.4 billion figure is trump change, but perhaps a more accurate figure.)

The reasons for acquiring AOL are all too clear: As Facebook and Google claims more than half of the $42 billion online ad marketplace, Verizon wants more mobile content and advertising, along with video ads tailored to users through demographics and data mining of cellphone customers.

AOL owns all brands of media, including the Huffington Post and game applications that produce mountains of personal data for advertising and message construction.

Our smartphone consumption, at its peak right now in terms of sales and usage, is more than three times higher than that our use of personal computers during its heyday.

“Mobile, mobile, mobile,” is what the market is saying. As when television merged the technology of moving images and radio sound into relatively small boxes — called TVs — all things media are in constant states of flux. Continual digital media mergers, both of companies and of technologies, surely represent our constant, collective paths.

Singularity, anyone?

“Cord Cutting”: Web Telecom Bundles Are Killing the Cable Store

While it’s hard to tell the difference anymore with media evolving all over the place, giant telecoms — with likely all of them jumping into the Internet bundle market to compete with the digital programming successes of HBO and Netflix — are beating up dinosaur cable companies so badly that many of the latter will do practically anything any more to stop customers from jumping ship.

Cable originally came to most of us during the mid-1980s and later. Cable broke the four- or five-channel model that most Americans watched practically since the early 1950s. We welcomed cable, which instead offered us 24-7 content with a lot of good and bad channels: the sports we liked (ESPN); the news machine we really liked and really hated (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News); the news we scoffed at and now feel sorry for (Ted Turner’s CNN); at-times revolutionary but largely inane music videos (MTV); and specialty raunchy but wry content (David Chappelle and Comedy Central).

But over time, bad cable channels have greatly outnumbered the bad. Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 dirge, “57 Channels And Nothing On”, dates me — but well illustrates the point.

Most of the country’s viewers are still comprised of people too lazy, too scared of change, too fearful that something will go wrong and waste time, or just plain too damn busy to switch away from a model that grants cable companies nearly regional monopoly status. These cable companies still earn astronomical profits as practical “cable annuities.”

Count me among the sheeple still paying into the cable annuity monster. But I — along with millions of us, blessedly — am increasingly converting to the Internet bundle world of watch-as-you-want, when-you-want, at monthly rates sometimes considerably less than 10 percent of standard cable. Tens of millions now pull up “Game of Thrones” on HBO, along with “House of Cards” and the enchanting “Peaky Blinders” BBC series on Netflix, whenever they want.

Many have labeled the shift away from cable to Internet program bundles as “cord cutting.” Some lament the dizzying array of program offerings, among them the great Tim Wu in “The Dreaded Bundle Comes to Internet TV”, from the May 3, 2015, New Yorker.

Also comes The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Pfanner, who writes “Sony Joins Crowd of Online TV Providers,” about Sony PlayStation’s Vue service, and many other Internet services taking shape.