Buy Windows Products 
Buy Mac Products If you’re interested in seeing one of the dumbest business ideas ever, have a look at the new Comcasttown.com web site. I heard an ad for it on the radio, and was thinking “Cool. Now I can stream those Comcast TV shows to my PC.” I am a subscriber, so I figured they had finally worked out some content deals to get me the TV I already pay for onto my PC.
What I got looks suspiciously like the Webkinz kids site. (My kids play on it constantly, so I know it well. And it’s great – for them.) Basically, you’re given a “room”, and you can buy virtual furniture for it with virtual cash, and there’s a Facebook connect thing where you can invite your friends to come over to your virtual room and do god knows what. The irony is that this is a wrapper over Fancast.com. Why shouldn’t I go to Fancast (or Hulu) to watch TV on my PC. Why should I be bothered with this nonsense? Worse, it appears you only get the top 5 shows on Fancast – unless you hunt for more I guess. I ran out of patience before investigating further.
What are they going to do next – come out with a line of Comcast stuffed toys? “Commies”? I’d buy one if it was a likeness of the idiot who came up with this idea so I could stick pins in it.
Let me watch the Cable TV I pay for on my laptop so I can ditch my SlingBox! That’s what I want.
On the plus side, the ad jingle was really, really catchy. And… no, that’s it.
At Applian, we’re really good at designing cool products and marketing them well. If there’s a marketing angle here I don’t see, I’d love to be enlightened. Especially by anyone from Comcast. So, if you’re from Comcast, come defend yourself in the comments!
Posts Categorized: Media Business
Comcasttown: Webkinz for Adults. No lie.
The “TV Everywhere” initiative
As online video grows in popularity, some people are considering disconnecting their Cable or Satellite TV services and consuming everything online. Services like Hulu, although owned by the big networks, are showing the promise of an online-only world of programming.
Others want a la carte Cable. They ask “why should I pay for channels I don’t watch?” KInda, sorta makes sense at first.
Most experts think this pay-as-you-go model is unlikely to happen in the near future. The NY Times had a good explanation of the economics and social benefit of bundling cable service. Mark Cuban also breaks this down nicely.
What will happen is that if you have a Cable or Satellite subscription, you will also be able to consume the same media online. Time Warner is already working towards this.
The Cable and Satellite and the Networks aren’t going to kill a very profitable business. But by enhancing it by making the content you already pay for available online, they will get more viewership and be able to serve more ads.
This seems like the best possible solution that balances the interests of consumers and the media companies.
Kindle, compatible eBooks and DMCA
I just read in Slashdot about how Amazon Uses DMCA To Restrict Ebook Purchases. Basically, someone figured out how to get eBooks from another service onto the Kindle.
As a part of our business, we occasionally have spirited debates about the DMCA, and how it is to be applied properly. Basically, Amazon is trying to use the DMCA to shut out competing eBook formats. The DMCA does not cover interoperability – only copyright infringement – and in my opinion Amazon is clearly in the wrong in this case. No copy protection is being cracked here – a DRMed eBook remains DRMed.
As some of the commenters point out, Amazon’s business model is to make money selling the eBooks, and not the hardware. The Kindle is at best a break-even proposition for Amazon. If people are able to purchase eBooks outside of Amazon, then that destroys their business model to a certain degree.
Another comment articulates the legal position really well:
Leaving aside the issue of users’ rights, as far as I can see Amazon is just plain wrong on the law and lacks legal justification for the takedown notice. What the DMCA prohibits is the distribution of tools for overcoming technical measures for protecting copyrighted materials. The first program generates a MOBI ID from a kindle serial number. The second program rewrites a non-Amazon ebook so that it contains the id that will allow it to work on the Kindle with the given serial number. Neither program modifies or copies the Kindle’s software. Since the ebooks in question are not produced by Amazon, no material whose copyright belongs to Amazon is affected in any way. In other words, this software does not defeat any technical measure of Amazon’s for protecting copyrighted material since Amazon has no copyrighted material at stake here. The DMCA is inapplicable, and the takedown notice invalid. Indeed, it is so clear that this software does nothing to defeat protection of copyrighted material that I would say that the takedown notice was issued in bad faith.
What this software actually does is allow for interoperability, which is explicitly protected by the DMCA.
Are we really ready to cut the cable?
According to this article in TV Week, people are indeed discontinuing Comcast, but may be moving to Satellite and IPTV services like Verizon. Online video may be making an impact amongst the digerati, but until there is a nice easy way to pull it up on your TV, online video has a ways to go. This is all in spite of the horrid economy.
Maybe that will change soon with better software – and easily available content? This should be an interesting year.
First Newspapers, now Broadcast TV?
You’ve probably read how many local newspapers are in deep financial doo-doo recently. Some have even closed, like the Rocky Mountain Daily News.
Now, the same thing appears to be happening to Broadcast TV. This article shows the writing on the wall.
The problems with the newspaper and broadcast TV businesses are similar: people prefer on-demand content. Why huddle around your TV at 8 PM Thursday to watch your favorite show, when you can watch tons of great stuff from sites like Hulu whenever you like? Why read the newspaper (which may be 12 hours out-of-date – god forbid!) when you can get the latest breaking news online?
We’re moving to an on-demand world, and any businesses that fail to adapt to that mindset are doomed to fail.
CBS boldly going where no one has gone before
There’s a new iPhone app out from CBS that lets you watch full episodes of some TV shows on your iPhone. Some old Star Trek episodes are available, but not everything. It looks like they are giving this a test run to see what happens.
If this sort of thing becomes prevalent, will it bring all 3G traffic to it’s knees? Beware the wrath of AT&T.
Cable TV – Coming soon to a PC near you!
This is an interesting article relating to Comcast’s plans to move into the video space.
It seems the Cable companies are scared to death about being bypassed by online video delivery, so rather than sit idly by and watch their business evaporate, they will be trying to make a compelling offering, with the hopes that their subscribers will stay.
You don’t suppose a recording option will be a part of their offering, do you???
YouTube cracking down on download sites
Looks like programs like Replay Media Catcher will soon be the only way to download videos from YouTube. TechCrunch’s video download tool has recently been blocked by YouTube, and it’s likely they will start to block other sites.
Here’s the story:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/13/youtube-kills-our-video-download-tool
What do YOU do about this? Use a PC-based download tool like Replay Media Catcher, which works free with YouTube. If you want the technical meat of why this will continue to work read on…
The way TechCrunch (and likely other sites) are being blocked is via the IP address of their servers. The server goes directly to the YouTube site, and pretends to be a web browser, and then figures out the download link. It’s easy for YouTube to write a script to block certain IP addresses.
The “client” approach (like Replay Media Catcher) cannot be foiled in this way, since the IP address for the download request comes from an individual user’s PC, and not a server. YouTube cannot tell the difference between your web browser, or a client running on your PC, since the IP address of the request is the same.
It will be interesting to see if YouTube continues to crack down on other sites.
Download Videos from Sling.com
Sling has announced their new media portal to compete with Hulu, YouTube and other sites today. And of course when we read news like this, we ask – how will people be able to download or record these video streams?
At-Large Recorder is already working with SlingPlayer 2.0, so that’s one option, but I suspect they will use a different technology (Flash?) for their media service. Once we get our beta invite and try it out, we’ll let you know what we discover.
As far as the service goes, here’s our take. The Clip-and-Sling idea is moronic – I sincerely doubt people will take the time to make clips of TV shows, and also people will be less than likely to watch them. Of course, people DO this already in YouTube, but the effort involved in this acts as a natural filter for presenting interesting things to viewers. if it’s too easy to make clips of TV shows, there will be a lot of noise. Also – being tied to the content owners may limit the flexibility of end-users to make compelling clips. We’ll have to see how the service evolves.
However – if they can provide LiveTV over the web, I can see that as being a game changer. And with the new SlingCatcher boxes coming out which let your TV become the viewing hardware for any Sling stream, we may finally get true IPTV. This will open the floodgates for other similar services, as nobody wants to be left behind.
Article on Downloading Amazon VOD Videos
Technology often moves faster than the news! Here’s an example:
We were featured in an article done by Reuters on September 26, mentioning how Replay Media Catcher was able to download movies from Amazon’s new VOD (Video on Demand) service.
Apparently, Amazon was asked for comment, and shortly before the article hit the wires, they had updated their system, making Replay Media Catcher (for now anyway) unable to record. Other aspects in the article are still valid though, but Amazon was a particularly big part of the story.
Nevertheless, there are other ways to record from Amazon — we recommend WM Capture. As this is a real-time high-quality recorder that works by capturing videos directly off of your PC’s screen, there’s no way it can be blocked.
The other interesting thing is how the story got going in the first place, which we’re still trying to figure out. Stay tuned!