Flutterby™! : The balance of network vs broadcast 2015-05-04 21:02:27.714427+00

The balance of network vs broadcast

2015-05-04 21:02:27.714427+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

I am not a subscriber, but the lede for this WSJ article about Comcast says:

Comcast now has more broadband subscribers than video subscribers. And that isn’t a bad thing.

I also noticed that NPR podcasts have recently been carrying ads for NPR's radio programs, so podcasts are taking over...

Aaaand, I recently got in the car, heard the tail end of something on the radio and reached for my phone so I could scroll back a few minutes in the podcast to catch the whole thing.

There's still something of a shared sociological feeling of everybody getting together to watch Game of Thrones, and I'm not sure how the advertising is going to sort itself out, but it seems like we've transitioned from broadcast media to, at least with localized caching and some queuing mechanisms, a network one.

I need to up my income game so TC and I can finally settle that bandwidth bet. Sigh. Or we need to go back and figure out when this tipped and what the timeframe on it was [evil cackle].

Now have the big telcos finally given up on metering to the home to try to extort customers into consuming their own media?

#Comment Re: The balance of network vs broadcast made: 2015-05-04 21:26:06.906942+00 by: ebradway

It's all about the antenna. I now listen to NPR more on podcasts and the NPR One app than I do on broadcast. What drove that shift, mostly, was removing relatively heavy power antenna from my Miata and replacing it with a lightweight, hidden antenna that mostly sucks. Instead, I download a dozen podcasts to my phone or stream the news over NPR One.

Conversely, I ran out to BestBuy on Saturday to buy a Mohu HDTV antenna so we could watch the Kentucky Derby. NBC, in their infinite brilliance, only lets you stream their video if you pay for TV through Comcast or DirecTV (or another source). There was no option to let me stream the 2- minute race, even if I wanted to pay for it.

Hooking up the Mohu 30 to my TV was a revelation. I now have about 20 broadcast channels that I only had to pay for once. I was able to "stream" the race. But even then, my wife was disappointed that she couldn't replay NBC's pre-race programming.

As for metering, many cell service providers have subscription music services that are excluded from your bandwidth limits. Will Google get there? Isn't that the idea? Will Comcast get there? Maybe. Will my DSL provider get there? Never. Will my gigabit internet provider (City of Longmont) get there? Never.

#Comment Re: The balance of network vs broadcast made: 2015-05-04 21:48:40.823018+00 by: ebradway

I searched the archives to find The Bet. It's probably a matter of semantics as to whether Dan buys that bottle of scotch this year or next. I can't even imagine what it would take for TC to have to buy the bottle in 2020.

And my comment about a hybrid stream... boy I was off. Some popular shows do have apps they can run while the show airs, but I only know about that from the ads I see as I stream video later on.

Newspapers: Not much left there... Just USA Today being crammed under hotel room doors. Books: What percentage are read on a Kindle vs. Paper? Music: Apple is the largest retailer of music but never ships media. How do streaming services compare to over-the-air radio? TV: There is still some benefit to DirecTV and Cable but it's mostly usability and short-sightedness of content providers. Movies: The theaters still own the initial release and RedBox has held on to video rentals by getting the overhead down. Does anyone actually buy movies on BluRay?

#Comment Re: The balance of network vs broadcast made: 2015-05-05 11:25:17.670354+00 by: DaveP

I buy movies on BluRay, but I also buy music on CDs and books on paper, so I'm an outlier.