The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really
- Textbroker Raises Millions Of Euros For Quick-And-Dirty Content Marketplace
- Just Because Google Exists Doesn’t Mean You Should Stop Asking People Things
- Guest Post: How We Got HubPages To Scale
- OMG/JK: Just Two Guys Drooling Over The New MacBook Air
- The Real Privacy Scandal On Social Networks: The Feds Are Spying On Their “Friends”
| Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really Posted: 24 Oct 2010 08:52 AM PDT
We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. Comcast cable customers dropped nearly 3% in Q2 compared to last year. In Q2 for the industry overall, a record 711,000 subscribers abandoned cable tv, and six of eight operators suffered their worst quarterly subscriber losses ever. Just this month, a lot has happened:
With all these alternatives, a J.D. Power and Associates survey released this month said consumers are less satisfied with the monthly pay-TV bills and cable subscribers are more likely to feel ripped off than telcom or satellite TV customers. Why Does Cable TV Exist? When cable tv first started in the 1940s, it was a disruptive technology. Community Antenna Television (CATV) solved a problem. Some homes, in mountainous regions, cities, and locations far away from the over-the-air broadcast transmitters couldn't get a good signal. By setting up a large community antenna and retransmitting the signal on coxial cables to those homes, the reception problem was solved. Some claim the first system was set-up in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania and cost subscribers $100 per hookup plus $2 a month. As the industry grew, cable operators began to pick up distant signals, providing new programming choices for consumers. Even homes that could receive the over-the-air signals signed up for cable. And cable started producing its own exclusive, original channels. In 1975, HBO became the first cable network delivering its signal across the country, via satellite to cable systems, which then re-transmitted it to consumers. Ted Turner (“I was cable before cable was cool“), launched the first basic cable network distributed by satellite, WTBS, in 1976. Cable also offered local community programming, not available on the broadcast networks. I remember watching a news show at home produced at my junior high school. At the time, this blew my mind. What’s Changed But all these once ‘cable-only’ benefits have changed. DSL, cable (yes, cable – more on that shortly) modems, and perhaps future fiber to the house mean video has many other routes to the home. The once exclusive cable-only content is now becoming available elsewhere. At first, cable shows started appearing on DVDs after their first run on cable. But now, there are many more options. Cancelcable.com lists some non-cable ways to find your favorite shows. And local and user generated content now has a global reach and can be shared in a community of viewers with common broad or narrow interest. There is one key stumbling block for getting more tv shows on the Internet though. Money. And it’s the reason for the network / Google TV dispute mentioned above. An AdAge article wisely pointed out
Revenue per viewer-minute is much less online vs. broadcast. This could change as more ads appear on the web distribution and they become more targeted and interactive. Also, show or channel subscriptions could solve this problem. The one thing that cable does have going for it is: its relatively easy to use. Make a call, someone comes over to your house and hooks it up, and then you control it with your remote. (Well, you may have waited for hours on hold for someone to answer your call and then waited all day for the installer to arrive.) Up to now, you had to be a tech savvy person to cancel cable and hook up your own system. No one from Google, Apple, or Netflix is going to come to your house and help you hook the new devices up. As Danny Sullivan found out, hooking up your Google TV is not quite ready for prime time or the masses. But, expect it to improve. And other offerings, such as Apple TV, are making it easier. The cable alternatives are moving from technologies only early adopters use to ones the broader market can figure out. Cable Has Faced Competitors Before The Cost of Cable The cable industry has resisted “a la carte” pricing, allowing customers to pick and choose which channels they watch and pay for. Cable networks make part of their money from subscription fees paid by customers to the cable operators and then to the networks. So smaller networks could go out of business under such a pricing plan. There’s also a debate over whether “a la carte” pricing would save or cost consumers money. Internet TV already offers pick and pay pricing options. New media can handle this much better than old media. For my money, I think I’d come out with a big savings under an “a la carte” system. Cable Fights Back There’s also speculation that cable boxes could come with ‘Google TV’ built-in for an additional fee. But, would consumers really choose to pay the higher fee and keep their cable box, when other options will be cheaper? The Immediate Future I actually still have cable. I’m inches away from dropping it, but there are still a few shows not available elsewhere that my wife enjoys. But, it’s hard to imagine those shows won’t be available elsewhere in the near future. I know a lot of folks who keep cable for live sports, but cable surviving as a sports-only service is hard to fathom. More than a year ago, writer and entrepreneur Paul Kedrosky wrote “Many people are coming to the correct conclusion that in the age of Hulu, Boxess, Bittorrent, etc., that cable TV is an over-priced relic of another entertainment age.” Now that the likes of Apple, Google, Netflix and others are aggressively joining the game, the days of that over-priced relic seem even more numbered. For more information, check out other TechCrunch posts:
       
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| Textbroker Raises Millions Of Euros For Quick-And-Dirty Content Marketplace Posted: 24 Oct 2010 03:51 AM PDT  Sario Marketing, the company behind a digital marketplace for unique on-demand content called Textbroker.com, has landed a "multi-million Euro growth financing round" through funds advised by ViewPoint Capital Partners. The German company plans to use the proceeds to expand into existing markets as well as new markets within and beyond Europe, starting with France.
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| Just Because Google Exists Doesn’t Mean You Should Stop Asking People Things Posted: 23 Oct 2010 11:38 PM PDT
If you spend any amount of time online you’re probably very familiar with the above website, “Let Me Google That For You.” LMGTFY is a super smug and hilarious site built for those sick of “all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.“ As all of us know, it is super annoying when your co-worker or worse boss sends you an email (!) asking an easily google-able question, therefore making you google the answer to send back and wasting your and their precious time. Granted. The issue is, just like cell phones have made it easier to forget phone numbers, “google” as verb is now a replacement for the word and action “think.” The search engine has become such a stand-in repository for human knowledge that it has, among other things, compromised the entire genre of games based on trivia. Consider the example of how Google put an end to the “Phone A Friend” lifeline on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”;
Google has basically become an extension of our brain, the epitome of Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for our minds.” Twice this week I have asked questions that would be better suited to a human rather than an search engine algorithm and both times I’ve been met with a “just Google it”-esque response. One of those inquiries was about directions to a local restaurant and the Google Maps walking directions and the directions I needed to get there safely while walking and biking were two very different things (yes, I know about Google Biking directions, still unavailable on the iPhone). I ended up getting lost in the rain because in the mist I couldn’t see the very narrow bridge across the 101 freeway that the Google Maps directions indicated.
Google is not omniscient. It doesn’t understand that the shouting coming from next door is probably a faster and more importantly more viscerally satisfying indicator of whether the SF Giants just won the NL Championship Series than any keywords I could search. There are countless examples of “Google fail” (available, yes, through Google) that are constant reminders of how the service cannot account for all the intricacies and subtleties of the human experience. And while it’s great to have access to an index of the largest compilation of information humanity has ever seen at my literal fingertips, I’m going to continue to ask people things like, “What’s the best place to get pizza in San Francisco?” or “How do you complete this function on Excel?,” even if it is on forums like Quora. How do you think Google got all that information in the first place?
       
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| Guest Post: How We Got HubPages To Scale Posted: 23 Oct 2010 07:57 PM PDT Editor’s note: This is a guest post by HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson on how Hubpages succeeded in amassing visitors. After the recent TechCrunch post about HubPages, we received several questions about how HubPages got to 39 million unique visitors per month. Here's how we did it: Four years ago, during our launch in August 2006, we wanted to do three main things to create a successful social content community: first, we wanted to make it easy for authors to create a one-page topical website; second, we wanted to drive traffic to the author's content; and third, we wanted to share the majority of the revenue back with the author.
We had planned for natural search to be a major source of traffic, but it wasn't until November of 2006 that we started to get measurable traffic from search engines. To this day, we continue to refine our platform to help authors on HubPages to have the best opportunity to show up in the natural search results. One of the key metrics we learned was about the longevity of content. Content created on HubPages peaks in traffic on average nearly three years after it's created. This knowledge helped our business become more predictable. For the author, creating a HubPages article is like putting a little bit of money in the bank that is going to increase its value over the next three years and then continue at that level for the foreseeable future. The large quantity of content that was created early in the life of HubPages dramatically increased in revenue over 3 years, and allowed us to continue to grow the company. We became a metrics focused company. The two key drivers of our business are Hub production and revenue per thousand Hub views. Based on these drivers, we developed a model that allowed us to do sophisticated micro-marketing including search engine marketing to attract writers. Through analysis of Hubs created by new authors, our models are able to predict a close estimate of the traffic and revenue that a new author will generate over various time intervals. This prediction model has been significant in our growth. In the early days, we decided we didn't want to be the arbiter of quality or try to control what people wrote, but we soon discovered that high-quality authors and advertisers did not feel comfortable with the fully open publishing platform that included adult content. So, in July of 2007, about a year after our launch, we modified our terms of service and took leading steps in the social content category to become a porn-free site. The short-term impact was over a 30% drop in traffic, but it reaped long term gains. We also continued to build anti-spam technologies and put in place requirements for publishing on HubPages that improves the overall quality. Then we wanted to give insight to authors about the type of content we saw working well on HubPages so that they could earn more. We started hosting contests about writing on evergreen topics. We started incorporating analytics into each page of the site that showed authors their traffic sources.
We continue to invest in specialty tools that teach authors what pages to link to with the Interlinking Tool and how to refine the titles of their Hubs with the Title Tuner Beta. By taking the data we collected, and putting it inline with the tools, authors became more successful on our platform.
HubPages is a set of technologies, but we really are about authors. We took pro-writer stances by letting the author choose what they wanted to write on, and giving them ownership of their content, so that the revenue they earn can increase over time. As the author community grew, we built features that fostered communication – like the ability to follow and compliment other authors. As a result, HubPages' reputation as a writing community continues to grow. Now, going on our fifth year of business and with nearly 140% growth in the last 12 months in terms of visitors, I can see the site growing well into the future based on our three original tenets of making it easy to create content, driving traffic and sharing the revenue.        
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| OMG/JK: Just Two Guys Drooling Over The New MacBook Air Posted: 23 Oct 2010 04:25 PM PDT We had a special guest for this week’s episode of OMG/JK, the show I host alongside fellow writer Jason Kincaid: the new MacBook Air. If you’ve been waiting to see two guys endlessly fawn over something, watch above. And once we wiped the drool off of our faces, we also discussed Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the $250 million fund to back new social applications. And we talk a bit about the Google TV, its awful remotes, and the quickly heating up connected television space. Here are some posts relevant to the topics we discuss:
       
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| The Real Privacy Scandal On Social Networks: The Feds Are Spying On Their “Friends” Posted: 23 Oct 2010 10:04 AM PDT
All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal's so-called Facebook "privacy breach" article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that's much bigger. It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to "friend" people in order to spy on them. The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook. For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them. Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other's news posts going forward. But that's not how the government sees it. In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy. Here's a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: "Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of "friends" link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know." And it gets worse. The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide "an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities." Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys. Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry? Here's why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn't be saying if they knew they were under investigation. Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that "people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face." Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person? According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, "we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language." This leads to a few common sense conclusions. First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.” Second, as the EFF's Jennifer Lynch pointed out, "the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target." In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression. On October 18th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that "gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends." To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more). In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used "a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama's inauguration." And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with "unpermitted" pools in Long Island, NY. Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads. Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison. Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.        
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Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.
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