Multichannel news had a story up last night that was mostly a story about how Comcast’s plans for Internet video on demand wouldn’t cannibilize its cable business, but there were some gems in the article (thanks to Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee.com, otherwise the article would’ve slipped past me!)
From the article:
Today cable, satellite and telco TV providers pay an estimated $22 billion per year in programming fees, Gilford noted. “It’s pretty hard to imagine that revenue stream going away,” she said.
Asked about “cord-cutting” — the notion that cable customers would cancel their pay-TV service and obtain all their video content online — Gilford said that remains a theoretical idea rather than a real trend.
“It’s something people are talking about, but it’s not actually happening right now,” said Gilford, formerly vice president and general manager of Yahoo Entertainment.
Who wants to imagine a $22 billion revenue stream going away!?!
For MTV Networks, online video as a business is profitable, said Greg Clayman, executive vice president of digital distribution and business development — but “the bad news is it’s still a small one, certainly relative to the rest of our business.”
We’ve been saying such things for so long, it’s good to hear the executives finally saying it in public. Even Jeff Zucker at NBC is saying similar things with regard to Hulu.
ABC.com is profitable on a gross-margin basis, which means every episode streamed from the site generates a profit, according to Albert Cheng, Disney/ABC Television Group executive vice president of digital media.
“It took us a while to do that… but it’s been really a good business,” he said.
Compared with broadcast, however, Cheng said “we have a way to go” in terms of getting to the point at which ABC is generating the same amount of profit on each episode no matter where it’s viewed. “As successful as we are with ABC.com, most people still watch TV,” he said.
Cheng has a different take on it than Jeff Zucker though:
The tradeoff is not the proverbial “analog dollars for digital pennies,” Cheng added. The difference between Internet video and TV is more like comparing “a teenager to a full-grown adult.”
Read the full article at Multichannelnews.com
To be sure. Just streamed an episode of Castle on abc.com. Even at full size setting, the video I was looking at was a small screen and the audio either dropped out or wasn’t in sync with the video.
You don’t have to put up with stuff like that on regular TV.
The quality on ABC’s player is better than any other I’ve seen, but the player itself is so annoying that I can’t stand to use it – I don’t know if it’s a Firefox thing, but after every commercial, I had to get up and click “click to continue” for the episode to progress. Why wouldn’t I want to continue? Do they think viewers are walking away from the screen during that 30 second ad and feel that to be considerate, they should pause the video? I watch a lot of TV online, but like AniMatsuri said, you don’t have to put up with these little annoyance on real TV.
Hulu has the best video player…
but ABC does put the continue thing in case you went to get a snack, or to the bathroom, or to check your e-mail.
It’s not just a Firefox thing. I can’t even get the player to work on Firefox for me, so I use Safari, though it’s hit or miss if the video is going to load or not. Once it is loaded, the quality is at least as good as anything else (I’m not an HD fiend and can’t really tell the difference unless something is drastically worse in quality), but getting it up and running, and dealing with the commercials, makes me rate the player much lower than the other players.
Plus, ABC seems to keep episodes up a much shorter period of time than they are left up on Hulu by NBC or FOX.
Heradite, I prefer Hulu’s player, as well. Is that really the reasoning behind ABC’s “click to continue” thing? It makes sense, but it’s kind of funny. I mean, I’m perfectly capable of pausing the video myself if I need to use the bathroom. (Unless ABC doesn’t have a pause function – I didn’t even notice; I only used it the one time.)
Hulu does seem to keep their videos up for much, much longer – for Chuck, their site says something about they’re able to provide the 5 most recent episodes, but in reality, they have the last 12 or something like that.
Albert Cheng is living in a fantasy world.
It’s as if I decided to walk from New York to LA and I got halfway across the George Washington Bridge and you called and asked how I was doing and I said:
“we have a way to go”
Mikey, LOL, I’m not sure they are even to the bridge yet. I also didn’t buy “it’s a really good business”. Since when are tiny profits on a gross margin basis really good businesses? “really good” is the new “it doesn’t suck horribly”
<1% margins and a stack of press clippings is the new killing it
If you hate “CLICK TO CONTINUE”, then go into SETTINGS at the top of the player and set it to not “CLICK TO CONTINUE”