Constantine: a game-changer for UK TV?

Almost without herald, the new series of Constantine has premiered in the UK on Amazon Prime. One chain-smoking Scouse exorcist and dabbler of the dark arts later, the TV landscape looks subtly different.

The roots of all this lie back in February earlier this year, back before Amazon Prime Video launched, when Amazon and Warner Bros. International Television Distribution inked a deal for streaming rights to a brace of properties (Arrow, The Following, Hostages, Revolution and The 100) following their linear UK broadcast runs.

Constantine, as anybody who has read the original source material will tell you, has somewhat upped the ante as is his wont; the show debuting exclusively in the UK hours after its US first screening.

Presumably Amazon has some first look rights to the show as part of its wider deal with Warner Bros. — owners of DC comics, incidentally, Constantine’s original home — and as an untried proposition from a largely untried stable it might not have attracted the same sort of bidding attention as some other US properties. But it does signal a certain amount of intent and the historical precedent is that when the number of bidders sitting round a table rises, so the price does too.

And yes, Amazon has done this before earlier this year with the 13-part Extant from CBS. But then it made a righteous song and a dance about it. The fact that so little fanfare attended Constantine suggests that there will be more of this thing in the future.

Sky paid HBO £150m back in 2010 for a five-year deal to snap up the exclusive UK and Irish TV rights to HBO's archive, new programming and a first-look deal on all co-productions, and earlier this year paid an undisclosed sum to extend that to 2020 (Sky Deutschland did a similar thing in September). Sky must be fervently hoping that Amazon, and a few other OTT rivals, will have fallen by the wayside by the time it comes to extend again…

(As for Constantine, the first show was great, the second was wobbly...it might have to raise its game to make another season.)

What the FCC did next - Part 1

Press releases are all very well, but it seems that to signify a proper change in policy what one needs nowadays is a blog post. At least that seems to have been Tom Wheeler, FCC Chairman’s thinking last week when he lit the blue touch paper under a potential rule change that could make internet TV really take off. And, somewhat predictably, not everyone is happy.

Not for the first time, but perhaps this time it might have loaded the bases in its favour, the FCC in the US is floating a rule change that would put internet TV providers — multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) in the jargon — on the same footing as cable companies when it comes to certain key regulations. Critically, it would mean that broadcasters wouldn't be able to refuse to let an internet TV provider carry their own content.

"Consumers have long complained about how their cable service forces them to buy channels they never watch,” wrote Wheeler. "The move of video onto the internet can do something about that frustration – but first internet video services need access to the programmes. Today the FCC takes the first step to open access to cable programmes as well as local television."

The FCC hopes to fulfil its avowedly free-market mantra of 'Competition, competition, competition' and give consumers in the US the ability to buy the programmes they want from the suppliers they want.

This is nothing really new. Congress put in place similar rules to help the then nascent US satellite industry in the early 1990s, and this is just an extension of the same; taking the requirement of having a facilities-based transmission path out of the equation. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.

"The definition of an MVPD should turn on the services that a provider offers, not on how those services reach viewers. Twenty-first century consumers shouldn’t be shackled to rules that only recognise 20th century technology,” writes Wheeler.

As you might surmise, this has not gone down well in certain quarters, namely the head ones of the US National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA). “Redefining what it means to be an MVPD raises profound questions about how government will extend regulation to Internet video services and how any would-be virtual MVPDs will meet their 'social compact' obligations,” it thundered.

Now this is interesting. The social compact dates back to 1934 and is largely guff, and unenforced guff at that. In exchange for their licensed airwaves, broadcasters were to be required to fulfil the standard (at the time) Reithian doctrine of airing programming that served the “public convenience, interest, or necessity.”

This has evolved over the years to paying lip service to locally-oriented public affairs and political, educational, and cultural programming, but with no minimum standards set or enforced it is largely ignored. How about this for a takedown of the whole thing:

“Most broadcasters today air very little of this sort of public interest programming, and some air none of it at all. Nevertheless, Congress and the FCC continue to confer onto broadcasters all of the privileges of public trusteeship, including, most recently, the assignment of a new, lucrative digital television channel at no cost to them. By contrast, other FCC licensees, including landline and wireless telecommunications providers, paid in excess of $23 billion for certain digital licenses in spectrum auctions conducted over a four-year period in the 1990s.”

(Anthony E. Varona - University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform)

Perhaps the likes of the NCTA really ought to be careful what they wish for…

House of Shards

If you will forgive the mixing of media metaphors, it seems that House HBO is preparing to enter a full scale war for the Kings Landing living room with House Netflix, while in the meantime casually pulling the rug out from House Amazon Prime ahead of a probable beheading. George RR Martin might not be writing the script for corporate entertainment America, but there’s still blood on the walls and you never know quite who’s going to end up on the losing side.

So, finally finally, HBO has announced that it will offer a standalone OTT service for customers who don’t have cable subscriptions, immediately prompting a flurry of articles and posts about cord-cutting and even reposts of the Death of Traditional Broadcasting zombie feature that refuses to die.

So, who are the winners and the losers in all this? Frankly, apart from one notable loser it’s too early to tell: the US resembles Westeros at the end of the second book in Martin’s series. HBO is entering the market at a premium price (a rumoured $15 per month, $6 above Netflix’ most popular subscription tier) but then so are a lot of other people at the moment. Dish, Sony and Verizon are all imminently entering the OTT market featuring content libraries from the likes of Viacom and Disney; ESPN has signed a nine-year licensing deal with the NBA to launch a dedicated online service for live basketball; and CBS has cracked open its vaults and current offerings in a fairly limited fashion and launched CBS All Access.

Amidst all that, you have to consider that Netflix is growing faster outside the US than inside (estimates being that two thirds of its expanding base in the last quarter were outside the contiguous states — sometimes well outside). And that consistent research shows that viewers are happy to run two services: a base level ‘traditional’ broadcast service which they then top up with OTT content as and when.

Whether HBO’s mooted premium pricing model will fit into that emergent behaviour or break some invisible ceiling is an unknown, but if anyone has the depth and quality to attract the consumer to such a deal it will be them. Which is where Amazon Prime Video is looking on increasingly unstable ground.

Much was made of a deal struck for the HBO back catalogue on the still-nascent service a few months ago and, while theoretically it still has years to run, the likelihood of their long term viability on the platform now has to be questioned. And Amazon, for all its clout, is finding the OTT space a difficult one to compete in, boasting an estimated 20m customers in the US as opposed to Netflix’ verified 50m.

In the US financial press the knives are already out. Already thoroughly unimpressed by the Fire Phone and its impact on profits, one survey has suggested that only around 13% of Prime subscribers are in it for the video and sentiments such as “AMZN stock investors should be pushing the corporation to kill the service ASAP” are starting to poke their heads above the parapets.

Can a beheading be far behind? As always, it’s best not to get too attached to the individual characters: you never know what fate might befall them.

BSkyB searches for Pluto

The Pluto UI in Minecraft action

BSkyB has managed to establish itself a fairly enviable reputation as a trend-spotter over recent years and, while this doesn’t always work out in its favour (stereo 3D for instance) it is prepared to invest to bring new technology to the market and onboard.

Its latest investment is $500,000 pushed towards LA-based online video aggregator Pluto.TV. Pluto.TV is an online television platform that aggregates video content from across the web (YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Funny or Die and more it says) and programs it into themed and curated TV channels.

It’s an eclectic mix. Out of the 100+ current free channels you’ll find plenty that wouldn’t find any room in a conventional broadcaster’s EPG — Channel 114 is currently dedicated to playing Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ 24 hours a day, while 707 World of Minecraft does exactly what it says on the tin — but that is, you suspect, the whole point. A recent upgrade has included the ability to save programmes to a list of favourites for time-shifting.

While freely available everywhere through a browser, the app and connected TV functionality (so far Fire TV, Chromecast, and Apple TV via Airplay and an iOS device) is currently limited to North America. But it is something that you could easily see folded into a mainstream EPG — especially when Sky rolls out its Project Ethan STB — and it certainly has the potential to crack the insidious and ongoing problems with Connected TV UIs. Much will depend on how good the curation is and whether it can surpass the ‘watch this’ algorithms all the big video players already deploy.

Other investments made by Sky this year include $750k in Californian VR start-up Jaunt and a whopping £5m in US advertising technology firm Sharethrough, while streaming specialist Roku, and digital distributor 1 Mainstream benefitted from its investment largesse in 2013.

Sharethrough is billed as a world leader in native advertising (which, if you haven’t stumbled across it yet, enables publishers to monetise their sites and apps with adverts that are non-interruptive and stylistically similar to the surrounding content) and Sky has been using it on skysports.com. Expect to see much more of that onscreen as Sky’s advertising sales house Sky Media will offer its clients access to Sharethrough as well as utilising it itself.

And expect to see much more of all of this sort of thing too. Earlier this year, Sky opened up a dedicated office in San Francisco - an investment SkunkWorks if you will - to help it continue to forge new partnerships with tech startups. It will be fascinating to see how much of what it invests in is purely speculative and how much leads to actual onscreen innovation. Compared to the BBC R&D budget (the Corporation’s failed DMI project alone cost £98.4m) the amounts are relatively small but, like Pluto, it will all depend on how good the custodians of the conduits are.

Gender Equality 0 Internet 1

This from The Verge: Emma Watson nude photo threats were apparently a plot to kill 4chan.

In which, emmayouarenext.com is revealed to be a hoax and a mightily murky one at that. But the thing that gets me is this:

The organizer says that emmayouarenext.com reached 48 million visitors, 7 million Facebook shares and likes, and 3 million Twitter mentions.

As of 10:43 24/09/14, by comparison only 96,199 men (myself proudly included) have signed the #heforshe commitment.

These numbers are *seriously* out of whack.

Video killed the internet star

An interesting piece from The Verge.

What happens to literacy when the internet turns into a giant TV station?

Personally, I skip video in the same way that I used to skip jpegs on the web 20 years ago. It's far too slow a means of conveying information: I can skim read 200 words in about 10 seconds at a depth of understanding that's more than enough to know if I want to read any bits of it in more detail. Then I can lob it into Pocket or whatever. Video? Too clunky; too resistant to efficient archiving; too manipulative...too slow, frankly.

It's like 1995 all over again...

It's all repeats nowadays - online mindfulness

[Reposting this one from last year in lieu of having the time to write anything new at the moment. Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks after IBC...]

One of the things I've been increasingly puzzling about recently is the disconnect between our online lives and our real ones; the personas if you like that we present to people in the real world and the ones that we forge for ourselves online.

There's a tradition of this, of course. Back in the early days of the internet, it was possible to have an enormous amount of fun in the Usenet groups you frequented by pretending to be a 16 year old schoolgirl from Helsinki. Certainly fun when troll-baiting. But with the rise of social media and its interconnecting webs of likes and dislikes, follows and retweets, our online personalities are designed to be much more faithful extensions of ourselves. The problem is, we don't treat them that way.

Maybe it's because our online relationships are mediated via the keyboard, and even with the rich complexities of language - and the less subtle interventions of emoticons - we are always a step removed. But it seems that this is particularly the case when it comes to mindfulness. A quick quip, a sarcastic comment...it is all too easy for us to participate in conversations that we perhaps wouldn't chose to in real life. I've lost count of the times I've been within a button press of tweeting something or commenting on something on Facebook and then pulled back and run through the usual quick Buddhist mantra: is it kind? Is it necessary?

Often it's not, and at least online there is a delete button (depending on how Facebook is running its privacy policy that week). But, again in Buddhist parlance, right thinking and right speech should also lead to right typing and our online relationships - ephemeral sometimes though they may be - are poorer when this isn't so.