The National Football League (NFL) will test the delivery of live football games online to selected Verizon high-speed customers Commissioner Roger Goodell said today at the Reuters Media Summit, marking the first time, I believe, that this major sports league will put its games online for U.S. consumption.
The NFL will offer in the coming weeks its Thursday and Saturday night games to Verizon’s FiOS high-speed customers, as well as customers who have signed up for Verizon’s high-speed services under the telco’s joint marketing pact with DirecTV. The NFL is testing the web service internally tomorrow starting with the game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Cincinnati Bengals. If all goes well, the Verizon customers will get the games “in the coming weeks.”
The web service will ultimately be made available to all multichannel video providers that carry the NFL’s network and will offer special features such as audio from players and coaches and new camera angles on the game.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:21 PM | Print | Comments (0)Two of the top communications companies in the U.S. are about to provide a case study for future economists on the nature of facilities-based video competition. After suing Montgomery County, MD for onerous franchise conditions, Verizon finally got its cable franchise from the upscale DC suburban jurisdiction yesterday. Nearby Prince George’s County also issued a cable contract to Verizon, filling in some major franchise holes for the telco in a huge, tech-friendly and relatively well-to-do region that includes not only the District of Columbia, but also a spate of desirable territories including Fairfax, Anne Arundel, Loudoun, Prince William and Howard counties and Arlington, Bowie, Herndon, Leesburg and Laurel, all in Virginia.
Verizon now has the green light to offer its FiOS video services across all of these regions, which also happen to be prime Comcast Cable territory (with a smidgen of Time Warner thrown in). Bet on some interesting competitive developments in the year ahead as Verizon pits its turbo-charged set of voice-video-data services against Comcast’s triple-play bundles.
What’s really interesting is that this is one solid and expansive market that features basically two relatively well-matched competitors over a wide region. In most markets, Verizon might have a handful of franchises, while the cable company franchises typically represent a mix of operators, each with different competitive strategies, services and prices.
Verizon’s fiber-based FiOS video services are, arguably, the equal of Comcast’s video options, while the telco holds a slight competitive advantage over Comcast with its FiOS high-speed Internet access. Of course, Verizon also offers phone service — Comcast has recently rolled out and begun aggressively marketing its Comcast Digital Voice service in the region.
It’s going to be a true battle of the bundles in the DC metro region…stay tuned.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:40 PM | Print | Comments (0)Michael Kinsley has this amusing piece over at Slate on how the Internet, which was supposed to be the vast bastion of anonymity, has fostered a culture where so many people feel the need to reveal so much about themselves.
Anonymity, for better or for worse, is supposed to be one of the signature qualities of the Web. As that dog in The New Yorker cartoon famously says, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Internet is a place where you can interact with other people and have complete control over how much they know about you. Or supposedly that is the case, and virtually everybody on the Internet is committed to achieving that goal.
But, as Kinsley points out, anonymity has given way to full disclosure, with social networking sites, blogs and personal web pages offering up profound and mundane details about their authors.
The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.
The intense focus on personal detail reaches its apex, perhaps, in Twitter.com, which allows users to tell the world what they’re doing right now.
For the ultimate in solipsism, check out Twitter.com, a site where—once you register—you can answer the question, “What are you doing?” At 7:47 a.m. on Monday, for example, Lynda was going to get a glass of cold water.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)
This raises more questions than it answers. Did she get it? Was it cold enough? Tragically, we’ll never know until someone starts a site about what you were doing before what you’re doing now.
The perennial quest to find a link between violent video games and violent behavior continues — researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine conducted a study that found violent video games stir up emotions while decreasing self-control.
Dr. Vincent Mathews, professor of radiology at the school, headed up the research, which randomly assigned 44 adolescents to play either violent or non-violent video games. All the while the teens were hooked up to MRI machines that scanned their brains to track the regions of activity. Kids playing violent games experienced increased activity in their amygdalas, their centers of emotion, and decreased activity in their prefrontal brain areas, which are the seats of inhibition, concentration and self-control.
“After playing a violent video game, these adolescents had an increased activity in the amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal,” Mathews said. “At the same time, they had decreases in activity in parts of the brain which are involved in self-control,” he added.
But, and here I take issue, Matthews and other researchers say that this is evidence that violent video games lead to “aggressive and negative behavior” and warn parents to monitor their childrens’ violent video game playing. Hmmm….of course kids are going to let go of self-control when playing, say, “Mortal Combat,” because the game calls for behavior not acceptable in the real world.
On the occasions where I’ve tested out these kinds of games, I myself have had to overcome my innate squeamishness (i.e. let go of self-control) in order to kill somebody or run a person over with a car, and believe me, I’m emotionally aroused when forced to do these things. However, I would no more engage in these kinds of behaviors in the real world than I would sprout wings and fly around above cities.
I’d say that despite the conclusions drawn by the researchers regarding the link between brain activity and behavior, the jury is still out. Sometimes what happens in the brain stays in the brain.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:02 AM | Print | Comments (1)The titan of discount retailing, Wal-Mart, yesterday finally made its move to sell movies-over-the-Internet. On the heels of Wal-Mart’s big announcement, former P2P renegade BitTorrent said it has made progress in its bid to go legit and announced a spate of online TV and film distribution deals with top studios and TV networks.
The original powerhouse in home video, Blockbuster, hopes to have an online movie deal next year, CEO John Antioco was quick to add at the Reuters Media Summit yesterday. The current star of the video rental market, Netflix, plans to unveil its own online distribution strategy early next year and is budgeting $40 million to build the service.
Wal-Mart, BitTorrent, Blockbuster and Netflix are joining a relatively robust market for online movie downloads. Right now users can turn to at least ten major online outlets to purchase and download feature-length films including iTunes, Movielink, CinemaNow, AOL, Guba, Vongo, Amazon Unbox, iFilm and MovieFlix, not to mention Google’s nascent film download business (which mostly consists of grade Z films.)
Despite the rush to deliver films online, no one is making serious money selling movies over the Internet, (although, it must be said, Disney is definitely generating decent pocket change with its sale of movies via iTunes.) Watching movies on PCs is just not as much fun as watching them in the family room — people just don’t want to do it except in limited situations such as on airplanes, in the back seats of cars and so forth.
One of the most experienced executives in this business, Jim Ramo, CEO of studio-backed Movielink, said during an audio event we held in early October that Internet-delivered movies won’t become a mass market business until someone bridges the divide between PCs and TVs.
It’s sort of ironic. The Internet, which today primarily talks to PCs, is still not yet a mass market product because the PC is the primary display and that’s still constraining long-form video on the web…Clearly it’s not a mass market product until you get it to the TV.
Why then is everybody rushing to sell movies on the Internet? One answer could be that someone, soon, is going to bridge the divide between the PC and the TV and everybody senses this breakthrough development coming. Apple plans to unveil its mysterious iTV unit early next year, a piece of equipment that promises to enable easy TV-based viewing of PC-based content. Intel has its still-fuzzy Viiv platform that can do the same thing. Tivo is doing its part to help the PC-to-TV transition along.
Another explanation for the most recent movies-over-the-web hub-bub is that while few people want to sit and watch a full-length film on their PCs, they like having the option of doing just that. Bundling DVD sales with add-on downloads is therefore a nice marketing device for retailers. Wal-Mart is charging $1.97 to $3.97 (typically weird Wal-Mart prices) for downloads that accompany DVD purchases, but some studios think Wal-Mart should be giving the downloads away free as promotions to buy the DVDs.
No matter why all of these top companies are gearing up to sell films on the Internet, it’s clear that Hollywood has gotten over its fear of the web. In just two or three short years, the studios have gone from wary to enthusiastic about this new revenue stream. At some point soon, expect every movie every made to be available for some kind of viewing — PC, TV, mobile device, whatever — at the click of a mouse.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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