TV – Page 3 – Tech Narratives

T-Mobile today announced its latest “Un-Carrier” move today, in one of its simplest and certainly its shortest announcement so far: it’s offering free Netflix subscriptions to subscribers to its family plans. Specifically, the offer is available to subscribers who have at least two paid voice lines on the T-Mobile One plan introduced in August last year. That’s now the standard plan for new customers, but many existing customers will be on older family plans and will need to switch to those plans, which may cost more than those offered previously. Typically, two paid lines will be $120 per month with taxes and fees included, so the annual benefit of this offer is equivalent in value to a month’s wireless service. T-Mobile has just over 12 million postpaid accounts at the moment, with an average of just under 3 lines per account, so that gives some sense of the addressable market here, although many would need to switch to T-Mobile ONE to qualify. For Netflix, the upside is smallish – a few million potential new customers over the next few years – but low risk, with these subscribers likely having lower churn.

Certainly not all of those lines would qualify today, but assume that a quarter of those accounts eventually take the Netflix offer, and it ends up being about $90 million per quarter at the full $10 price, which I’m guessing Netflix isn’t paying. More realistically, at 80% of the full retail price, the cost to T-Mobile would be closer to $70 million on a revenue base of roughly $10 billion in revenue per quarter, so the cost is likely to be far from material for the company. Conversely, the Netflix offer will likely increase loyalty and therefore reduce churn and the costs associated with it, and drive more people to the T-Mobile ONE plans and thereby increase ARPU in at least some cases, so T-Mobile will not unreasonably be hoping the net effect on margins is positive.

This move is just the latest in a long string of Un-Carrier moves from T-Mobile, the vast majority of which have been fundamentally about the price or cost of service, either discounting services or throwing in freebies, while dressing the moves up as being something more. That’s clearly worked for T-Mobile, as it’s been by far the fastest growing postpaid phone operator in the US over the last several years, and this move is likely to provide a further little boost, though not a massive one. And of course it’s worth noting that AT&T has been offering free HBO to some of its unlimited subscribers for a while too, so T-Mobile certainly isn’t the first to offer a bundle, but Netflix has broader appeal in the US than HBO and the requirements to qualify are less stringent on the T-Mobile plan.

via T-Mobile

T-Mobile is Winning in US Mobile

Facebook Bids Over $600m for Indian Cricket Rights But Loses Out to Broadcaster (Sep 5, 2017)

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Facebook

★ Roku Files to Go Public, Loses Money, Sees Ads as Core of Future Business Model (Sep 1, 2017)

Roku today made public its S-1 filing with the SEC as the first step towards a long-awaited IPO. I’ve been tweeting charts and nuggets from the filing for the last couple of hours in this thread, but I’ll provide a brief summary here. The long and the short of it is that Roku is growing at a decent clip, is currently unprofitable with little sign of that changing, and is in the midst of a big shift in its business model. Whereas for most of its history selling its streaming boxes has been its core revenue stream, it’s recently added a platform licensing business, but that’s not actually where its new revenue streams are coming from. Rather, it licenses its platform very cheaply and monetizes usage by taking a cut of certain subscriptions sold through its platform and serving up ads. It’s the latter which is a surprisingly important part of its business model (though there have been signs of this shift) and which is a major focus of much of the text in the S-1 filing. Last year, this advertising and subscription revenue share was nearly $50 million out of its $400 million in total revenue, and half of its platform revenue, and that accounted for essentially all of its growth in 2016. In that sense, though Roku on paper looks like principally a hardware company, it’s in some ways more like a Facebook or a Google – a company that collects millions of data points on its customers (18TB of uncompressed data per day) and will use that to target advertising. In that sense, Roku is an unusual player in the streaming space, given how many modern streaming services eschew advertising, but sees itself as a key beneficiary of the move of TV advertising dollars from traditional channels to streaming. This is going to be a fascinating IPO to watch and I’ll have plenty more analysis on Roku in the next few days.

via Roku Form S-1 (SEC)

Roku

Apple Reportedly Looking to Take Over Hollywood Studio Property for Video Push (Sep 1, 2017)

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Apple Doesn't Get Services

Disney/ABC TV to Cut Staff to Reduce Costs (Aug 31, 2017)

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Disney

Disrupting TV

Apple Reportedly At Odds with Movie Studios Over Pricing 4K Movies (Aug 29, 2017)

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Apple Doesn't Get Services

Amazon Will Forgo Video Pilots and Commission More Series Directly (Aug 25, 2017)

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Amazon

Apple Readying 4K Apple TV Box, TV App Update to Better Support Live TV (Aug 24, 2017)

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Facebook and Twitter Sign Deals with New Network Stadium for Sports Video (Aug 24, 2017)

Yesterday, Facebook announced a deal with Stadium to provide sports video content, and today Twitter made a very similar announcement. Stadium is a recently launched sports network which leverages Sinclair’s broadcasting infrastructure and streaming capabilities from Silver Chalice (a subsidiary of the Chicago White Sox organization) and in-studio talent from 120 Sports. Its sports rights are mostly for second-tier conferences, so there won’t be many high-profile games available, and essentially all the content is also available for free on Stadium’s own website and where broadcast. So there’s no exclusivity and little real value here and this is mostly about adding tonnage of live video on two platforms which are still in the early stages of that effort. The challenge in sports, of course, continues to be that the major rights are sewn up for years by big names from the TV industry, with rare exceptions like Thursday Night Football’s digital rights offering the only real opportunities to snag them in the near term. And yet sports is about the only must-have category of live TV left among these platform’s core audiences, leaving them in this awkward position of adding lots of marginal content just to check a sports box.

via Mashable

Live video is the next big thing

Snapchat Content Head Says Scripted Shows Coming, Mobile Not a TV Killer (Aug 23, 2017)

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Snap

AT&T Launches Own-Brand Tablet with DirecTV Front and Center (Aug 21, 2017)

AT&T today announced Primetime, an own-brand LTE-enabled tablet which it will sell under an installment model and allow customers to add on to their shared data plans. The device puts the DirecTV services AT&T also sells front and center, meaning that this is not just an opportunity to sell more connected tablets but also another push to connect its wireless and entertainment offerings in bundles. History here throws up some worries: Sprint and Verizon have seen terrible tablet subscriber growth in the past year because they’re passing the two-year anniversary of when they gave away lots of free tablets on two-year contracts, and customers are now churning in big numbers. This tablet from AT&T carries its own brand, and it’s not clear from AT&T’s press release what sort of specs the device has, but there’s a risk that AT&T sees the same churn in 20-24 months when customers have paid these things off. Overall, I’d also argue that AT&T’s bundling of wireless and entertainment hasn’t worked all that well either for its TV business or its wireless business, both of which continue to bleed subscribers, while Verizon bounced back in a big way in Q2 thanks to its big push around unlimited. That, and not TV/wireless bundles, seems to be what’s selling in the US wireless industry at the moment, and AT&T is the odd one out among the major carriers in not promoting the unlimited offerings it re-introduced earlier this year. I’m not sure this tablet changes any of that, and it feels like another attempt to shoehorn DirecTV into a wireless proposition rather than simply leading with what customers are looking for.

via AT&T

AT&T

NBC’s Daily Snapchat News Show has had 29 Million Unique Viewers (Aug 18, 2017)

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Turner to Use UEFA Soccer Rights as Foundation for Streaming Service in 2018 (Aug 17, 2017)

Time Warner’s Turner unit, which acquired English-language US rights to the European club soccer tournaments from UEFA earlier this year, has announced that it will be launching a new steaming service next year to carry the games. A subset of the games will also be broadcast through its linear channels, but it sounds like this service will be the only way to get the full set. This is a great example of the kind of approach big TV companies should be taking with online streaming services, where we’ve seen two broad strategies be successful: recreating a linear / pay TV offering in the digital world, or creating something entirely new (Turner here is doing the latter). This should provide a very direct way to recoup the $180 million Turner is allegedly spending on three year’s rights for the soccer tournaments, while also allowing it to experiment with streaming models for sports. It sounds like it’s interested in adding other sports over time, though not the basketball content that’s already a big deal on its linear networks, and I worry that could be a distraction or dilution for what will otherwise be a very clear value proposition.

via WSJ

Time Warner

Disrupting TV

★ Apple Reportedly Spending $1 Billion on Original Video Content in Next Year (Aug 16, 2017)

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Apple Doesn't Get Services

★ Netflix Hires Shonda Rhimes Away from ABC to Create New Shows (Aug 14, 2017)

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Netflix is Spending Too Much on Content

Facebook Announces List of Shows Created for its New Watch Video Tab (Aug 10, 2017)

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Disrupting TV

★ Facebook Launches Watch, a New Tab for Video Including Original Content (Aug 9, 2017)

Right after both Business Insider and Mashable posted sourced stories about it launching tomorrow, Facebook appears to have decided to take the wraps off its new video tab today instead. That this was coming was widely reported, and now we just know a few more details – the new tab in Facebook is called Watch, and will showcase lots of different kinds of videos, although the focus appears to be on personality-driven stuff of the sort that dominates the more popular YouTube channels. In general, the model here feels very YouTube-like, with a subscription model, though Facebook’s apps for TV platforms in recent months have signaled the broad structure and interface, with a combination of videos recommended or liked by friends, things you’ve saved, things that are popular on the platform, and so on. What I don’t see much of in Facebook’s announcement today is the longer form, more produced stuff that’s supposed to be coming too, probably because it’s not ready yet. There will be some other content in there too including the live MLB coverage Facebook acquired rights to a while back starting next season, but in general this is a hub for all kinds of video on Facebook, from professionally produced stuff to the stuff your friends share. Simply calling out video into its own tab, though, is going to raise its profile and thereby push people to spend more time in videos, where they’ll see ads only every few minutes, as opposed to scrolling through the News Feed, where they’ll see ads every few seconds. I’m more and more convinced that’s a risky move for Facebook, because all the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen so far suggests people are really put off by interruptive ads in Facebook videos (I certainly am too), and this whole effort could end up backfiring. That’s something I’m hoping to write about soon. Update: Variety has a listing of additional shows from professional producers which wasn’t in Facebook’s blog post.

via Facebook