NBC's Olympics of Denial

After two weeks of a sport bonanza, the London 2012 Olympics are over. I am a big fan of the Olympics and I enjoy (re)learning about all the exotic sports once every four years. As a cord-cutter, I must say I was quite worried about the Olympics this year. Will I be able to see the action? My heart skipped a beat many a time at the thought of watching the highlights on YouTube two weeks after.

But I didn’t need to worry. While I don’t have any cable or satellite TV at home, I do get one channel with an over-the-air antenna, CTV, which was the primary channel providing Canadian Olympic coverage. The coverage was provided live and there was also a daily 3 ½ hour summary in prime time. But the programming delivered via my little indoor antenna was actually just a fraction of the content available free of charge online at www.ctvolympics.ca. There, I could find live coverage of virtually all events going on and a recording of every competition, sometimes a dozen of online channels simultaneously. If that wasn’t enough, I was able to go to BBC’s site which provided live coverage and a recording of every London 2012 event.

That was simply awesome. Sure, I was still exposed to the annoying commercials, even online, but I was able to watch everything live, in a tape delay, or on-demand!

Contrast that with NBC. NBC infuriated TV viewers by airing the Olympic events only with a tape delay. In today’s day and age, it is impossible to stay away from the results and so the viewers had to watch the Olympic event while knowing the results. But what was even worse was the online coverage. NBC required viewers to sign on with their cable accounts. That eliminated all the cord-cutters like me, all international audiences, and anyone on vacation in the US like I was for a few days. Strange decision, actually, as online viewers can be a target audience for commercials just like the viewers watching on cable.

NBC online streaming required a cable account.

When exposed to criticism, NBC bragged about their viewership, which was breaking all records yet again. NBC’s interpretation was that the numbers have shown that the viewers loved the service NBC delivered. Well, I beg to differ. The growing numbers reflect the rising popularity of the Olympics, the ever greater media buzz and the higher notoriety of the top athletes such as Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. The American viewers can’t get enough of the Olympics and NBC didn’t give them any choices. So they had to watch on NBC terms.

But the Olympics can be covered differently which has been shown by CTV and BBC. I realize that NBC paid $1.2 bln for the rights to broadcast the London 2012 Olympics coverage in the United States. That’s a huge sum of money and NBC has to be careful to make sure that they at least break even. But what I am seeing is a company in denial that is clinging on to its old ways of business while the world has moved on. Pretty soon, the US audiences will figure out alternate ways of watching their favorite programming and right now, it looks like NBC may not be a part of the picture. Just go to the BBC web site, folks.

Who needs NBC?

The Future of Interactive TV Has Arrived

Back in January, I’ve decided to say ‘adios’ to my cable TV provider and “cut the cord”. As I have written about before, being a cord cutter is not that difficult as most of the movie and TV show programming is readily available from alternate sources such as iTunes, Boxee, Hulu, or directly from the TV networks’ sites. Most, except for live sports.

I can live without live sports to a certain degree but that doesn’t stop me from trying to find non-cable solutions. Particularly, I like watching  the Grand Slam tennis tournaments and so I have been pleased to see that the online coverage has been on the rise this year. The current online live streaming coverage from the US Open, however, beats cable hands down.

Internet streaming on the TV screen (photo of my TV set)

The US Open video streaming is offered free of charge, supported by relatively unobtrusive advertising, and delivered by IBM which is not a big surprise since IBM has been sponsoring major sports events this way for years. However, the capabilities of the video stream, which IBM calls the US Open PointStream, go beyond anything we’ve seen in the past.

You chose which match to watch (screenshot)

For example, PointStream streams all matches live and you can interactively select which match you want to watch. Your regular cable TV makes that selection for you and you are not always going to like it since you will inadvertently miss certain matches. On PointStream, you are in charge of deciding which match you want to watch. In fact, if I want to watch two matches at a time, a picture-in-picture feature is available.

Picture-in-picture feature (screenshot)

PointStream goes far beyond that, though. With a mouse click, you can see the score results from all courts where play is under way. You can also see real time statistics and analysis for the match you are watching. IBM is effectively combining the video stream with a business intelligence type of analytics.

Real-time match analysis whenever you want (screenshot)

You can pause the play or rewind it - features we all love from Tivo. You can engage in online chat with other viewers. This particular feature would have been much more useful if it was actually streaming the Twitter conversations related to the #uso11 hashtag, though.

Real-time match statistics a mouse click away (screenshot)

The bad part is that living in Canada, I had to VPN into the US to trick the system into believing that I am a US based viewer. That’s doable and I gladly pay for the VPN service but these artificial borders are infuriating. To watch the action on my big screen TV, I had to connect my iMac with the TV set via a 20 foot-long HDMI cable. That works fine although it is not a very elegant solution. I’d rather had the live TV streaming provided directly via my Apple TV. I hope Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook is already working on it.

Who says you can't watch live sports without cable? (photo)

All in all, I am very impressed by what is possible today. I have an average speed Internet connection at home (8.1 Mbps according to speedtest.net) which gets further degraded by the VPN service (6.72 Mbps) and yet I am able to watch the action just like on TV. And with programming choices and features available, the experience is way better than the traditional TV. Yes, the future of interactive television has started. And I have a message to you, the cable and satellite TV companies - interactive streaming is what I want. Evolve or die!

PS: Rafael Nadal won the match.

How I Became a Cord-Cutter

I became a proud cord-cutter last week. That's a term the cable industry uses for people like me - customers who discontinue their TV service in favor of Internet-delivered entertainment. For years, I’ve been unhappy with the TV model: 

1. Double dipping
I am forced to pay for TV programming with my time and attention via advertising but I also am forced to pay to a TV or satellite company for delivering that advertising into my TV set. Radio doesn’t have this model - advertising pays for everything and satellite radio has a subscription cost but is advertising-free . Imagine buying a music CD with a commercial at the beginning of each song - that’s what TV is doing to us today. Is anyone else seeing this as a consumer scam?

2. Programming
500 channels and yet nothing’s on. I keep flipping channels only to end up watching a movie Tivo recorded for me. TV is decisively a one way medium catering to the lowest common denominator, not interested in my personal preferences or interests. Tivo has addressed this problem to some degree and I am happy to pay for the Tivo service but why do I have to keep paying the cable company for providing exactly the wrong kind of service?

3. Cable box
I hate the cable box. Every TV set since the 80s has a built-in cable tuner and yet the cable providers are forcing us to use their boxes. The cable boxes consume energy, make the channel switching painfully slow and require a separate remote that is never compatible with the TV set. The TV manufacturers are designing intelligent sets with sophisticated functionality which gets completely negated by the clunky cable box that makes clicking sounds as it slowly changes channels.

4. Packaging
I am really interested in only about 4-5 channels and yet to watch them, I need to buy a package that includes 300 channels, most of them painfully annoying. My cable provider offers as a big feature “time shifting” which is basically the same channel from different time zones. Are they kidding me? That’s just clogging my channel line up with the same junk over and over. And I am not going to elaborate on its  high cost.

So, what do I like about my TV service? Well, I like to watch movies, a couple of shows and the occasional big sporting event such as the Olympics, soccer World Cup or Wimbledon finals. That’s about it - and I pay all that money for this?

Not anymore. I have cancelled our cable TV service completely. We have been increasingly using Apple TV to watch movies from iTunes. Yes, it costs money but the costs are very reasonable given how many movies and shows we watch.

The new Apple TV 2G has also a built-in Netflix support and the new Netflix plan at $8 per months is absolutely irresistible. Netflix Canada still needs to work on making more of the blocked movies available but I am hopeful that the artificial content borders will eventually disappear (I wrote about that in Content Without Borders). In the meantime, iTunes pretty much offers everything that I can’t find on Netflix, including subscriptions to all the TV shows I can think of. And the money saved on the cable plan pays for a lot of episodes of The Office and Mad Men.

Yet there are some drawbacks. With increased streaming, I need to upgrade our data plan which costs a bit more. The data plans for Internet access are limited in Canada and overages are expensive - just like the mobile plans. Netflix streaming still has an occasional quirk although it has been improving steadily.

The greatest drawback by far is the lack of live sports events on iTunes or Netflix. That will surely change in the future but for now, I am relegated to browser-based TV streaming. Those are often either for a charge (which is OK) or blocked in countries with the richest TV audiences such as the US, UK, Germany and Canada. That will likely change once the TV networks realize that the Internet is for real. In the meantime, I am experimenting with VPN services that allow me to pretend I’m accessing the content from another country.

This is less than perfect as I am so far unable to get the browser-streaming on the TV screen the way Apple TV does it. Watching TV on a computer is a bit geeky, although the iPad makes that easier. I am testing jailbreaking the Apple TV and adding software such as aTV Flash by FireCore but that’s still lacking the ease of use of the native Apple TV. But all of these limitations are surely going to be solved in the upcoming months and years.

All in all, my cord-cutting is probably a leading edge move and not everyone will be willing to live without live NFL games on their flat screen (although, you can subscribe to NFL games online today). But the benefit of watching what I want, when I want it, without any commercials is worth the trade-off to me. At least until the next World Cup...

PS: The pile of devices around my TV set is being reduced down to the tiny Apple TV and the Wii. That’s it. All the other devices are gone - DVD player, Tivo and the cable box. It saves energy and looks way better!