The Juicy Nougat Center of a Deal

Everyone tells us to “follow the money.”

On July 28th, Comcast Corporation released its quarterly financial report.  A quick summary shows:

• Revenue up, but 265,000 subscribers lost. 
• Sales up, but net income down $83 million. 
• Advertising revenue increasing 23 percent from one year earlier
• Expenses for obtaining program content increasing abut 7 percent in the quarter
• Added 118,000 high-speed Internet customers, 82 percent more than last year 
• While at the same time, the loss of 265,000 cable TV subscribers.

So income at Comcast is rising, even while it's traditional core business model continues to drop.  A huge leap in advertising revenue, but a slow but steady rise in expenses for obtaining content for their cable operations.

Now we need to ask, where is this going here?  And what does Comcast see as the juicy center hidden deep within this Comcast takeover of NBC-Universal?

Some analysts say it's sports holdings.  Sports is huge in cable.  Disney owns ESPN, it brings in more revenue than ABC, which the Mouse also owns.  NBC Sports with their NFL games and future Olympics coverage might be a huge plum.

Others say it's territorial.  The big land grab now over, every town and municipality's already wired for cable … outside of new home construction. Uh, well, there's a growth industry!

And still others insist the effort to acquire NBC-Universal is merely image and ego, that after all these years as a simple common carrier, Comcast wants to be know as more than just “a big dumb pipe”.

But perhaps the truth of the matter is that there's a real juicy nougat center hidden in the NBC-U, a tasty core that could permanently reverse the cost of content acquisition, while guaranteeing income from advertising revenues to rise without stopping.  What is it?

What it is –  all these other cable channels you sometimes watch, like SciFy, Discovery, HGTV, Food Network … that's where the money is.  And what about Hulu?  NBC owns 32 percent of this cable buster – at least, until Comcast buys out the Peacock.

Comcast all but admits this. Because Comcast pays big carriage fees to have these channels on their system. And NBC-Universal is a partner in a huge bunch of these same cable programming channels … Weather Channel, Bravo, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, USA Network ... the list goes on and on. 

The ad revenue stream for these programming channels is enormous. For present partners-in-the-profit NBC Cable Holdings, there's profit far and away more than the income from NBC's network.  And what if a few of these leading cable networks should, for some reason, elect to retire the wire and seek other means of distribution to the viewers?  What kind of plum would it be for, say, the Discovery Channel to abandon cable's ship, and sign a carriage deal with, oh, I don't know … perhaps DISH Network?

So, this NBC-Universal deal, at it's heart, is really about taking over control of a vast number of popular content channels on cable.  And content is king.  By doing this, Comcast can reverse the cash flow of having to pay to carry -- and instead pocket those former costs as new profit.  Plus, own all the income from ad time bought on all those networks.

I think Comcast sees a way to have their cake, and eat it, too.

What could foul this corporate cakewalk?  More on that in a future posting.

Jim Furrer

Click to hear the podcast version of this blog! 

Original Audio Content by Jim Furrer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Obit for Dead Air

It's been one year.

America's transition to digital broadcasting is now out of the toddler stage and into the terrible twos. For kids, this is the exploring stage, and for digital broadcasting we're beginning to see the emergence of new and novel ways for stations to utilize their multicasting capabilities.

Multicasting is possible because spectrum space was given to each over-the-air TV station in exchange for relinquishing their analog portion. And this digital bandwidth – with efficient compression – can actually contain several discreet signals. The end result is the opportunity for broadcasting “sub-channels” and there's been a lot of exploration with these ancillary program streams.

Cost-effective networks such as Retro TV are one such patch-and-go solution. A couple of music video programming services have come and gone, hoping to attract MTV refugees unable to find actual music content on a cable channel.

But certainly once of the biggest applications was for a station to launch a 24-hour sub-channel weather service with plenty of local origination inserts, utilizing in-house station meteorologists and repurposing graphics from each newscast.  But how many local weather channels does one TV market need? Why in the world should the top three or four network affiliates in one market all push virtually the same content out on three or four sub-channels? 

I recognize the concept of challenge programming, but in this case doesn't counter programming make more sense?  A few stations seem to "get it" and are trying interesting and unique approaches toward utilization of their sub-channel spectrum. One of these catchng my eye was Meredith Broadcasting's on-the-air obituary service.

And think about it – the traditional distribution service for funeral, memorial and obit announcements was the local newspaper. Local newspapers continue to drop like flies, either closing altogether, or scaling back, sometimes to weekly or bi-weekly publication.  Local funeral directors found area residents not finding or missing funeral information. Why shouldn't over-the-air fill the void?

So execs at WNEM TV 5 in Michigan launched their on-air service last fall, aimed at a public used to reading obituaries in black and white, straight from the newspaper. Now Meredith's taking the idea to its 11 other stations, and syndicating it to 20 other non-Meredith stations, so far – and in talks with 15 more including stations in Columbus, Ohio, Reno Nevada, and Charleston, West Virginia.

Meredith supplies the technology and expertise while taking a share of the revenue. They won't reveal the exact revenue spilt.  But the stations charge less for the service than local newspapers, and the medium offers more multimedia possibilities than print.

Mid-Michigan residents can now see obituaries on television and the Internet from TV5 and MY5. Families can't buy obits directly from TV, but must go through participating funeral homes equipped with proprietary On-Air Notification Entry (ONE) software, which also ties the announcement into the stations' web site -- which makes sense, because the demographic for those reading obits doesn't include a large portion of the "computer savvy".

I think the quote from WSAZ GM Don Ray described it well:

“Obituaries are one of those things newspapers have always done and thought it was a birthright, but when you look there was room for improvement, doing them on TV and online.”

And perhaps a new and better rewrite of the old TV tech term “dead air.”


Jim Furrer

"X" Marks a Brand New Spot?

I spent quite a few years working on the production of national television commercials, and I know a classic rebranding campaign when I see one.

So, it's no surprise watching the rapid morphing of Comcast cable into Xfinity, and this current campaign follows to a “C” the classic rebranding structure:

1. Announce new name, but assure "we're still Comcast"

2. Use existing name, but share screen with new brand logo

3. Use new name, but share screen with old brand logo

4. Use new name exclusively, drop all reference to old identity

Current crop of ads place Comcast half-way between three and four. So far a very predictable metamorphosis, and one so textbook it breaks absolutely no new ground whatsoever. I can only hope that Comcast did not spend millions and millions on consultants or creative fees for this unimaginative corporate retread. 

  Of course, I would be wrong.

The current high-end national TV spots even go so far as hiring actor Jon Hamm for his come-hither voiceover, intoning as though he were the voice of computer HAL in Kubrick's space odyssey looking to hookup at a singles bar:

Actually, Hamm sounds here for all the world like his character ad exec Don Draper, in AMC's Mad Men, soullessly pitching new creative to a hapless client.

The bigger question in all this is "why"? Theories abound:

• Having totally trashed their image for customer service and support, Comcast wants to walk away from all their negative image issues and start over.

• Having max'd out their rate structure and facing mass customer defections to more cost-effective platforms, Comcast is simply repackaging their s.o.s. (same old service) in a fancy, shiny, glitzy wrapper in hope of dangling some suggestion of improvements. Well, my Comcast bill arrived last week, the same identical bundle at the identical price but with a big "welcome to Xfinity" sprawled across the invoice.

• Finally, in light of the current hearings in Washington debating Comcast's purchase of NBC-Universal, the Comcast execs decided divorcing their cable distribution from all soon-to-be acquired broadcast and motion picture content providers might be a wise move.

Overall, this last grand master plan is probably closest to the truth, but the laughable selection of the "Xfinity" monicker not only sounds like something out of the early 1980's, but also smacks of "X-rated" and "porn" which isn't surprising considering “adult content” makes up the largest portion of all cable's programming profits.

Or as one customer of a competing cable company so aptly put it, in a recent blog posting:

" … just so long as Cox cable doesn't try a similar name change."

Jim Furrer

Hear the Podcast of this Blog!

Original Audio Content by Jim Furrer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Back to the Future?

What goes down, comes round.

Who ever said that there's nothing left that's new in television may be right. There's nothing left to innovate, instead just great revolving cycles of approach and execution.

No better is this illustrated than with Wal-Mart's entry into own-it-all television program production.

Back in April … in partnership with Procter and Gamble … the two corporations produced "Secrets of the Mountain" which we can look at as a backdoor pilot. In advertising we used to call this a "time buy" with the corporate pair owning it all, including the essentially pre-sold availabilities. They brought the project to NBC with the two companies controlled ALL ad revenue for the two-hour block program.

And the viewers watched (17.5 million for "Secrets of…") most without even noticing the sponsor's exclusivity.

Now comes "The Jensen Project" on NBC with Wal-Mart and P&G again underwriting the program content and controlling all ad placements in the old two-hour MOW format revival.

Both these family-friendly fare flicks target children and parents alike, the exact demographic to which Wal-Mart and P&G market. Plus the resultant DVDs and soundtrack CDs get pushed in the stores and online, and since it's all theirs, all of the product's profits go directly back into the corporation coffers. Sounds ideal, a media match made in marketing heaven. Total content control.  

And exactly the model existent in the 1950's for network television, inherenting the originallycommercial model forged from the development of network radio -- total program sponsorship.

Advertisers owning outright the entire show, in many cases even taking over the shows title, as with The Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and Charley McCarthy or The Johnson's Wax Program with Fibber McGee and Molly or The Pepsodent Show with Bob Hope.  The earliest network television hits carried on this model, often with TV stars stopping the weekly storyline to perform in the sponsor's own commercials.

Eventually when these old classic programs reverted to syndication, the crossover sponsorship and content create problems. As with I Love Lucy, The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Superman and others, newly edited or reshot opening and closing credits were necessary to remove the intertwined sponsorship evidence.

And now we've come back around, full circle again, with major advertisers buying not just 30 second ad slots but two-thirds of the entire nightly primetime block, producing it all from opening tease to closing credits. And it's working because there's no financial downside. It's risk-free for NBC because the producers paid for it and guarantee the network won't lose money by airing it.

Talk about an example of classic TV …

Jim Furrer

The Next Bad News Bearers?

They say bad news comes in three's.  Major transportation disasters, passing of famous figures, Lindsay's court hearings.

So what next for the FCC?  The communications commissioners must be crouching behind their desks.

It was only this April, when the Washington DC Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's power to tell cable giant Comcast what to do.  Specifically, the Court found no authority under the Communications Act of 1934 for the Federal Communications Commission to try and enforce it's network neutrality principles upon the giant cable common carrier.

Simply put, on that one the FCC failed to tie its assertion of authority to any actual law enacted by Congress.  Observers called it a major blow to the Obama administration's emerging National Broadband Plan.

And now comes Wednesday's three judge ruling from the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down the FCC's current near-zero tolerance for accidental expletives during live events broadcast by the TV networks.  Calling the policy on fleeting expletives "unconstitutionally vague" the ruling did let stand a 1978 Supreme Court decision affirming the FCC's right to generally police the airwaves.

Simply put, with this one the FCC failed to tie it's assertion of authority over content to any actual law enacted by Congress.  Judge Rosemary Pooler wrote in the 3-0 decision, "Indeed, there is ample evidence in the record that the FCC's indecency policy has chilled protected speech."  The website Fast Company first published the following graphic:

Not a good call for the commission charged with policing our airwaves.  What next?  Well, today -- Thursday July 15 -- the FCC Dashboard meeting agenda includes Expanding Investment in Broadband Health Care Technology; Electronic Access to Cellphone Rate Information; an Inventory of Commercial Spectrum Space; and yes … Comcast's proposed takeover of NBC-Universal.

With the FCC having just recently lost in the courts to the same cable giant, if it's really true that bad news comes in three's, watching the government's behavior from this point forward will be, as Arte Johnson used to say, "ver-rrry interesting."


Jim Furrer

Ringo Starr ... All Star so far

It was strange to watch Ringo Starr turn 70 years old yesterday.

Oh, he still looks great, and I can only wish I don't pass for 80 when I hit that same mile marker Ringo breezed passed on Wednesday.

All things must pass, and although no one could predict the strange twists of circumstance and mental misguidance that claimed two of the Four, Richard Starkey somehow didn't strike me as one to ever become the grand old man of music and culture.

But he did become just that, and more. For every Linlo and HoHan and SpenPratt and K-Fed and Tinkerbell out there, it's affirming to find someone with true talent not just surviving, but thriving, over the decades.

Perhaps the reason is that unlike the aforementioned contractions and nicknames, Ringo defines a sharp difference between celebrity and actual talent.

I had the opportunity to work professional with him, out in Los Angeles at Raleigh Studios about ten years ago, filming host segments for one of his many DVD music releases, "Ringo Starr, So Far."   He knew the business, he knew his lines (mostly) and he was willing to try something different in delivery or tone, as long as you could support your position and defend your decision.

Oh, sure, he'd grill you on the why and the wherefore of what you were asking from him. And then, professional to the core, he'd smile and just do it.

Well.  I cannot imagine Ringo in a tantrum or a SCRAM or leaving the scene of traffic accident -- all common occurrences among today's media celebrities.

And that's the difference with true professionals, far different from "famous just for being famous" and thank goodness some of them survive today.


Jim Furrer

Stop counting lines and just look

The reception flap over the new iPhone 4 may have obscured a different issue, namely the high-definition camera Apple built into the device.

Observers and critics are quick to point out that 720 progressive, the video resolution Apple designers selected, is already overshadowed by smaller and cheaper "video only" devices hitting 1080, such as Sony's Bloggie handheld.

Don't confuse pixel count with image quality.

In side-by-side comparisons by several web sites, the quality of video from the new iPhone beat out all the other inexpensive MP4 handhelds, with the possible exception of the Flip HD models, which equalled or slightly surpassed the iPhone camera:

What's happening here? It's subjective issues such as colorimetry, signal-to-noise, effectiveness of the automatic exposure, black level rendition, and quite a few other esoteric qualifiers. Line count, and the competitive specifications race for more lines or most pixels, is only one very small factor that human vision uses when judging that elusive "quality" factor.

Truth is, every pixel has a noise floor, and the more pixels that collectively make up the sensor area, the more the designers must deal with system noise and loss of sensitivity. That's right, for any given imager surface area, when fewer receptive "buckets" exist to gather the fixed amount of light making it to the sensor, then each bucket can collect more of the photons. Increase the number of light buckets by making each smaller, and the opportunity to collect decreases proportionally.

Back in the 1980s when CCD cameras first started penetrating the professional and broadcast marketplace, I purchase a Sony BVP-5 solid state broadcast camera. The quality of the pictures, for the time, was outstanding. But soon came the BVP-7 with a denser imager and adjustable shutter, and it forced me to upgrade. The specs on the Model 7 were much improved. Resolution charts performed better. But the images seemed, well, more "sterile" than the beloved Model 5.

Several years later, the BVP-90 came out and again I jumped. Coupled with some very expensive Canon glass, those images got me a lot of work. But often when evaluating the color monitor, I found myself wishing for the wonderful richness and pleasant detail handling of that old BVP-5 I'd started out with.

With the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs has publicly announced the Apple team took a look at all these factors when zeroing in on 720P. By concentrating on color imaging, low light performance, and a host of other considerations, the subjective quality of the images captured by the new iPhone is quite outstanding. And that's what counts.

As we used to say, "Just look at the whole frame, stop counting all those lines."

Jim Furrer