

Time Warner Cable drops Ovation and Current TV - abdophoto
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/02/3761236/time-warner-cable-drops-arts-channel.html

======
nmacri
More context: [http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/al-jazeera-to-acquire-
curren...](http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/al-jazeera-to-acquire-current-tv-
ny-times/)

Since Time Warner Cable would not consent to the sale “Current will no longer
be carried on TWC. This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera
America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years
ahead.” Time Warner Cable says that it is “removing the service as quickly as
possible.” The loss of the No. 2 cable operator will hurt: Time Warner Cable
has 12.2M video subscribers and Current reaches about 59M homes. Others also
could follow Time Warner Cable’s lead as they look to prune their often
bloated channel lineups.

------
GabrielF00
Time Warner and other cable companies are anticompetitive monopolies that
offer poor-quality service at high prices. At one point Comcast had a worse
customer service rating than the IRS (hence the new Xfiniti brand). Dropping
these channels is pure greed.

------
eli
Seems like a strange overreaction. I mean, I get Al Jazeera English here in
DC. There really isn't anything on it that should be controversial.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Current was reportedly tanking, which
is why it was on the block in the first place.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The actual headline is "Time Warner Cable drops arts channel" which talks
about the Ovation channel being dropped because nobody tunes in, as an aside
it also mentions that Current TV was dropped after being acquired by Al
Jazeera.

Now I suspect the person who submitted this thought there was some weird
conspiracy about Al Jazeera and Time Warner and what not but the reality is
that when a channel changes ownership previous contracts get voided, sometimes
that gives folks an easy out. In this case it looks like they took that out.

------
unreal37
How does carrying a TV channel cost Time Warner real money? I guess they pay
the channels for the rights to broadcast, but how much was really costing
them? A few hundred thousand a year? What if Ovation was free?

As for the politics of carrying an Al Jazeera owned channel in the U.S., it's
a sad day for free speech.

~~~
mikeryan
So at least in the past when I worked for TechTV new networks paid for
carriage, and eventually got paid by the cable operator once they earned their
stripes (usually 3 to 5 years)

I doubt this cost is really the relevant one though. More importantly its the
opportunity cost. Cable operators are limited in bandwidth and the number of
channels they can carry at any given time. Getting rid of Ovation free's up
that network bandwidth for another, more profitable network (or more HD
channels etc...)

Ovation and Current both were at a disadvantage as independent networks.
Larger network groups like NBCU, Scripps (food network) Viacom (Comedy Central
& MTV) have a better chance getting a smaller network off the ground because
of their increased leverage.

Hopefully at some point the cable operators will move to a Switched Digital
Video[1] system which would free up bandwidth and allow for these smaller
networks to get traction a bit easier, but its not going to happen soon and
(hopefully) streamed internet networks will really start to flourish. Maybe
the Ovations and Currents of the world will move this way sooner now.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video>

~~~
huayhuash
Actually, TWC does use SDV in most of their markets.

------
geuis
That's fine. I dropped Time Warner and Comcast years ago. Oddly enough,
between Youtube, podcasts, Netflix, iTunes, and bittorrent I have no need to
have "channels" any more.

If there's a movie or tv show I want to see, Netflix -> iTunes -> bittorrent.

I've actually been finding I watch Youtube more than anything else. I have a
particular set of interests and have found a particular set of regular
independent producers on Youtube and subscribe to them.

    
    
      Minecraft: Etho's Lab
      Starcraft: HDStarcraft and Husky
      Bread baking: multiple
      Telescope mirror making: multiple
      Photography: multiple
    

Beyond that, I listen to a variety of podcasts about tech and photography.

I literally have _no_ need for cable tv and haven't for years. All of the
interesting stuff is online.

What I'd really love to see is a popular tv show with a loyal fan base but
marginal viewers on cable to just switch over 100% to Youtube. Put the
episodes in full HD and run regular Youtube ads. Maybe do some in-show
advertisement, product placement, that kind of thing.

Recently, Dirty Jobs was cancelled after 8 years by Discovery. That was a
really cool show with a loyal fan base. Its numbers got too low for Discovery
so they canned it. It'd be the perfect example to try switching to a pure
online model.

~~~
recuter
> What I'd really love to see is a popular tv show with a loyal fan base but
> marginal viewers on cable to just switch over 100% to Youtube. Put the
> episodes in full HD and run regular Youtube ads. Maybe do some in-show
> advertisement, product placement, that kind of thing.

The budget for one Top Gear episode (for example) is greater then what PSY
made from his youtube video with a Billion views.

On top of that, even the smaller networks enjoy a built in audience of
hundreds of thousands (if not several million) viewers for each new show they
put out there. If you start a show from obscurity it has a much steeper hill
to climb.

If you take an already existing show, like you say, it will lose most of its
audience because people will think "whatever happened to" and promptly forget
about it. That's how good stuff like Firefly gets killed, you move the
schedule around a bit and ratings tank because people don't keep up with that.

~~~
geuis
I know the current monetization for videos is low. That's not for lack of
audience, its because advertisers have not really switched over a lot of their
ad spend to online video.

Look at this video from HuskyStarcraft.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfBKFLrUQU4>. That's his episode celebrating
his 700,000th subscriber. 700,000 people subscribe to his channel. He posts
several videos a day, usually about 20-30 minutes in length. Each video gets
hundreds of thousands of views in a day, and even more over time. There are
entire cable networks that don't have that kind of viewership, and this is
just a highly-caffeinated guy broadcasting high-level StarCraft 2 games. There
are thousands of Youtubers just like him.

There's a _huge_ audience worldwide on Youtube. It and sites like it are
already the future of broadcast, and the traditional networks are way, way
behind. They're going to be less and less relevant as time goes on.

If you take an existing show that, as I already said would likely be
cancelled, and move it to Youtube there could be an amazing response.

~~~
recuter
That is rather what I am talking about. He posted 18 videos this week (I'm not
counting the two from the last 24 hours) with an avg. of ~55,000 views.

There's a lot of noise and people have short attention spans, he also posts
stuff willy nilly. So only some small fraction of his 700,000 subscribes see
any one video, for the rest it disappears into their feeds.

His 360 Million views is still quite a lot, by definition there can only be so
many accounts with such a high view count. And yet that translates to a check
of only around a quarter million dollars.

This is great for a highly caffeinated individual sitting in underwear and
recording his screen - it simply doesn't cover a cast and crew even if you
improve the CPM by a factor of x10.

The truth is that TV advertising is very overpriced and just like newspapers
trade physical print dollars for digital pennies the same thing applies here.

------
jspthrowaway2
> _Carl Meredith is one local viewer upset about Ovation’s removal from his
> Time Warner lineup. Meredith and his wife, who live near Clayton, are big
> fans of Ovation’s reruns of the original British version of “Antiques
> Roadshow.” Meredith said he had his DVR set to record the episodes during
> the day, and the couple would watch them together at night. Now, he gets a
> blue screen telling him Time Warner Cable no longer carries Ovation._

That's a rather left-field choice of show to enjoy, and in most of these
discussions reruns (especially esoteric ones) don't get a lot of focus.
Pundits tend to focus on the newest episode of, say, _Homeland_ as the item
worth buying. The Merediths show us that there is more to that puzzle.

The à la carte selection of and payment for individual shows, as opposed to
individual channels, may have some merit after all; if you read between the
lines, they don't want Ovation. They want reruns of British _Antiques
Roadshow_ , and Ovation just happened to have them. This couple is already
down the road toward a different model, too, since they utilize their DVR to
time-shift the episodes anyway.

The downside to shifting to paying for shows is (the often useful) local
network affiliates, live sports programming, real-time news, and so forth,
which are problems yet to be solved. Basically, anything live. I think the
generation that's in their 20s and 30s now, though, is more palatable to this
kind of model, and we're very likely on the way.

\----

Other point I'd like to make here is that British _Antiques Roadshow_ is
produced by the BBC, who haven't quite figured out the United States yet.
Different legal systems force them to make real bummers, like rescoring _Top
Gear_ since they have a very liberal licence to use popular music in the UK
and America is a very different picture. In many _Top Gear_ films, the music
is half of the equation[1] and its replacement with stock light rock jams is a
real shame. Heard some of that in the _Best of Top Gear_ edits that BBC
America just aired. That's also probably why they have to be really aggressive
on YouTube, and a lot of the unofficial clips of _Top Gear_ on YouTube have
been disappearing, replaced by official edits following the same rules.

A lot of Americans, myself included, are chomping at the bit for _Top Gear_
but the BBC finds itself having to edit it to remove British-specific jokes
(which I disagree with) or rescoring as mentioned above (which is just
unfortunate). They're pretty lax on _QI_ on YouTube, though, which is just
great; I've seen all of _QI XL_ Series J so far, not far behind Britain.

[1]: Example from last series, brilliantly written, shot, edited, and scored:
<http://vimeo.com/40226173>

