Amazon’s crazy cheap Firestick, Netflix made Coach Taylor do something bad, Roku wants some money.
CordKillers: Ep. 42 – Gore Porn
Recorded: October 27, 2014
Guest: Scott Johnson
Intro Video
Primary Target
- Amazon Fire TV stick
- Amazon takes on Chromecast with Fire TV Stick
- The mixed-up math of Amazon’s Fire TV Stick discounts
- Fire TV Stick coming Nov. 19th available for preorder. Ships Nov. 19
– Coming to UK and Australia soon
– For first two days of preorder $19 for Prime members
– Free month of Prime for non-mebers
– Dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage
– Netflix, Hulu Plus, Plex, YouTube, TWitch, Spotify, Vevo A&E etc.
-(Chromecast is $35/ Roku stick $50)
Signal Intelligence
- Netflix has two more TV shows for 2015: ‘Bloodline’ and ‘F is for Family’
- Two new Netflix originals
– Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman, who were the creators of Damages.
– Coach Taylor says “We’re not bad people, but we did a bad thing.”
– 13-episode original, with the plot focusing around “a family of adult siblings whose secrets and scars are revealed when their black sheep brother returns home.”
– March 2015 - F is for Family
– Animated by Bill Burr, EP with Vince Vaughn set in the 1970s
– Voices from Laura Dern and Justin Long
– Burr will premiere his new stand-up special I’m Sorry You Feel That Way on Netflix December 5th, 2015
Gear Up
- U.S. TV startup Roku to confidentially file for IPO: WSJ
- Roku Seeking Secretive IPO: Report
- Roku planning to file for an IPO in the US – selected bankers
– Companies with less than $1 billion annual gross revenues can keep confidential
– Last month, the company announced the Roku Powered program, an initiative aimed at helping Roku strike up direct partnerships with pay-TV providers. (BBC, Dish etc)
– The Information reported Roku pulled in $190 million in revenue in 2013.
– Says it is near profitability
-Could Roku be the box to unify two worlds?
Front Lines
- Comcast lost 81,000 video customers in Q3, its best result in 7 years.
- -A year ago Comcast lost 127,000 video customers. The company ALSO added 315,000 broadband subscribers bringing it close to parity with 22.38 million video subs and 21.59 million broadband subs. The company increased overall customers by 82,000.
- Nielsen, and Adobe are launching a measurement system across Internet-connected devices.
- This includes desktops, smartphones, tablets, game consoles and over-the-top boxes. The system will launch in 2015 with ESPN, Turner Broadcasting, Sony’s Crackle, Viacom and Univision already signed up. It’s called Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings, Powered by Adobe and uses Adobe Analytics and Adobe’s ‘Primetime’ TV delivery platform.
Under Surveillance
- Brian: Legend of Korra season 3, Twin Peaks to ep 3, Transparent, Fargo ep 10
- Tom: Fargo (Ep. 10), Haven, Agents of SHIELD, Star Wars Rebels, Arrow, The Flash, Transparent, The Shield (309), Continuum
- Scott: The Sopranos, Arrow
Dispatches from the Front
What do you mean by “all the spectrum” if you look at the swath of spectrum actually being used for OTA (uhf and vhf) there is very little actually being used when compared to other technologies like Lte, wimax and wifi.
I am looking at it from a wireless engineer / networking side as such that trying to reuse what is there for another purpose.
There is more spectrum that is licensed and used for the private sector than any other form. Direct TV, dish, xm radio, airline cell carriers just to name a few own more spectrum combined than those that are used for public OTA TV services.
So in a way yes I’m saying that for quality of service and sheer reach of consumption OTA is as good as it gets. Now sure we can transition to mpeg4 OTA and get better use of it but to say that we could replace the spectrum in favor of an on demand solution for everyone just could not happen with the limited bandwidth that uhf and vhf have combined.
Thanks for the reply,
Josh
If we end up paying a-la-carte for our programming, then our money will be going directly to the channels we care about instead of being divided across the hundreds of channels that we don’t care about. I wonder if that will make better programming or less commercials. Thoughts?
David
Links
patreon.com/cordkillers
Dog House Systems Cordkiller box