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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Wednesday Morning Links, News, And Views -- Part II

Active rigs: 183

WSJ Links

The new Motorola smart phone is getting good reviews in The Wall Street Journal, including this pretty-good review from Walt Mossberg Most interesting: Motorola is copying something Apple did many, many years ago: offering the phone in various colors and personal inscriptions. Although Apple does not (yet) offer its iPhone in different colors, Apple did pioneer color and inscriptions with its early iMac computers, the clamshell comes to mind. I remember Microsoft laughing at Apple computers coming in various colors.

A nice analysis of the Time Warner Cable and CBS dispute; the writer has it right.
The dispute is one that has become commonplace in pay TV, centering on how much more money Time Warner Cable should pay to carry CBS on its cable lineup. CBS says it wants to be "paid fairly" for its programming, while Time Warner Cable says it is trying to protect its customers. But at the core of it, the companies are squabbling over their share of pay-TV's spoils—money that, if the newspaper and music industries are any guide, could disappear much faster than anyone expects.
... these arrangements aren't sustainable. Younger people watch what they want online, making the idea of cable TV less appealing. The percentage of people age 13 to 33 subscribing to pay TV fell to 76% this June from 85% in June 2010, a new study by research firm GfK found.
"Cord cutting used to be an urban myth. It isn't any more," said cable analyst Craig Moffett in a report Tuesday.
Yet the entertainment companies seem blissfully unaware. Yes, most make their cable programming available online, but only to TV subscribers who remember passwords, itself a turnoff. Some shows are separately licensed to online outlets, like Amazon.com Inc., Hulu or Netflix Inc., but not every outlet has all seasons.
TV executives may feel insulated from the travails of newspapers. But if Messrs. Britt and Moonves don't stop fighting over money and think longer term, there won't be much money left to argue about.
And that story is followed by: pay-tv lost subscribers last quarter
Pay-TV providers lost video customers in the latest quarter, and tempers are flaring in the industry over who is most to blame for the rising costs that are driving some subscribers to "cut the cord."
The net video customers lost by cable, phone and satellite-TV providers in the second quarter totaled about 380,000, according to Moffett Research LLC. That is just slightly better than the 393,000 customers the industry lost in the year-earlier quarter. Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Moffett Research, in a research note Tuesday, pointed to evidence of cord-cutting by showing that new household formation has shown "at least tentative signs of recovery" while "pay TV subscribership has not."
I cut the cord several months ago.

Oil boom helps shrink US trade deficit by 22%. A stand-alone post later. 

2 comments:

  1. few realize that in all major markets the over-the-air HD is better quality than cable anyway and networks like the "majors" all have air presence. Circumvent the umbilical.

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    1. I did not know that, but it does not surprise me. For me, there's still something geeky about dish antennae (and the aesthetics) and that delays my shift. Obviously I'm in the minority thinking that way; Dish seems to be doing well. But cable has a real challenge.

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