Sunday Snapshot 12/4/16 The TV turn: The terms "cord cutter" and "cord never" seem quaint now – almost antiquated in a world where Netflix occupies so much of our media lives that news of it offering offline access to select shows and movies can essentially blow up the tech news cycle. Yet the idea of a world where cable and satellite subscriptions are not the main avenue to televised content has also seemed surprisingly naive – until recently. 
Tech media has spent years proclaiming the coming cord cutting revolution, when everyone would rise up and overthrow their cruel cable overlords. Yet traditional TV providers clung stubbornly on, and the glorious untethered, a la carte content utopia never existed beyond the fevered imaginations of a dogmatic few. Yes, people were using Netflix and Hulu, but these were supplemental to their big, comprehensive and costly satellite packages, which adapted words like "on-demand" into their own lexicons to stave off the streaming standouts biting at their ankles. But the gnats have become titans, almost without anyone really noticing. YouTube and Netflix have viewership numbers (and reliable analytics about those viewers) that would and probably do make big cable execs weep. And this week, we saw what I consider the final proof that the traditional TV model is doomed; AT&T and DirectTV released their own streaming service, which does not require a user to be an existing DirectTV subscriber. DirectTV Now isn't without its fair share of awkward limitations, problems and launch jitters. But it's an acknowledgement from a company that only a few years ago would've staunchly argued against the migration of viewership away from traditional TV subscriptions in any significant numbers. Even if it's just a foot in the door to the streaming market, it's not a door that a major subscriber would've even acknowledged until recently, let alone walked through. Amazon, Sony and Sling are all also building their own comprehensive TV offerings slowly but surely, and stuff that completely bucks the system like YouTube is also now turning from a silent majority of youth viewership into something more lucrative and visible as its audience comes of age. The writing is now actually on the wall for plain old cable and satellite TV, and that makes it a very exciting, if uncertain, time to be in the media business again. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment