Posts filed under 'Businesses that Suck'
In watching the fight unfold between Cablevision and Disney/ABC, it’s plain to see that the largest problem the cable companies have is their adherence to their business model and not picking the right core competency.
Time Warner Cable is asking its customers to support their fight against content providers:
I’ve recently upgraded my home internet connection to Time Warner Cable’s “Wideband” Internet Service — using DOCSIS 3.0, I get 50Mbps down, 5Mbps up. And I actually get it. Since I’ve posted before about the negative experiences I had with Time Warner’s RoadRunner service at a previous apartment, I’ll update it with some information about how one individual turned around my customer experience and gives me some measure of hope.
In either case, I’ve tried streaming various HD video services, and while I’m fairly impressed as to how far full-screen HD video has come, it’s still not where it needs to be – full-screen on my 24″ LCD the video can resolve to fine detail, but has horribly visible problems with lots of motion. Whether Hulu, TNT, or the Olympics, there were issues, though I found the way the Olympics’ Silverlight video streams seemed to “resolve” to detail very well after motion slowed, and it appeared to in some ways mimic the eye varying focus organically. The Olympics player also didn’t full-screen the video, it full-screened the player, which maintained a photo-like frame with advertising.
In any event, in investigating the bitrates used by all three services, I found that it never exceeded 3.5Mbps, probably due to the tactical problems with distributing significantly higher bitrates over the internet.
Why isn’t Time Warner Cable reading the writing on the wall and recognizing itself for what it is?
The “television” cable company is a content distribution network.
They’ve figured out how to give me a 50/5 last-mile connection. Downloads from content distributed by CDNs is reasonably close to rated speed.
Time Warner should be focusing on making it easy for content providers to get higher bandwidth streaming content hosted (if on-demand) or replicated (if live streams) into their network, from which they could easily pass it along to me at 10 or 15Mbps, resulting in significantly higher quality video.
They could either charge content providers (like ABC/Disney) for their content distribution services which enable an unsurpassed customer experience (possibly even charged at variable rates subject to SLA as monitored by end-user equipment), charge customers to access this premium experience (charge one rate for internet access with “wish you the best” experience, and an additional fee for access to this premium CDN), or a mix of the two.
I’ve got an LG BD570 on the way, which is a Blu-Ray player which supports streaming of Netflix, VUDU, CinemaNow, Youtube, Pandora, and media from my home network over DLNA. It hasn’t been delivered yet, but I’m well on my way to being my own CDN. If they’d provide a highly-accessible CDN, and access to it through a set-top box open to whatever applications whether they use the CDN or not, they could offer a hell of an experience. And they could extend the CDN into my house using one of my set top boxes as a CDN node of sorts.
Did Comcast GetIt(tm) with its rebranding as xfinity? Might that be where they’re heading?
Cablevision’s Optimum Online services have always been a cut above the internet offerings from Comcast and Time Warner. Maybe they can “get it”, give in for now, and then change their business model to be someone whose services are actually in demand, wanted by both the content providers and end users. Rather than being a proxy for licensing battles, they can step out of the way of the content providers’ licensing models, offering infrastructure that seamlessly handles a feature set that supports the licensing models of choice of the content providers, and allow users to handle the battle over licensing.
Get out of being in the middle of the problem, and get into the middle of the solution. There’s something wonderfully empowering in the business model being focused specifically on the level of service provided — it ties business success with customer experience, a wonderful feedback loop.
Wouldn’t it be nice to want to do business with the cable company?
Were they also to establish an open licensing authorization platform, they could provide content providers a platform to authorize access to content based upon the licensor’s business model, and provide sublicensing to content aggregators targeting specific verticals. They’d sell services to content providers (licensors), curators (aggregators based upon value-add with a sublicensing business model), as well as to end users (aggregation of licensing into packages or a la carte bundles for retail sale).
If you make the rights management reasonable, CableCompany, you can open your own iTunes-like content licensing store on this platform. You can get revenue from transaction fees on the sublicensing, and be transparent about it. You’d be a “cloud service”, and could bill based upon usage, and drive usage through an exemplary customer experience.
Or you can wait, and die off when someone else does this. Look out for FiOS and Google. Verizon’s got everything to gain about getting high ARPU internet services rolled out, and don’t have the same legacy mindset about content licensing that you do. And Google’s gigabit-to-the-home is probably actually just an attempt to wake you up to get you to do this for their benefit as well.
Be the open and transparent good guys and innovate to the future, or be the hated bad guys and become irrelevant. Your choice.
March 7th, 2010
When you take some time to think about the mortgage crisis that’s helped turn our markets to mud, it seems to come down to overpaying for things without a well-reasoned calculation of risk.
Until about a month ago, I lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and walked by New York University’s buildings each day. According to the College Board, the costs for a student who lives on campus total $51,982 a year.
Assuming no increase in costs, that’s $207,928 for an undergraduate degree.
Somehow, they report that the average indebtedness at graduation is $33,637. I presume that they’re referring to the debt load that the student carries. What won’t show up in that figure is the amount of home equity borrowed against by parents to pay the expected family contribution.
In any event, someone’s coming up with $200k. There are many reasons why self-selection would dictate that the median household income of students at NYU would be higher than the $50,233 American average, but even if the average is twice that, after taxes and living expenses for the rest of the family, they’re not coming up with $52k out of pocket, unless they’ve been extraordinarily diligent in saving.
While undoubtedly there are a number of students who will work at high-paying jobs coming right out of school, most of their classmates won’t. Parents won’t always make rational decisions, putting something like the pride of having a child at Princeton above economic sense. If they’ve got the money, it’s none of my concern. If they don’t… who bears the consequences?
Imagine graduating college with $100,000 in debt, at 21 years of age. Assume that the graduate may have a child 10 years later. If a parent’s education isn’t paid off by the birth of his child, when will the cycle end? That’s $833 per month, every month, for 10 years, before considering interest. Twice that for a couple.
How do we get some sanity here?
Making more money available isn’t the answer. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to send everyone to college. Maybe we should treat education loans more like standard unsecured credit, or make education loan decisions based upon likely ability to repay given not just credit history, but school transcripts and historical economic success of similar loan applicants.
Of course, that idea dies an early death at the hands of those who think it unfair to the economically disadvantaged. So… what do we do? And how do we not screw ourselves with subprime education lending?
Are the people losing their houses now paying their student loans? Are they going to be any time soon?
May 3rd, 2009
Spelling does count. If the sender, subject line, or your message is misspelled, I’m far more likely to think that it’s spam and bin it. I’m fine with the false positives which may make it into the bit bucket if you didn’t take the time to figure out how to spell what you wanted to tell me. *cough*joe*cough*
And I’m not buying from you if your math is horrible and it makes a difference to what I’m buying. A dimwitted marketer put this on thestreet.com below an article I was reading.
Hmm… while it’s true that if I’d bought and sold at the prices indicated, $18.37 and $37.82 respectively, I would indeed have made over 50% on the investment, as you advertised. But if you’re advertising what a financial genius you are, shouldn’t you be noting that buying something for $18.37 and selling it for $37.82 brings you a return of over 100%? I think on math alone, I’m far better with my bad guess strategies than with this genius guiding me.
December 15th, 2008
While I did create a “Glycerine” channel, I’ve heard an acoustic rendition of Bush’s Glycerine at least 5 times now on my Ani Difranco channel, and I haven’t listened that much to Pandora.
I don’t know if I ran into a flaw in the algorithm, have had strange luck, or if Pandora isn’t really all that amazing…
August 5th, 2008
I’ve got a lot to say about Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey in the coming days and weeks. I’ll start you out with this screenshot of just the kind of slow speeds I’m getting on a regular basis. 150ms ping to the first hop isn’t infrequent, as well as 10% packet loss to the first hop as well…
At 3AM, I can get 19mbps download on that speed test (I pay for 20mbps Road Runner Extreme). Between 7pm and midnight? The speed tests sometimes show as high as 2mbps or so, but will vary from minute to minute down into the hundreds of kilobits per second. As you can see in the screenshot I included, I’m testing at 220kbps.
Road Runner has sent techs out twice. Both said that the signal looked fine, but one replaced the cable modem. Both said that a service call would be opened for the “plant” folks to do something. One, upon my geeky pleading (I poured on the victim bit… but it was genuine… the tech support line is 30 minutes on hold to have someone run me through the exact same steps: unplug the router, plug in a computer, disable the firewall, disable antivirus, run the speed test. “We have to send a tech out to you”. Lather, rinse, repeat.) mentioned “upgrades” which had been done quite a bit north of me, but hadn’t been done this far down yet. I inquired about the schedule, and he said that he hadn’t been told, even after asking.
Frustrated, I submitted a complaint with the City of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Unfortunately, I was told that their influence about complaints about cable companies is limited to cable television issues, and not Internet access. But he did mention that they were aware of the node-splitting upgrade that Time Warner is performing on Manhattan.
Of course, node-splitting is a way to mitigate oversubscription problems. Too many users on one node, and the internet bandwidth to that node is saturated by the sheer traffic volume.
But if Time Warner has been planning node-splitting, they’ve known about capacity issues.
So why haven’t they offered in any of my multiple interactions with them to a) downgrade the level of service I’m subscribed to because they can’t honestly offer the service when peak time is so incredibly far from what they’ve sold me, b) offer to lower the pricing on my upgraded package until the upgrade happens (and tell me when it would), or c) at least OFFICIALLY ADMIT THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM.
I’ve got some thoughts about how I’ll proceed from here, and I’ll document what happens better and more real-time (this problem began in the fall and has gotten progressively worse).
But alas, it’s bedtime for now.
January 25th, 2008
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