Dish's $25.5 Billion Offer for Sprint Is All About Cord-Cutting
Dish is willing to pay $25.5 billion for Sprint because it thinks the wireless high-speed Internet Sprint can offer is the future of streaming TV.
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All that anecdotal password sharing we've been hearing about is more than just a few media savvy friends passing around their logins: One analyst estimates that something like 10 million people watch Netflix Instant, gratis.
Dish is willing to pay $25.5 billion for Sprint because it thinks the wireless high-speed Internet Sprint can offer is the future of streaming TV.
Two of the major broadcast networks are now threatening to remove their stations from the free airwaves if a little start-up called Aereo succeeds, with CBS joining Fox (and the NBCUniversal network Univision) in their pledges to go cable. But should anyone believe them?
With all this talk about the cord-cutting masses no longer wanting to subsidize TV channels they don't watch, it's a little surprising that one of the oldest, most widely available forms of TV is waning: over-the-air broadcast TV.
The chip-maker has said its Silicon Valley star-studded Intel Media group will build a potentially game-changing set-top box — one that might just end up slashing your cable bill.
For years cable and satellite companies have maintained they're not afraid of people canceling their service and watching video over the Internet (i.e. cutting the cord), but the cord nevers — the young people who never sign up for pay-TV service in the first place — are a totally different story.
For cord-cutters, the television makers at the Consumer Electronics Show gave us a lot of complex sorta-solutions to what is (on paper) and easy-to-solve problem.
While many predicted that the future (and the demise) of the television industry would come in the form of dropped cable subscriptions, aka, cord cutting, it's not turning out that way. Rather, it looks like we will have two camps of TV-watching humans: Cord clingers and cord nevers, neither of whom are enthusiastic about the state of things.
A poster child for cord cutting has given up on the cause, moving into an abode with a "tricked-out TV set up." That man is Forbes' Jeff Bercovici, who has gone without paying for cable for 13 years.
HBO, the content provider that has said many times that it has no interest in offering HBO Go as a standalone service, will now offer its content through a standalone streaming service. Don't get too excited: This isn't happening here in the good ole U.S.A but rather in Norway, Finland and Denmark.
There's this idea that young people, who have grown up in a streaming Internet world, aren't getting cable and they never will. We call these people cord nevers and wanted to put some statistics behind the theory.
Time Warner will never offer HBO Go as a standalone streaming service because it's not what the people want, says CEO Jeff Bewkes, asking us to look at the data, which he claims proves there aren't that many cord-cutters.
Along with the announcement of its high speed Internet service, Google introduced Google Fiber TV, its own television service, which works a lot like an old-school television provider.
During yesterday's quarterly earnings report, Netflix mentioned a possible end to its relationship with Epix -- one of its movie providers -- as if it were no big deal to lose a contract that provides many popular new release movies.
Critics say a pay TV business that regularly charges its customers $100 a month is doomed. So how about a cable bill that costs less than $40?
A report from Reuters that Netflix is in talks with an unnamed cable company has us worried since Netflix turning into cable is the last thing we want.
Even if you haven't heard of the upcoming Internet TV project Aereo, you can probably sympathize with the consortium of studios that isn't happy about a competitor profiting off of the content they worked hard to produce.
Even after reporting an increase in high-speed data customers alongside a decrease in video subscribers, Time Warner still doesn't think that the Internet is replacing the traditional pay TV model.
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