Comments on: Cloudy Days Ahead for Slingbox

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:18:29 +0000

@Marty – Boxee is a great example of the type of innovation that can happen when you open up platforms and challenge smart people to create. Cable MSOs are the antithesis of the Boxee mindset, with efforts like Opencable and Tru2Way spinning their wheels and resulting in very little real innovation and actual adoption/rollout over the past decade.

There are two big things holding cable MSOs back in particular: they are extremely cheap, hate CAPEX, and won’t invest in the set-top boxes needed to compete with these types of more powerful platforms. Second, they just are not interested in changing the equation much and ceding too much control to other powers in the relationship with the consumer, something open development and application environments might actually do.

By: Marty Picco

Marty Picco — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:10:38 +0000

I’d like to see the operators stop maximizing friction in the market and embrace an open platform delivery platform. An app store for TV would break open the floodgates of innovation, and I would think that with the right structure, everyone could come out winners: the content owners, operators, and independent developers.

The operators’ historical fear of being a dumb pipe is certainly a barrier, but I suspect that even they see the light on this but might be held back by the reality of their networks vs. their hype; that is, an open platform would likely bring cable networks to their knees.

A great example of the speed of innovation that’s possible was the recent developer challenge from @boxee. In a matter of months, 122 apps were developed for the platform (as CEO Avner Ronen says: that’s 121 more than your STB), and several of these introduced proven navigation and recommendation technologies from the likes of Digg, Pandora and Last.fm.

Open the platform and watch TV develop at web speed.

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:47:08 +0000

Cloud/network DVR appears to be where many MSOs appear to be headed, but that said I think that the user experience in the home will be superior using a client based DVR – heck, there’s enough lag using my in-home network DVR from Verizon – I can only imagine how poor the experience will be if all the content is in one of their data centers and then has to travel unicast from a shared server to my home gateway and then over my home network.

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:44:31 +0000

@Dave – I think you have a good point – assuming TV Everywhere works. I think that TV Everywhere will take a cartel-like mentality where every big content owner toes the line – if one of the bigs decides to just go heavy in the free/ad-supported route, it would force most of the others to consider whether they want to stay in the TV Everywhere cartel or break ranks. I may be off here, but I just think the authenticated web is going to be a tough sell for consumers.

By: nimrodb

nimrodb — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:34:29 +0000

How about getting the same functionality off the cloud? Will it still be in demand vs. the Hulus?
After all many of us used the sling to access our DVR remotely. So how about being able to stream the content we scheduled for recording off the cloud into our PC or iPhone instead of using sling?

By: Dave Bullock

Dave Bullock — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:54:27 +0000

Timely topic – but I think the better question is actually how the likes of “TV Everywhere” is going to impact Sling. That’s the more direct attack on the Sling value proposition… portability of your at-home media subscription. And better yet, no extra cost or hardware required.
The team at Sling had a great vision, and I expect they anticipated some of these changes…but likely not the impressive scope of the new entries in the market.

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:05:50 +0000

That’s the million dollar question. I think much of the focus now for online video has moved from if and when its going to happen to how to best deliver all this content as more consume a greater amount of their entertainment pie online. Akamai had a webcast today discussing the idea of HD streaming online, so you know the edge-caching folks are thinking about this, particularly as we move to HD streaming. Liz and Chris have written about adaptive bitrate streaming and other technologies to make this transition happen as well. In the end, however, we can’t ignore the fact that more and more bandwidth will be needed, which kind of shows you why Cisco keeps talking about this video thing

By: nick

nick — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:31:57 +0000

Do we have the bandwidth to stream all our movies, music, pictures and documents from the cloud? And who will monitor the storage of personal information in a virtual world?

By: Paul Walborsky

Paul Walborsky — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:57:24 +0000

My whole family Hulu’s – wife, kids, grandparents. Hands down that is the next thing. Sorry Joost, I was a big believer!

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:18:05 +0000

It’s a simple case of shifting content from the home (local) to the web (cloud). Even sporting events are streamed live on the web. The need to take your own content with you, even by Slinging it, is not as pronounced as when Sling debuted.