Understanding the new world order of home video services
CNBC lays out the new taxonomy of home video distribution: the first tier is the pipe into the home — which has changed the least. It is still mostly Comcast and AT&T, but 5G players such as Verizon are shaking up this tier with mobile broadband (no wires to the home). Tier 2 is messy. New players such as Roku and Amazon with Fire TV control 70% of connected TVs in the US (about 400 million). Other streaming device players include Apple, Google, Samsung, Comcast, Xbox, Sony PlayStation. The third and top tier consists of companies such as Netflix and Disney + that aggregate their own content with other content to create a comprehensive streaming platform, designed to keep you in their “home” as long as possible. The big players have sought to be the new network, offering a mix of genres and formats. Others, like ESPN+, continue to be specialists in a particular category.
dis-rup-shun: In the midst of the market’s creative destruction, it is helpful to have a map of the new world. Thanks CNBC. If the market can support only two or three major providers, then will other streaming offerings continue to pop-up for special interest segments — replacing today’s myriad of special interest channels that garner very few hours of the total market’s viewership? It is possible that the new world will feel a lot like the old world, just with different players in the middle.
The UAE is going to Mars
The United Arab Emirates is ready to send Hope, its Mars orbiter into space this summer, as the result of six years of preparation. The launch is scheduled for July 14th, U.S. time. The project has been in cooperation with University of Colorado Boulder, UC Berkeley, and Arizona State University. TheVerge
dis-rup-shun: The renewed space race — with multiple entities quickly sending new crafts to the Moon and Mars — is a curious mix of private enterprise and government agencies. Will China, the U.S., or Amazon be the first to establish meaningful activities on Mars, and what constitutes meaningful?
Sirius buys podcaster Scripps
SiriusXM has announced that it will follow a prior move of Spotify, and beef up its podcast offerings. The company will purchase E.W. Scripps for $325 million. CNET
dis-rup-shun: Just as stated in the first story above, the new landscape players are continuing to evolve, reinvent themselves, and blur the lines. The new consumer, thanks to the Internet and the proliferation of podcasts, has quite an appetite for specialized content. Podcasts are the new talk radio and to be a full content platform you have to offer all content. SiriusXM started with cars and is creeping onto computers and other devices. Spotify started on computers and smartphones and is creeping into cars.