It’s Coming: TV on the Internet
It’s only a matter of time before television is primarily delivered through the Internet. Sure, cable companies will do whatever they can to stem that tide, and certainly one of the big hurdles from preventing this from already happening is the lack of live sports people can watch through the Internet.
But just as music, movies, books, cell phones and the PC market were disrupted by forces they should have seen coming, so too, is the inevitable demise of cable television peering over the horizon.
Now, that idea is coming a little closer to reality with a new service from a New York-based startup, RadixTV. Essentially, the service broadcasts live television through the Internet.
This week, they rolled out an initial launch to the financial sector employees offering a package of four cable news networks — CNBC, CNBC World, Bloomberg and MSNBC — for $15 per month. The start-up hopes to have their channel offerings to 10 channels — including France 24, Fox News, CNN, Al Jazeera and the BBC — relatively soon.
Of course, they don’t say if the price of the service will spike once more channels are offered through the service.
“We are going where the consumer wants it,” said CEO Bhupender Kaul, AdAge reports. “We are not saying to the consumer, ‘you have to adapt to me.’”
Why the financial sector for the initial product launch? The company claims they don’t want to infringe on “consumer cable TV packages” and traders and brokers are sitting in front of computers all day digesting information. You go where the consumer wants it.
While RadixTV may not be the company that ultimately delivers on the promise of live TV through the Internet for consumers, it is a harbinger of things to come.
While RadixTV isn’t intended to replace anyone’s home cable subscription, it represents an incremental departure from that philosophy. The service is designed to appeal to financial professionals who want to watch the news on PCs during the day but don’t need or want to pay for ESPN or MTV. Indeed, NBC Universal, which is licensing three networks for the service, sees RadixTV as an extension of its existing direct sales to financial companies, the biggest of which license channels independently for business use.
“The business customer is not looking for 50 channels or 100 channels,” Mr. Kaul said. “They don’t want to have entertainment or sports programming, which takes away from the focus of working in an office.”
Mr. Kaul would know. He spent nearly 20 years working for Time Warner Cable and its predecessor, Warner Communications, rising from a local office in Queens to running Time Warner’s enterprise business, including a video package for business called Businesslink.tv, now discontinued. He left in 2008 to launch RadixTV, which he is self-funding along with a private investor.
Interestingly enough, Kaul doesn’t believe the future is television channels a la carte through the Internet. Like the business customer, the home consumer doesn’t want 50 or 100 channels of crap either. The reason cable is so expensive and ultimate useless is because consumers are getting gauged for having to subscribe to 250 channels when they are probably watching 20 channels regularly.
This is where Kaul will be proved right or wrong, as he believes consumers will want to pay for “genre-based groups of channels” or, as he calls them, “re-bundled networks.”
Consumers would then pick and pay for different packages delivered, and the cost of the service depends on how many bundles the consumer selects. That makes good sense on a certain level, but it’s essentially the same thing cable companies are already doing. Consumers pay a certain price for the “basic” package, and then add on other packages.
Here’s to hoping Apple figures out a way to disrupt the entire television ecosystem by offering consumers the ability to pay a certain price for the channels they want every month. If they started making high-quality iTVs (not a stretch given the television is the last hardware device the company could get people hooked on) all the better. So maybe HBO costs $10 per month, networks like NBC, ABC, and FOX are free or $1, and then various second-tier cable channels like FX, Comedy Central or USA are $2.50. From a consumer standpoint, that would be ideal.
Still, let’s applaud RadixTV for moving one step closer into the future.
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