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Tag Archives: over the top

Netflix + Arrested Development? Come On!

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I was asked by well-respected analyst firm TDG to pen a piece of the impact of Netflix wrapping up exclusive rights to the upcoming 4th season of Arrested Development (for their must-read OTT Newsletter).  At first they asked if I could get it done in the next two weeks, but I said, “two weeks, I can do it in two days. Hey!”  So readers who are surprised at that phrasing will probably want to stop right about now, since the rest of it is, in fact, an analysis, but one heavily wrapped in Arrested Development quotes.  You’ve been warned:

“I’ve made a huge mistake,” a quote that could either be attributed to the hasty creation (and destruction) of Qwikster, or to one G.O.B. Bluth, Will Arnett’s character on Arrested Development. In a groundbreaking move, those worlds collided as Netflix announced it was the “network of choice” to distribute the upcoming revival of the cult favorite show (leading many of us to say, “them?”).

Not FOX (the original broadcaster of the show), not Showtime (once rumored to pick it up from FOX), was in play here. In fact, not a single broadcast, cable, or premium network will carry the new episodes.

While Netflix already has rights to a forthcoming original effort (House of Cards, by David Fincher and Kevin Spacey), the Arrested Development play is a first for an existing show to be revived yet not be available through traditional TV (as fans of the show might say, “no touching!”).

Part of the curiosity here is that the show now has a larger fan base than when it was cancelled in 2006, and populates many “Most Popular” lists on Hulu, Netflix, VUDU, etc. One would assume traditional broadcasters would express interest in locking down that large audience…so much for assumptions.

For Netflix in particular, this is a very big deal. The company is acting like a loose seal out of water and consequently has Wall Street running scared. Having exclusive access to this show might bring back some of the recently lost customer base and could sit well with show fans, especially given that a key criticism of its service is related to its catalog.

From an OTT perspective, it’s safe to say there is no illusion of the tremendous opportunity ahead. In a world that seems to be moving more and more down a path where consumers can get truly quantum video access – the content they want, from the provider they want, on the device they want, at the time they want – this is a big stride forward.

Disclosures: I own a tiny amount of Netflix stock personally, but much more importantly, I’m a huge huge Arrested Development fan.  And as they say, there’s always money in the banana stand.  Come on!

ps – and that’s why you always add a disclosure.

Introducing the Future of TV newsletter and Twitter list

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Now that I’m “back in the game” so to speak, I’ve spent the past few months creating a few tools to help me find industry relevant content.  A few of my peers have asked to take a glance “at my tools”, which I found shocking at first, but soon realized what they were talking about.  As such, here they are:

1 – the Future of TV newsletter

Inspired by my colleague Jason Hirschhorn‘s excellent “MediaReDEFined” newsletter, I’ve set up a newsletter that’s just me curating news in the “Future of TV” space.  Topics include Social TV, Connected TV, SmartTV, Second Screen, Four Screens, OTT (Over-the-Top), Cord Cutting and just about anything else that comes along that way.  It’s a fully manually curated production, so you should expect anywhere from 2-20 or so article per day (substantially less on the weekend).

Sample excerpt:

The Difference Between Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV (TribecaFilm) | Talk NYC

Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT

With television moving onto different platforms, it seems like nowadays we can watch TV everywhere. What is the ultimate future for television in a world that expects more from their
The Cable Customer’s Bill of Rights

Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT

Over the past few days, we’ve received more than 1,000 horror stories about bad cable experiences: tales of bad techs, terrible service, and troubling billing practices. We used those to build a cable customer’s bill of rights.

Hope you find this useful, click here to subscribe.  And don’t forget to tell all your friends!

2 – the Future of TV Twitter list

The best way to really *use* Twitter (other than pure self-promotion, narcissism, and stalking purposes that is), is to organize people into “lists” that tend to tweet about a given topic.  Even then, it’s an easy bet that said list will still contain it’s fair share of lunch-related discussion and reality TV show spoilers, but it’s still better than the pure noise of your regular Twitter stream.  I’ve culled a list of people who tend to be more likely than not to tweet about something having to do with the future of TV.  It’s not perfect, and it’s probably still missing some folks.  Here’s a sample:

Note that this is *not* a list of all companies or people in the Future of TV industry, and Twitter accounts from companies such as Miso and GetGlue are conspicuously absent – but this is because they aren’t really tweeting about TV, and are tweeting about TV shows themselves (not to pick on either company – and if there are Twitter accounts from them, or others, that are more germaine to this topic, I’d be happy to include them here).

I’ve also embedded this list into the sidebar of the blog, so you can follow along from here if that’s easier.   Or click here to see the whole list in action.

Hope either of these are useful tools to anyone in this very fun, very fast-moving industry.  Happy to take any feedback or suggestions as well!

They Pulled Me Back In! I’m Joining Dijit Media as Chief Product Officer

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A week ago I announced that Jim Schaff would be taking over active duties at Stage Two, and that I’d be focusing on “other stuff.”  Today I’m excited to share the stuff:  I am joining the management team of Dijit Media as Chief Product Officer, where I’m responsible for product and marketing (here’s the official update).  Not only that, my virtually common law married colleague (business partners for much of the past 14 years) and very close friend Adam Burg is the company’s VP of Business Development.

What???

Last Fall, I gave a presentation at the Set-Top Box Conference in San Jose, and the entire drive back I had a feeling of near elation.  Not that I had said anything extremely profound, but it was wrapped up in the feeling of doing something I had a lot of passion for – in this case, discussing the future of television.  Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time doing research in the Smart TV (also called Connected TV or Internet TV) space, and started seeing some trends emerge, and realized there were some very interesting business opportunities on the horizon.

Adam and I spent months developing a prototype concept of the vision we had, and went to meet with some of the brightest folks we know in the convergence field.  One such bright folk was well-known VC Stewart Alsop, who I’ve known since the late 1990s, who introduced us to Maksim Ioffe, CEO of Dijit.  In our very first meeting with Maksim it was clear he shared much of the same industry and product vision and philosophy with Adam and me. I’ll keep this part of the story short, as we’ve all seen this movie before – we ended up agreeing to join the company. And there was much rejoicing (yay).

Why Dijit?

The grand vision of Dijit is to create the ultimate “four screen” (phone, tablet, computer, TV) social entertainment experience, one which seamlessly merges disparate products and platforms and content into one single, easy to use, consumer offering.  The company is well on its way, and its first product is an iPhone app that enables a really sophisticated, yet elegantly simple control experience for home media centers.   As Maksim put it, “Consumers have 21st-century home entertainment experiences but are stuck with remote controls that haven’t been updated since the 1980s.”  The company partnered with Griffin to produce the Beacon, a clever take on the “IR blaster” product, and one that’s already receiving solid reviews (and I haven’t even done anything yet!).  This is going to be a very exciting company to be a part of, and I’m thrilled to have such an opportunity.

Reminiscing.

I still recall the early days at Mediabolic, where we enabled networked home entertainment solutions that interfaced with legacy, analog consumer electronics devices (yes, we were networking the living room in an era where there were virtually no HDTVs, no YouTube, no Pandora, and no… iPod!).  At Mediabolic I learned what it takes to design and build embedded entertainment devices, to work with consumer electronics manufacturers, and the deep set of challenges surrounding the connected home industry (fun trivia: I heard the phrase “this is THE year of the digital home” every single year starting in 2001 – possibly earlier).  It was a great experience, and key people from that team now work at amazing companies like Netflix, Rovi Corp (Rovi acquired Mediabolic in 2007), etc.

At Sling Media I had the unique opportunity to work for and with some outstanding individuals, not to mention the position of being tasked with figuring out how to deliver the perfect “living room experience” – only over the Internet.  The company’s CEO, Blake Krikorian, taught me the meaning of focusing on every detail and nuance, remaining truly innovative, and keeping the consumer’s wants and needs in the forefront of every product decision.  I also had to learn the ins and outs of social media, back in the era before it was called “social media,” where “the bloggers” were a special, hard to understand subset of humanity (or, as I rapidly learned, just cool people).  We accomplished a great success building the Slingbox, and I’m proud of the product, the team, and the experience.

Over the past four years at Stage Two, I’ve had tremendous exposure to startups, big companies, CEOs, visionaries, the media, and managing a great team.  We literally put companies like Boxee, Bug Labs, and Pogoplug on the map, and have also had the chance to work for well-established firms like Electronic Arts, Best Buy, and VUDU (now Wal-Mart).  I’ve learned from entrepreneurs like Jim Lanzone (now president of CBS Interactive), Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs), David McIntosh (Redux), Rahim Fazal (Involver) and so many others (I’ll write another post in the next little while chock full of shout-outs).  I’ve redesigned product experiences for dozens of products, and created marketing/PR/social media campaigns for dozens more, and had the pleasure to work with great teams along the way.

The Future.

And now I’m taking all of the above, and putting it to work at one place.  Welcome to Dijit.