NimbleTV Wants to "Outsling" Slingbox

In some ways, Slingbox has been a key motivator behind thinking about "TV Everywhere" and other services that allow consumers to view at least some of the programs they have purchased as part of a video subscription service on their PCs, tablets and smart phones.


With TV Everywhere, customers must first buy the video subscription, and only then add on the streaming feature, which, depending on revenue model, is either an additional feature or an incremental fee service. 


A new service called NimbleTV, which is said to be testing in the city of New York, apparently allows full placeshifting of the full package of television channels that a customer buys through a video subscription service. 


That "sell through" approach is intended to sidestep any copyright issues, as users must first buy  a video service, and then are using NimbleTV only as a virtual digital video recorder. The big issue could arise later, if NimbleTv succeeds, and then wants to be able to sell a Comcast service to a customer where the local provider is Verizon or Time Warner Cable. 


You might think video distributors would fear services such as NimbleTV or Slingbox, but Time Warner Cable actually gives a Slingbox, free, to customers who buy its $100 broadband access service, on the assumption that such users are heavy streaming video consumers. 


Also, Sling is owned by EchoStar, the sister company to Dish Network. 


NimbleTV also seems to be offering the content providers and distributors a revenue share, so there is incremental revenue involved the key stakeholders. 


Placeshifting, of course, has been the key value of Slingbox. As with any copying and viewing of network content, copyright law can become an issue, though courts have ruled that a consumer who only slings content to himself or herself at a different location is not violating copyright. 


NimbleTV itself says the service 'is based on the simplest idea: customers should be able to access the TV they pay for wherever they happen to be." As NimbleTV takes a "sell through" approach, meaning customers buy the content first, then are able to use NimbleTV.


"We also stand behind the idea that providers and content producers should be paid, so we view NimbleTV as a solution that’s both consumer friendly and industry friendly," the company says. 


Those of you with a technical bent might be wondering how NimbleTV will manage a process that conceivably could require capturing and storing an enormous amount of content, in real time, 24 hours a day, for every single customer. 


In other words, does NimbleTV "actually" capture and save in the cloud each unicast subscriber stream? Undoubtedly not. It is probably hoping to get contracts with each major provider in a local market, and then revenue share with those providers.


That will "solve" the content capture and storage problem. In essence, NimbleTV would store a "single" instance of each program, and then grant access only to those channels a subscriber has as part of his or her programming service. 


In other words, if it gets permission from the leading cable, satellite and telco providers in New York, it can capture and store "one copy" of each network program, but allow users to watch only  programs on channels each subscriber already has purchased from a supplier. 


Also, the service is geographically "tagged," so that today beta test customers get New York programming to a New York address, according to  BTIG Research.


NimbleTV hopes to escape legal problems by acting only as an agent for each subscriber, for "private performance" purposes. Also, NimbleTV will operate on a "single stream at a time" basis. 


In appears NimbleTV will capture distributor video centrally, at a data center, and not at a local subscriber location, where the content then is uploaded over the subscriber's own broadband connection. 


The destabilizing potential might come if a subscriber in one region wants to subscribe to a service package from a provider in another region. It isn't completely clear whether the video distributors and content owners will continue to work with NimbleTV if it were to allow a person in Denver to buy a service offered locally in Miami, for example. 


But NimbleTV is another example of how cloud-based architectures are potentially enabling new services that could start to challenge today's video ecosystem. And that could happen even with the support of the content owners and distributors who might ultimately be affected.