Sirius XM Promises Satellite Radio 2.0

The fourth quarter of 2011 might be the time Sirius XM introduces the ability to customize audio feeds delivered over the Sirius XM service, but possibly also content captured from HD Radio, WiFi, and possibly terrestrial radio broadcasts as well.

"Satellite Radio 2.0" is expected to offer "significantly more choices for the consumer and contain functionality that does not exist today in our radios," says Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin.

Users might be able to customize their own channels using a “like” or “dislike” style button.

Sirius XM might analyze each song that was streaming through the Sirius XM spectrum, and then capture specific songs that met the listener’s preferences. The software could then cache that live content onto a new storage chip on the radio for playback at later times.

This caching could happen at any time that the radio was active, and not just while the user was listening to their personally designed channel.

All the while, the program could insert new content into the playlist that may potentially match the listener’s preferences and allows for music discovery over every single one of Sirius XM’s channels.
The same features might also be used for overall content discovery including news, sports, talk, and comedy programming as well.

Users might be able to save their favorite songs for instant playback at any time.

detail on Satellite Radio 2.0

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ABC And Nielsen Partner On iPad App That ‘Syncs’ TV And Mobile Viewing

The ABC Television Group and The Nielsen Company have developed an iPad app for one of the network’s new primetime dramas in hopes of seeing how much of a connection there is between iPad viewing and regular TV watching.

The app is built on Nielsen’s Media-Sync Platform, which allows mobile apps to automatically detect and synchronize with TV programming using audio watermarks. That means users can watch, leave and come back again right where they left off.

The free My Generation Sync iPad app was available in iTunes’ App Store. In addition to promoting the show, "My Generation," the app also is also designed to help draw interest to Apple’s new $0.99 “TV show rental” offer with Apple.

ABC And Nielsen Partner On iPad App That ‘Syncs’ TV And Mobile Viewing

More Evidence Android Will Blow Past RIM And Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Platform

Android is eating the lunch of every major smartphone platform, according to new data from comScore.
While everyone else lost at least 1 percentage point of market share, Android gained 5 percentage points of share in the second quarter of this year.

More Evidence Android Will Blow Past RIM And Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Platform

New Twitter is "Media"

As one would reasonably have concluded that Google is now "media," not a search engine, one would reasonably conclude that Twitter also is becoming "media," not a text communication app.

With the new format Twitter is rolling out, which will include ability to integrate video and other related information, Twitter will tend to highlight the actual value and quality of information and analysis, which is going to lead to a scenario somewhat analogous to the music industry, where people buy songs, not CDs or albums.

Twitter is going to bring more of that sort of environment to news and video content. One has to wonder if that will lessen the value of packaged "news channels."

New Twitter Completes Its Transformation into News Source

HTC "Desire" for AT&T

Some Android enthusiasts might not like application overlays such as HTC's "Sense" interface. Some users might disagree. The new HTC Desire to be sold by AT&T and other carriers internationally is the latest in the HTC line up using a similar form factor and the Sense user interface.

Will Access Rules Kill New Fiber to Home Investment?

A number of vendors at the FTTH Council meeting said their business in Europe, where the European Union imposed open access rules, has come to a virtual standstill, and that's something they want to avoid in the U.S. market, Carol Wilson, Light Reading events chief editor, reports.

Much will hinge on whether Title II regulation is imposed on broadband access services, or whether, by some other mechanism, mandatory wholesale rules, especially with discounted access rates, are on imposed on the owners of fiber-to-customer networks.

To be sure, competitive providers would get a new lease on life if such rules were put into place. But just as surely, incentives to build new fiber-to-customer access plant will diminish.

Some will argue this won't happen. But it apparently is happening in Europe, at least by some accounts.

FCC Could Crash FTTH Party

Will Third Quarter Confirm Notion that Multichannel Video Business has Peaked?

The second quarter decline in multichannel video subscribers--the first ever in industry history--might not have been a statistial abnormality.

Rob Marcus, Time Warner Cable CFO says Time Warner Cable is on track to lose customers in the third quarter, with the weakness attributed to the economy. If that winds up happening at some other leading cable, satellite or telco companies, we could have a trend developing that could suggest the multichannel video industry finally has hit the wall, and has stopped being a growth industry.

According to researchers at SNL Kagan, the multichannel video entertainment market, which basically has grown in virtually unbroken fashion for decades, suffered its first-ever decline in the second quarter of 2010.

There was some continued shift of market share from cable and towards satellite and telco providers. But those shifts also were accompanied by an apparent net loss of 216,000 subscribers in the multichannel marketplace as a whole, compared to a gain of 378,000 in the second quarter of 2009.

Observers who have been watching what has been happening in some other legacy businesses, especially fixed-line voice services, are familiar with similar processes: gains for competitors and losses for the top incumbents. But there is more at work that market share gains and losses. Over the last decade, the total number of customers available for anybody to get has been dropping.

"Cable TV" has been a mature market for some time, but still has managed to eke out small gains, year after year, despite gains by satellite and telco competitors. But that appears to have hit a possible inflection point in the second quarter. More data, over more time, will be needed to confirm the possible trend, but it would be a historic watershed if the market actually shrank for the first time.

Cable was down a combined 711,000 subscribers, with six of eight top cable companies recording their worst losses ever. By contrast, satellite providers added a combined 81,000 subs and telcos netted 414,000.

Cable's combined share of the market was down to 61 percent from 63.6 percent in the second quarter of 2009.

Telcos now claim six percent of the video market, up from 4.3 percent year over year. It is tough at this point to figure out how much the economy and moribund housing market had to do with the results. Both those trends would normally be expected to slow the market.

But most observers also are watching for signs that alternative channels, ranging from online video to DVD rentals, are having an effect as well. So far, there has been scant evidence of any significant shift of viewing habits.

Some people, for all sorts of reasons, seem willing to live without paying for cable, satellite or telco-provided multichannel video entertainment. But most people appear not to see the advantage of cord cutting.

To be sure, there is an argument that the second quarter was a statistical anomoly. There has been no break in the growth trend line for multichannel video subscriptions, argues Michael Turk, a political and communications consultant. He chalks up the second quarter decline of 711,000 total industry subscribers as an artifact of "artificially" higher sign-ups as the broadcast digital TV transition occurred, a process that lead to higher-than-typical signups, followed by slower demand in the aftermath, but well within the historical growth profile.

The digital TV transition a year ago caused cable operators to offer temporary subscription discounts as a way of luring formerly-resistant consumers. It is possible that the expiration of deeply-discounted offers has lead some customers to churn off.

More likely, the temporary offers had similar effects as auto and housing credits recently have had: demand was simply pushed forward, leading to a decline of growth rates in subsequent quarters as the promotions expired.

If one subtracts out those who dropped cable when their discount expired, cable actually netted about 100,000 new subscribers in the second quarter of 2010.

But Time Warner Cable's guidance about the third quarter suggests there might be something to the notion that the video business has topped out.

Marcus said that Primary Service Units (or PSUs, a measure of voice, video and data customers) will likely fall below second quarter levels, for example.

"Video in particularly has been challenged," Marcus said. "Video net losses are pacing ahead of where they were in last year's Q3, voice growth is slower than it was last year and HSD [high-speed data] while the strongest performer, is still lower than last year. The net-net of all of that is that we may actually see a PSU loss for Q3."

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