CBS Offers Web Service as TV Unbundles Itself | Hacker News Reader

CBS Offers Web Service as TV Unbundles Itself

nytimes.com

35 pointsdnetesn42 comments

For the live stream, the ads will be the same as those on the traditional television broadcast. For the on-demand programming, the typical 12 to 16 minutes of ads an hour will be reduced 25 percent.

I guess I'm not their intended customer. I'm not going to pay for a service to give me ads. If I'm watching a live show, I want the ability to pause it, walk away for a few minutes, and then skip commercials.

For on-demand content, I don't want any commercials. I don't see the value otherwise.

The problem is the same as it is with print; the subscription fee usually only covers the cost of distribution. The cost of content is typically paid for by advertising, which brings in more than subscriptions do. This CBS streaming service is going to be $6/month. So for each million subscribers they get $6m/mo.

But CBS's most show, The Big Bang Theory, which is the most popular show in the USA in that time slot, pulls in about $6.5 million of ad revenue every episode. So CBS would need 4 million subscribers just to match the revenue stream from that one show. Put another way, they need 50k subscribers to replace the ad revenue from one single 30-second commercial spot on that same show. http://www.ibtimes.com/economics-prime-time-how-much-does-it...

This is why the economics of TV are so brutal and many shows are canceled after only a few episodes or a single season. It's not necessarily the fault of the show itself - if a new show goes up against a much stronger offering from another channel, it may not attract a critical mass of viewers and it's more economical to cancel further production and fill the time slot with repeats of more popular material that draws a reliable audience.

Now it could be possible for individual shows to break even. I don't watch a lot of TV, so I only ever watch one program on CBS, a show called Elementary. I would be willing to consider paying something like $1/episode or $25 for the whole season up front - but that has run for a few years already. For launching a new show with the production value and baseline quality of acting that a commercial audience expects, you probably can't get people to pay for it without spending the same amount of money on marketing as on the production itself. So without the cross-subsidies from advertising it would be quite difficult to raise the capital to finance new TV shows. Obviously you have alternatives depending on what sort of show you want to make, eg you can produce a wacky animated comedy relatively cheaply and launch it on YouTube or somesuch to get your initial audience critical mass. But if you want to do an hour-long serious drama or current affairs or science programming, your up front costs are far higher and you need people to open their checkbooks - your MVP probably costs at least $1 million.

Recently, I thought I'd give Hulu Plus a shot. I didn't realize I would still have advertisements after paying a monthly fee. I cancelled my subscription immediately. I don't need to watch those shows that badly.

I have been actively working on removing advertisements from my life and have found it has made my mind feel less cluttered.

Same here, I was a Hulu customer for a whole 3 hours before I committed to Netflix 2+ years ago. Ads on top of the fact that they didnt have the episodes available until days after they aired.

I'm now basic cable(+dvr) & internet ($80/mo) + Netflix $8 + AmazonPrime

possibly adding HBO soon

Do you have cable? My guess is they're targeting existing cable customers who are considering cutting the cord- those people are already paying for a service that gives them advertisements, so for them this isn't much different (in fact it's 25% less ads and potentially a much smaller cable bill).

Except this is streaming broadcast shows, not cable (unless I missed something). This wouldn't really help cutting the cord... you could already get rid of cable and just use an antenna for CBS.

You can think of this as just another physical medium for transmitting the same content. We already have cable and satellite, and now there's the Internet. Of course, it does have the advantage of being available without an entire cable or satellite bundle.

The access to a large back catalog of CBS shows is, for me, a worthwhile feature.

Antennas won't work for many people.

Which people? I've lived in one place where my antenna didn't work, and it was so in the middle of nowhere that slow DSL speeds would have made streaming TV content pretty unpleasant. I'd imagine many of those people already have satellite for TV and internet.

I hear downtown areas are particularly bad for OTA. I live in southern California, but far from the transmitters, and its hard to get a clean OTA signal.

* Antennas won't work for many people.*

Heh. Especially so in the Chicago market. CBS 2 Chicago (WBBM) is the only remaining VHF transmitter in the area. I can easily pull in the other UHF stations, but CBS has continued to be a problem. Reception was poor, but since February I can't get them at all. At one point during the DTV transition period, they weren't allowed (permitted?) to transmit at full power. I wonder if something similar is going on now. That, or a new building has gone up between me and downtown.

In fact, "cable TV" was invented to solve this problem. CATV=Community Antenna TV

I don't buy cable because of the commercials and I sure as hell would never pay to get commercials streamed to my tv via my internet connection.

15 bucks is probably way too high as well, considering the average cable bill is $100/mo, and that's few more channels than 1.

If this were something like 4.99/mo with no commercials I'd consider it. As it is now, I can just buy the best CBS shows on blu-ray for a lot less than $180/year.

It looks like it's $6/month, not $15. Did I miss something?

Woah... I could have sworn it said 15!

Isn't ultra-basic cable (including CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox) around $10/month? Paying $6 for just one network with ads seems really steep.

ultra basic cable is free. Over the air broadcasts.

Also, no football:

"In a notable carve-out, National Football League games will not be available on the service."

Welp that's about the only thing worth watching on CBS...

This is basically retransmission fees applied directly to you instead of your cable provider. Your argument is more against retransmission fees + advertisements. For a company to be able to sell such a product/idea internally and to shareholders, they probably have to keep double-dipping. But, yes, it is annoying.

I am not going to pay to stream content that still has ads in it . . . this is one reason that I am a "cord never" in the odd parlance of the article.

I'm going to assume they started on this effort at the same time they started making loud noises about Aero and their "mini" antennae.

I agree that it seems strange to have both pay + ads, which is clearly a grab at both the money people paid to the cable/satellite company and the revenue they get from advertisers. I would subscribe to a service where it was free and the ads paid for it (like broadcast TV), or it cost money and had no ads (Netflix). My guess is that they won't be as successful as they would like, perhaps that is my hope. I would not be a fan if this pay and pay model became the norm.

Of course the Dish/DirectTV/Comcast folks are no doubt having fits about being disintermediated.

> I agree that it seems strange to have both pay + ads

> I would not be a fan if this pay and pay model became the norm.

Maybe you've heard of cable television for which you both pay and see ads? I think it might catch on at some point...

Snarkiness aside, think about what the "value" is/was that cable brought to the transaction. The value of cable was that you could get channels (and thus content) that you could not get from 'over the air' stations. Early cable adopters people with poor or non-existent over the air reception. Then cable added the equivalent of UHF channels (sorry if that is a US centric thing but all of the channels on that band in the US were a bit 'off'). Then came the 'movie' channels which you could only get on cable and the reason people paid for cable was that other content which they had no other way to get.

Internet service was never a threat until bandwidth got to the point where you could watch video on it with the same fidelity as bad TV, then suddenly other ways to get alternate content were available. Netflix dropped into that change just as affordable 1 - 3 mbit bandwidth was hitting (the whole ADSL revolution in the 90's) and since the bandwidth race that has just gotten worse.

So cable, which you paid for, was the only way to get this "other" content, which carried free over-the-air content with its concommitant advertising as a 'favor' to its subscribers so they didn't need an antenna (and they did get better reception, but not HD, but that is a different thread). Now folks are dumping cable for things like Netflix and Hulu because they can get content "ala carte" and Netfix on demand is better than all of the 'budget' movie channels on cable (think Encore, Starz, or Cinemax) and now they go back to over the air reception (now digital) of the free content. Comcast is disintermediated because they don't bring anything to the party (except, to their pain, fast internet access).

That is the sea change that is going on here. Fat pipe providers as a commodity, and a bunch of different services being content providers on demand.

Having lived through the transition from broadcast-only tv to widespread cable tv, that's not at all how it was sold. Cable was sold on the merits of primarily: better reception (no more antenna!) and many more available channels. The dollars that you spent on "cable" were for those features, primarily. The channels themselves were "free" and carried the advertising they always had. It was kind of like buying internet access, in that most people don't expect that all content accessed via the internet will be ad-free.

The unbundled CBS isn't really akin to paying for cable. You're already paying for your internet access yourself. If anything, CBS online will be like a "premium channel" in cable tv terms. Which, historically, have been generally ad-free. I assume the reason for that is the market figured out that people don't like to both pay for some particular channel and see ads.

While I'm excited that more Big Networks are realizing that offering streaming only packages to consumers is a Good Idea, I'm really worried about how the cable internet companies will retaliate. We've already seen them blame Netflix for its own popularity, what's stopping them from doing this to companies like HBO and CBS that are now willing to offer a package that circumvents TV entirely?

The cable companies can't retaliate against the likes of CBS and HBO, because they risk losing the content for their service. So they pick on Netflix instead...

Well, that's supposing that the big cable companies are rational. They tend to act counter to that in a lot of situations though...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639327 s/Warner Brothers/CBS & HBO/g

I suppose I've got three more major networks I can look forward to reposting this for (ABC NBC Fox), and who knows how many of the cable-only networks will think this is a good idea....

At first I though it was US only, like always, but then I saw there's also Canada in the countries. I fill everything, it's fine, I get to the second step, the activation, it ask again for address, but now, no country and only a state selection.

This probably means CBS will be disabling their existing system for allowing free viewing of their shows, delayed by a day or so. That was a nice service.

CBS - The Police Procedural Network

I am happy to see this happen but broadband quota limits could become a limiting factor as more and more video is consumed this way.

Until they work things out with the NFL it's not worth any money. The rest of the programming is available elsewhere.

Heads up: if you run AdBlock they prevent you from watching anything except the live stream.

Watching CBS over lines owned by Comcast (who owns NBC) will be interesting.

> Watching CBS over lines owned by Comcast (who owns NBC) will be interesting.

People having been watching CBS over lines owned by Comcast most of the nearly half century Comcast has existed, including the period where it has owned NBCUniversal (it has been, after all, a CATV company a lot longer than its been an ISP.)

Actually, Comcast would love to be able to ditch the local networks. They currently have to pay local station owners for distribution rights in the form of retransmission agreements.

This way, CBS will be paying for a commercial CDN because, well, that's what you have to do when you distribute video over the Internet if you want decent performance (and there are lots of business and technical reasons for this). Most commercial CDNs have had interconnect agreements with all the large ISPs for over a decade.

And now Comcast will be carrying that content with no extra charge. Maybe that will just work out that Comcast lets them send full video, but I suspect there will be nflx-like carriage arrangements by the time it's done.

...seriously awesome news.

Isn't the Internet great! Instead of paying cable for one bundle of channels, we are now paying a monthly fee for each one.

I know you are being sarcastic, but as an existing cord-cutter who hasn't paid for TV in over 2 years, I much prefer this way.

I won't sign up for the CBS service, but I would totally pay a monthly fee for Comedy Central and Fox Sports Detroit, as those are the only things I really miss from back when I had cable.

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