Current Inefficiencies:

As a cable or satellite customers I am only given a small number of choices about what program plans I can choose.  These packages are predefined, pre-priced, and inflexible in their offerings.  After deciding to use a certain company, Comcast in my case, love it or leave it, is the only option I have vs. broadcast thanks to an obstructed southern skyline at the appropriate angle from anywhere in my yard or on my roof.  Comcast offers a small number of packages that each add onto each other until you can subscribe to everything they offer.  I do not have a need for everything they offer but I do have an interest in a specific selection of channels.  My problem, or issue, is that to get the channels that I want I have to subscribe to a mid-range package just below the premium offerings, paying a premium price for content that I don’t use.  Satellite services such as Dish and Directv offer packages as well with no customization outside of the different options in each package.

Streaming Options

An alternative medium for me to cable is online.  I watch the same shows, at the time of my choosing, with basic time-shifting built in, via sites like Hulu or OVGuide.  I find this refreshing in that I can usually find what I am looking for and watch it on my own schedule.  This is great for a missed episode or a recommendation from a friend or absent minded viewing while I work, but not for my primary shows where I want to relax in front of the television and not a computer screen.  Options are starting to come out that stream web content directly to the TV but the technology is still immature and the user interfaces typically focus on specific features but miss the principles of K.I.S.S interface design.  A recent option that is gaining momentum is ZillionTV – they plan and might actually succeed in bring the streaming content of the web to our living rooms – they get it – just like Tivo gets time-shifting for the masses.

À La Carte

If the cable and satellite companies will not give me any options there is someone out there that will.  More often I am willing to find my show a few days after it airs via OVGuide, and ignore any commercials that might get in the way, my irritation to this is that I usually have to watch it on my computer.  Advertisers have to understand the potential lose of revenue this leads to in scale – the cancellation of the Jericho series is a prime example of how time-shifting and online content can scare away funding from advertisers for a show that is loved by its fans.  I however would be more than willing to watch commercials if they were relevant to the programs that I watched or preferences that I specified, or better, that I could train my set-top box to understand – the Tivo style thumbs up / thumbs down applied to commercials could tailor advertising content directly to me – in such cases I would be apt to actually watch them vs. time-shift around them when such an option is available.

Wish List – Listen Up Service Provider

I would like to see the following:

• A basic, simple fee, to support the generic infrastructure of providing service.
• The ability to subscribe to specific channel for a fixed price per channel and a discounting price, or sliding scale as I add channels to my account.  I am uncertain what a single channel should cost but it should scale to reward those customers that subscribe to more channels or specific packages or recommend combinations.  Channel prices could vary as well as there is no reason why premium content should cost the same as broadcast content, but the service provider should be cautious about overpricing – as an example I would be willing to pay fifty cents for each broadcast channel or a standard definition cable channel, one dollar for each high definition cable channel and two dollars for each premium channel such as HBO or Showtime.
• The ability to subscribe to a particular program on a particular channel at a particular time, but not to the channel itself.  This might require an additional service such as having DVR access added to the account, as an additional fee, so that should you use a provider supplied or personal DVR, the show is made available to your signal at the specified time, or after normal broadcasting time potentially for a discount, for viewing either in real time or via a DVR.
• The ability to have commercials tailored to my preferences.  Taking this option a step further training of commercial would be ideal.  In practice of defining preferences I should have the ability to opt out of certain categories of commercials that are not applicable to my purchasing needs, desires, or habits.  Applicable to a training technique I would like the ability to start fresh and tell the service what I like and dislike.  To do this would require that I actually watch commercials, which I am okay with, but after a period of time I would expect the advertising content to begin to tailor to my liking and applied bias.  Once advertisers understand that viewers don’t mind watching most commercials and would likely be happy to do so should the content be somewhat personally tailored, all involved parties would win – I might even be more opt to use the Tivo “Press thumbs up now to learn more…” feature.

Infrastructure

Asking for a upgrade in service from the service providers is easy but what would such an infrastructure upgrade entail.  In most cases the connectivity to the market from the provider is already established.  There would be the need for innovation on the side of the provider to add the above functionality to their content management and distribution systems.  The technology seems to be close to some of the ideas already in that Comcast at least offers a significant amount of content on demand and I see much of the services I mentioned as an extension from that base with an added layer of management that understands more about my personalized preferences vs. a presentation layer to the masses.

In addition to the content providers’ themselves there would be a new market waiting to be tapped by set-top box manufacturers to add in the new features and take advantage of a new way of providing the same content to the same defined market in a new way.  Advertisers would need to rethink how they market.  They could take a given product and market it to defined groups of like minded viewers in different ways tailoring the presentation where it made sense.  They would need to understand that some viewers are not appropriate audiences for certain products and they would have to respect our preferences to get us to agree to and honor a potential new partnership where time-shifting became a technique of the past.

Outside of the proposed benefits to Advertisers I was curious to see what my new cable bill would be assuming that the at a minimum the discreet channel subscription was made available.  With a basic fee of $10.00, 6 standard definition channels at $0.50 each, 19 high definition channels at $1.00 each, and 5 premium channels at $2.00 each, my monthly bill would be (10+3+19+10) or $42.00 – Normally my bill for my cable package is $74.00 monthly with about three-fourths of the content not wanted and not viewed.  This approach would continue, I am assuming, to pay the providers bill, and it would make me a happy, satisfied customers knowing that I am paying for precisely what I asked for and nothing more – wrap the service with a convenient, easy to use, subscription management system accessible via the web or the set-top box and bill me monthly for the either the high water mark of channels I subscribed to for the month or offer me a range where I can pay a set price for a specific number of channels but limit my options to change them to a few times a month to minimize abuse.

I certainly won’t hold my breath but I would love to see the cable and satellite content providers implement even one of the above ideas.  If I had my choice the discreet channel subscription would be a great start and likely the easiest to implement in scale.

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