Here Are Two More Stats To Show That Doom Is Slowly Marching On Cable TV
The new gadget will be Google's latest in about a half dozen attempts.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the industry - including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Samsung - is also attacking the living room with TV boxes. It's almost weird that Facebook isn't.
And, slowly, but surely, actual users are catching up to the vision tech companies have for them.
Efrati has these two fascinating stats to prove it:
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"At Hulu, almost half of viewing is happening via smart TVs, game consoles and set-top boxes. That's up from 30% in the fourth quarter of last year."
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"MLB Advanced Media, which lets people stream baseball games through the Web, says 8% to 9% of the company's several million subscribers watched its games exclusively on their TVs this year, up from 4% to 5% in 2012. About half of its subscribers watched its games on their TVs at least once this year."
What does increased Web TV viewership on actual TVs mean?
It means that, in the mind of the consumer Netflix, HBOGo, Hulu, and ESPN are all becoming the same thing - an icon you tap on a gadget to get video you pay for, organized by a trusted brand with a recognizable logo.
It might also mean that eventually, people will stop paying for cable packages that give them 300+ channels, and start paying $10/month for the 75 logos they actually want on their TVs/videogadgets.
If that happens, it's going to be ugly for companies like Time Warner and CBS. Those companies have cost structures built on carrier fees they get for niche channels - small in the singular, but large in the aggregate.
They've gotten fat on those revenues - just the way the New York Times once got so fat on classifieds that it became a $30 billion company. (It's now worth a couple billion.)
If those carrier revenues start to seep away, it will benefit Hulu, Netflix, and other companies that are building cable-like services, but have much leaner cost structures.
The big cable channel companies wouldn't go away - HBO will do well in an unbundled world - but they will, over the next decade, slowly get much smaller and then have to grow again.
The cable providers will be fine. They own the pipes.