Now we’re confused. Dish Network has come out with something it calls DishOnline and we’ve been trying to piece it together. It took a while but now we think we’ve got it right.
It’s three things from one web page, maybe more if you count setting your DVR remotely. The first is that you can watch some programming online. The service gives you options to rent a program or movie online and when you get to the next menu, gives you the price, usually between $3 and $4 or let’s you watch it for free online.
When there is an option to watch it for free, the programming is delivered from Hulu, not from its own servers. We assume this is so Dish cannot get its content blocked by rival pay TV providers who also offer broadband such as AT&T and Comcast.
If the program is rented it doesn’t simply play, but instead begins downloading it to your Dish DVR at home. And finally, if that DVR happens to be a ViP 922 SlingLoaded DVR or is attached to the upcoming Sling Adapter or any prior Sling Box, you can begin watching the film where you are, but it is streamed over the internet from your home DVR ‘ which means that should not be blocked, because it might just be sending your video snaps to your granny. It would need both deep packet inspection and fingerprinting services to see that it’s a copyrighted piece of video, and those are not currently in use at the major ISPs.
So DishOnline is a superset of what it was trying to call TV Everywhere, but which it now refers to as TV everywhere (small ‘e’). TV Everywhere in cable parlance is the same content from the web for free as that delivered in your TV subscription. For Dish it is actually your Home pay TV service placeshifted to where the broadband line you are using, wherever it is.
The claim is that this is the only online video portal which integrates live and recorded TV with more than 150,000 popular movies, TV shows, clips and trailers into one easy-to-use interface. Except that you can get much of that at TiVo and probably at Roku, Sezmi, Boxee and Amazon Unboxed video ‘ oh yes and Netflix. And then there’s Xfinity from Comcast etc’ So actually it’s just one of the online portals that offers lots of content. Except it’s not an online portal. It’s really an online interface for carrying out three separate jobs ‘ watching online, saving to your DVR and watching from your DVR.
But it does have a point in that it quite neatly skirts any future issues with
Net Neutrality whether or not it becomes law, and it does make use of its SlingLoaded DVR and showcases it, so that Sling Media might sell more of the things to other pay TV providers.
We spoke briefly last week to Sling Media and it would not tell us how many devices it had shipped but confirmed to us that it was lower than 1 million. The service was first shown to the world in January 2005, which it shipped in July of that year. So here is the type of progression that might lead to.
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
50,000 90,000 140,000 190,000 240,000 290,000
Which comes neatly to 1 million
When you look at the shipments they don’t do anything to dent the 14 million or so subscribers that Dish Networks, its sister company, has in pay TV subscribers. We reckon that half of these shipments have retailed outside the US, because Sling was very early to go international, and that no more than 25% of those shipped in the US went to Dish customers. That might mean 125,000 in total, and perhaps a run rate of 25,000 a year going forwards. That’s not a great return on the Dish and Echostar investment of $380 million that it paid for Sling Media.
A better return will be if Sling can either gain Dish many more new customers, or slow churn down among its existing customer base. So the very brave decision has been that the major new ViP 922 SlingLoaded DVR, comes ready made with the software. That will make it tough for Dish to be able to judge the effectiveness of the acquisition, since right now it will be the customer which drives up sales of the devices. It could have taken a license for a lot less and made a box itself.
Recently Sling has agreed a deal with Widevine and will use the same DRM technology that a number of the genuine TV Everywhere portals are using, including Comcast and Time Warner et al. This is purely to get the blessing of Hollywood of using a DRM that has been through its testing procedures. Initially Sling Media launched with its own encryption, but that was when it was positioned as an outsider ‘ offering placeshifting in spite of pay TV companies like Dish, not for them.
It will also serve to satisfy rival pay TV operators, Sling thinks, and that in turn may release more orders for Sling. Somehow we doubt it. The pay TV market in the US is fast, furious and intensely competitive. The Sling devices may never sell there until its is owned by a company independent of Echostar, and perhaps it is better using the ViP 922 to showcase its capabilities and then sell it off to someone like NDS. On the other hand, international operator sales might materialize, if not within the US.
Right now Sling, if sold off, would never fetch the amount of money that Dish paid for it, and it is damned if Sling is successful and damned if it’s not. If the ViP922 gives Dish success in differentiating its offering, then rivals could buy it (or worse still copy it), taking away that differentiation. If it doesn’t work, that’s a lot of investment for nothing.
As for the DishOnline portal, it does seem to work quite well. The search engine is instantaneous and accurate focusing on actors, titles, genres and directors, the streaming is well set up, and it geotags (blocks non-US residents) without being dumb about it and opens the door to complain or appeal against it. It also gives paid access for free for certain customers, all dictated by the customer number they key in at log in. All round it’s a good implementation, but that doesn’t mean that its customers will upgrade to the new box just for this. They may use the site without the ViP device.
Oh the site does something else, it allows just about anybody to watch some videos, but it turns out that where it does this, it is just a direct link through to Hulu.