Cablecos are raking in billions from their pay-TV and broadband services but satcos and telcos are making in-roads with pay-TV and taking market share away, according to a recent report by Kagan. Satellite TV services, DirecTV and Dish and the telcos pay-TV services emphasize the amount of HD channels they offer.
Cox this week said it’s making a major upgrade of its pay-TV service. It will begin offering Cisco’s new Explorer STBs for a new Cox “Plus Package.” The STBs offer HD, whole home DVR, tru2way and MoCA (coax) networking. Privately-held Cox said it’s the first cableco to “introduce a whole home DVR with tru2way capabilities in multiple markets.”
In a battle to stave off the satcos and telcos’ pay-TV services, Cox said it will offer more HD channels in markets as it upgrades its local plant.
Rollout starts this quarter and Cox expects to have the new services and STBs available throughout its footprint by year-end.
The company said tru2way, which took a long time to get to market, allows HD sets to get interactive guides and VoD plus to-be-deployed applications and services. Viewers can use their remotes to access interactive entertainment and information including games, shopping, music, news, weather, local information, sports, advertising, voting and polling, banking and services that are embedded in some TV shows.
Among the DVR functions are:
That Internet video can be viewed on HD sets and that Videos on the DVR can be streamed (placeshifted) over the Internet to a desktop or portable PC, in and outside the home, so users can watch where, when and what they want to watch. Instead of TV Everywhere it looks Cisco has added placeshifting to its devices. Cox said “content enjoyed within the home can be programmed to be viewed on mobile devices.” The device can come with between 160 to 500 GBs or hard disk space.
Tom Nilson, VP and general manager of Cisco’s North America cable subscriber business, said the Cox deployment proves that “the tru2way standard has become a reality.”
It also proves that the cable TV companies, which held their annual trade fair in LA this week, are pulling out all the stops to keep and perhaps increase their share of the pay-TV market. Despite all the “fear and uncertainty” scares about over-the-top TV, consumers are watching more pay TV than ever. It’s the telcos that face a bigger problem. Can they wire up their networks for pay-TV fast enough to replace the billions in revenue they’re losing in residential phone services? Or do they care about residential phone as long as they’re experiencing a boom in mobile broadband?
It’s going to be an interesting year in the fast-growing and highly-profitable market that encompasses pay-TV, mobile and wireline broadband, home networking and over-the-top (Internet-delivered) TV.