This Just In
By Staff -- Multichannel News, 10/21/2007 8:00:00 PM
Items:
Comcast Plans to Launch 'Start Over’-Style Service
Murdoch: Pulling CNBC Ads Looked a Bit 'Heavy Handed’
In Demand Adds HD To NBA, NHL PPV Suites
'Daily Show’ Puts 13,000 Clips Online
Clearing the Air
Comcast Plans to Launch 'Start Over’-Style Service
New York — Comcast is working up its own version of Time Warner Cable’s “Start Over,” which lets viewers play back certain TV programs if they’ve missed the beginning of a show without the need for a digital video recorder.
“Start Over is a great service,” Comcast senior vice president of strategic planning Mark Coblitz said at an event this week in New York hosted by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. “We’re going to do it, too, because we’ve seen how popular it is.”
Asked when Comcast will offer the replay service, Coblitz said “probably next year.”
Comcast spokesman Chris Ellis said the operator hasn’t made any announcements about when or where the service will be launched, or what the service may be called. He also declined to say whether Comcast’s version of Start Over will be free but noted that 95% of its video-on-demand content is available for no additional charge.
Start Over, as offered by Time Warner, is a VOD service that provides replays of as many as 22,000 cable and broadcast TV shows per month, available only during the show’s broadcast window. Time Warner has agreements with more than 100 networks for the service.
Time Warner’s Start Over lets viewers launch replays for only a limited time after they’ve aired: up to two and half times the original program’s length. Start Over does not permit viewers to fast-forward — ensuring that commercials can’t be skipped, as with conventional DVRs. The operator provides the service to digital-cable subscribers in those markets for no additional charge.
Comcast’s Coblitz was discussing Start Over as an example of a service that would hypothetically be unavailable to users of devices using DCR-Plus (“digital cable ready plus”), a plan proposed by the Consumer Electronics Association to standardize access to interactive cable services. The NCTA opposes DCR-Plus, claiming it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and recommends the Federal Communications Commission adopt the CableLabs-developed OpenCable Platform middleware instead.
Murdoch: Pulling CNBC Ads Looked a Bit 'Heavy Handed’
New York — News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch said the controversy surrounding advertisements from CNBC that were pulled from The Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch Web sites during the launch of News’s rival Fox Business Network was done without his knowledge, but added that the decision to pull the ads could be perceived as being heavy handed.
Fox Business Network launched on Oct. 15 in about 30 million households. A New York Times report last week pointed out that ads that rival CNBC had contracted to run on the Web sites — owned by Dow Jones, which News Corp. agreed to purchase for $5 billion — were pulled that day. According to the Times, CNBC had paid about $87,000 for the ads, but Dow Jones officials said they exercised their right to alter the timing of the advertising.
Speaking to reporters after News Corp.’s annual meeting here Friday, Murdoch said that he was unaware that the CNBC ads were pulled. “It certainly wasn’t on instructions from News Corp. or even on request,” Murdoch said.
But Murdoch added that it would be well within News Corp.’s rights to reject ads from competitors.
“Fox doesn’t carry ads for programs on CBS or ABC or whatever,” he said. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable. In that particular case, it did seem a little heavy handed.”
Murdoch said that although he has had little time to watch the Fox Business Network in the past four days, what he has seen he likes.
“I thought it was very impressive to date. They’ll get better as they go along, but it’s had some already outstanding programs,” Murdoch said.
The network’s weekday schedule begins at 5 a.m. with the one-hour Fox Business Morning, the three-hour Money For Breakfast; and the seven-hour Fox Business. The afternoon part of that block, starting Oct. 22, will be co-hosted by Liz Claman, the former CNBC Morning Call host who joined the network Oct. 18 with an exclusive one-hour interview with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet.
Although FBN won’t be rated until sometime next year, the fledgling network evidently took some audience from CNBC during its first three days last week.
According to Nielsen Media Research data, CNBC viewership on a total-day basis declined 12% from 245,000 over the span of Oct. 8 to 10 to 215,000 from Oct. 15 to 17. In primetime, CNBC saw average viewership decline 19% from 252,000 from Oct. 8 to 10 to 205,000 over the first three days of last week.
In Demand Adds HD To NBA, NHL PPV Suites
New York — In Demand is offering two new high-definition sports package channels aimed at providing cable operators with more bandwidth options in their battle against satellite providers over enhanced signal products.
The company has bowed GameHD, which will air “NHL Center Ice” out-of-market action, and will soon tip off TeamHD, which will focus on HD games through the “NBA League Pass” pay-per-view package.
The new channels are positioned within the traditional sports-package area of the cable systems’ lineups, according to In Demand vice president of business development Jason Patton.
'Daily Show’ Puts 13,000 Clips Online
New York — MTV Networks’ Comedy Central launched a Web site hosting more than 13,000 video clips from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart — representing major segments from every episode of the program since Stewart joined in 1999.
The beta version of the site, TheDailyShow.com, which went live last Thursday, provides a searchable database of clips (“powered by Google”) and a timeline to locate clips by air date. The site’s “Wayback Randomizer” feature pops up a random clip from the archive.
Separately, Comedy Central signed a two-year contract extension with Stewart that keeps him behind the Daily Show anchor desk through 2010. After being courted by NBC and other networks, Stewart chose to sign a relatively short-term contract extension with Comedy Central.
Stewart also is an executive producer and writer and the principal behind Busboy Productions, which produces another Comedy Central hit, The Daily Show spinoff The Colbert Report.
In August, Comedy Central locked franchise players Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park creators, into a three-year contract extension.
A team of 16 writers and editors worked since June to tag each of the 13,000 Daily Show clips with keywords, according to Comedy Central spokesman Steve Albani. In the future, the Viacom-owned network plans to allow fans to contribute to the process of categorizing video content.
The site also lets members post comments about the clips and to give videos a “thumbs-up” rating (but not a “thumbs down”).
By unleashing thousands of segments from The Daily Show to the Web in a searchable format, Viacom hopes to not only attract hard-core fans to the site but also to provide a better way of finding those clips than video-sharing sites like YouTube, which Viacom claims has been a haven for pirated clips.
Also last week, Google launched a test of the YouTube Video Identification service, which is supposed to be able to identify copyrighted material posted to the video-sharing site (see Technology, page 49).
The show first launched in the summer of 1996 with host Craig Kilborn. Albani said those earlier episodes will eventually be added to TheDailyShow.com, with the number of clips topping 16,000 in the next few months.
— Todd Spangler and Steve Donohue
Clearing the Air
An Oct. 8 profile of Cable Hall of Fame honoree Jim Chiddix (“Setting Sail From Hawaii to Denver,” page 6A) should have reported that Chiddix pursued, not earned, an electrical engineering degree from Cornell University.
The article “Verizon Puts on Game Face” (Oct. 8, page 10) included an image of Screenlife’s Scene It? DVD-based trivia game as an example of the kinds of set-top games Verizon Communications plans to offer FiOS TV subscribers. Currently, however, Verizon does not have an agreement with Screenlife to offer the game.
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