March Madness: streaming video is a future money-mad telecoms don't get
You can watch the NCAA championship online, but content providers and government still won't let you watch what you want
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Slowly, the entertainment industry is adapting to a real world where customers come first. When it comes to video, however, some of the most important customers still tend to be powerful intermediaries, not the people who do the watching.
Incumbent companies still wield unreasonable power against new competition for our eyeballs. So we viewers still have to jump through – dare I say it during the month of March? – hoops to get what we want, when and where we want it, if we can get it at all.
Speaking of March, the NCAA and its TV partners are actually among the smarter purveyors of video entertainment. After such a positive experience last year, when March Madness streaming became a serious alternative to gathering around television sets, there are quite a few ways – albeit cumbersome – to watch the college basketball tournament on any number of different screens. While I don't care in the slightest about this sport (more on that later), people who do care are leveraging their existing cable and satellite TV subscriptions, and cord cutters are able to pay the broadcasters directly to watch video streams.
Meanwhile, as panting fans of HBO's Game of Thrones await next month's start of season four, I'm just starting to watch season three. I'm too cheap to pay my TV provider an extra $20 a month just to watch a couple of programs I can watch later by renting the DVDs. I would gladly pay HBO a few dollars a month, or a one-time charge for specific shows, if it let me stream programming directly to my various screens. But because HBO's business model relies on collecting money via the cable and satellite companies, that's a nonstarter.
HBO can't even make its own HBO Go streaming service work right. (You have to be an existing HBO cable subscriber.) It bungled the season-ending episode of True Detective earlier this month, blaming the outage on "excessive interest" in the show.
Oh, sure, that's the ticket: blame the customers.
I'm on the verge of joining the cord-cutters – people who've dropped or never bought traditional pay-TV packages. But this increasingly large audience is simply out of luck when it comes to HBO's admittedly excellent original programming, unless they have the patience to wait. This helps explain why HBO shows are so popular on file-sharing systems: Game of Thrones was the most pirated show last year – again. I don't recommend illegal downloading, but I can absolutely understand why people do it. I can also understand why HBO sticks with a business model that piggybacks on the cable/satellite providers' still-powerful grip on the viewing public.
What amazes me is that I was saying things like this more than a decade ago, when I first started watching TV shows on my computer. Every fall I'd spend five or six weeks at the University of Hong Kong. I'd set my video recorder to capture episodes of my then-favorite show. Being less patient in those days, I'd also download them. The TV networks from which I was allegedly "stealing" – even though I'd paid for it via my cable or satellite provider – couldn't be bothered to let me buy it again, which I would have done for the shows I liked the most.
This wouldn't have been an issue had a service like Aereo existed back then. In the cities it serves, Aereo uses tiny antennas to collect over-the-air network programming on behalf of customers who can then get the video streamed to their devices. The networks loathe this innovation, which interferes with their collection of money from – you guessed it – the cable and satellite companies, and have sued to stop it. Sadly, as the case heads to the Supreme Court next month, the Obama administration – which rarely misses a chance to suck up to the Copyright Cartel and its allies – has sided with the networks.
The common theme in all of these cases, of course, is money. Big-time entertainment is a huge generator of revenue for the people who control it. They want our eyeballs, but only as a way to collect our money – often indirectly, through the orifices called telecommunications companies. Someday, the cartels will be broken up, if we have common sense as a society. I doubt it'll be soon, though.
One cartel that especially needs dismantling is the NCAA. I mentioned earlier that I'm not a fan of the NCAA basketball tournament, and the reason I'm ignoring it is my disgust with the hypocritical system of big-time college sports, which has become a major part of the entertainment industry itself. Billions of dollars are changing hands each year, much of it coming from the entertainment industry broadcasters that pour wealth into the NCAA and its universities. But the performers – the "student-athletes" – aren't getting anything close to what they deserve from the arrangement. They don't get zero; scholarships are worth something, after all. But the big-university players are professionals who earn billions for coaches, TV networks and universities, getting only the tiniest share in return. They are being grossly exploited by a system that is capricious if not outright corrupt. (For chapter and verse, check out some of New York Times columnist Joe Nocera's lacerating descriptions of NCAA abuses.)
I'm a fan of this, however: a class-action lawsuit filed this week by college players who want to break up the NCAA. I hope the trial is broadcast on TV – or better yet, streamed. That's one show I'd watch, for sure.
