Unboxing broadband, part 4: Now TV is back in the box

Even though we’ve culled Now TV from the herd of under-TV boxes, I’m still feeling hopeful for quality TV viewing. blog.mindrocketnow.com

We’ve put away the Now TV box. It is no longer a companion in our evenings. We realised that for the last few weeks, we hadn’t used it, preferring the Amazon Fire TV box instead. Why? - No Game of Thrones until April.

It’s not that there’s nothing else to watch on Now TV, just that most things that we want to watch are also on Amazon Fire TV, and the Now TV exclusive content isn’t something that’s better than the Amazon Fire TV exclusive content. Analysing this thought process, it turns out that we classify our content into four tiers:

• Exclusive content that is reason enough to subscribe to a service
• Exclusive content that can be easily replaced with exclusive content from another service
• Content that we own (bought or recorded)
• Programmes that happen to be on when we switch the TV on

If we re-order this list in the order of what we watch the most, it’s:

1. Exclusive content that is reason enough to subscribe to an IPTV service
2. Programmes that happen to be on when we switch the TV on - generally Freeview
3. Exclusive content that can be easily replaced with exclusive content from another service - terrestrial or IPTV
4. Content that we own (bought or recorded) - PVR or blu-rays

Original content was the way cable grew up, taking eyeballs and awards from the network channels to the likes of HBO and AMC. It’s therefore natural that IPTV services would try the same trick to take viewers from cable to Netflix and Now TV. However, the proliferation of services mean that there’s a fragmentation of exclusive content. No one service has everything, and the number of services you have to subscribe to in order to get to is getting quite high. Let’s assume we’re just interested in TV in HD, not interested in owning anything, and only UK-legal stuff (no dodgy VPN to see Hulu). To be able to watch everything we’d need to subscribe to:

• Netflix (£72 p.a.)
• Now TV (£84 p.a.)
• Amazon Prime (£79 p.a.)
• Total = £235

We’d still be missing out on exclusive content on non-subscription services where you pay by the box set, e.g. Playstation Plus, BlinkBox, Wuakai TV...

In this fragmented world, it costs a lot to be exhaustive. What’s more, the low cost of cancelling a service (contracts only last a month) encourages the diametric opposite behaviour, to be selective and only buy what you want at the time that you want it. Services are having to grapple with the new problem of how to embrace churn into their product design.

So from the programmer’s perspective, exclusivity of content is becoming a difficult attribute to master. Get the right “event TV", and people will find the monthly fee a small price to pay. Get less compelling content and people will take advantage of the low cost to change, and move on to the next service. Get content that isn’t compelling to investors, and the whole studio will go out of business, as was the case with Microsoft Studios for Xbox originals.

Knowing how hard it is, why is it that everybody seems to be producing original content? Netflix has made Marvel Daredevil (really want to watch that), and even Sony is making Powers for Playstation Plus.

The answer lies in the long tail. Not every TV show needs to be as popular as the Internet-breaking Game of Thrones, because IPTV providers do not need to offer the same thing to everyone. The beauty of being able to have a one-to-one relationship with your audience is that as long as you provide each individual their compelling content, they will use your service.

The trick then is to make a programme that fulfils enough of these one-to-one relationships to carry the service. To do this, the programmer needs to understand their audience. Netflix famously did so by applying analytics, figuring out that their target audience liked Kevin Spacey and David Fincher, so paired them to create the House of Cards. Amazon is currently gauging audience reaction to a number of pilots; rather than TV executives deciding their fate, audience numbers (and analytics on what they also watch) will decide in which pilot to invest further.

It feels like the nature of TV away from the networks is changing: from the biggest shows, to the most high quality shows; from only populist shows to quality shows; from a few good shows, to many good shows. We might just be in a golden age of television.

Digital Identity and Privacy

The timeframe between a privacy mistake and its impact is getting shorter, as access to information becomes more immediate. However, the duration of privacy mistakes are lasting longer, since the Internet archives everything. We are also more comfortable with trading privacy for convenience. These three trends means that we must become much more aware of the impact of our digital lives on our privacy, and our privacy on our future digital lives.

Social networks is a primary example of this tension. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2010 said that: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people."

The power of the network derives from the number of connections and the amount we share; the greater each dimension, the greater the value we derive from it. However, Zuckerberg is conflating the need to communicate, which is fundamental to our psyche, with our need for privacy, which is also fundamental to our digital well-being.

Privacy means different things at different ages. Teens, with no credit card or history to protect, are less concerned with credit card fraud. They are more concerned with their ability to control their own social situation and their position within it - e.g. railing against parents insisting on being friends on Facebook. However, when a cursory search of their Facebook history will reveal their date of birth, Mother’s maiden name, first school - all data points used by financial institutions to supplement your password - there’s a potential future breach being prepared.

Context is therefore important; we communicate in Real Life differently with a bank than our pub friends, so the same true of our online communications. However, context is one of the key difficulties of our online lives - though our RL context changes as time passes, everything we’ve ever shared online can be found in the future. This is unnatural to us, and so we don’t deal with it particularly well. 

We may use different services to distinguish between circles of recipients and keep them separate; potential employers on LinkedIn won’t see my embarrassing photos on Facebook. Studies have found that teens use many more services to finer define circles of friends. Encryption is seldom used; they prefer obfuscation through use of slang, and even steganography (hiding messages within unencrypted messages). But unless the account is deleted immediately afterwards, the communication remains searchable for ever more.

I think the solution is to take complete control of our own Privacy (settings) as its own entity. Every time I post to Facebook, Facebook should communicate with my Avatar to check my most up-do-date privacy settings applicable for that post. My Avatar should be hosted by me, perhaps in an app on my mobile phone, and should only be alterable by me. I should decide if changes should affect historical posts as well as future ones. And it should remain within my gift to change my mind as often as I wish.

Facebook should be encouraging me to post and retain posts, by reminding me of the benefits. If targeted advertising is of benefit, I will choose to continue to receive them. Facebook should be free to make money from its platform, but not from me. A fine, but important distinction.

-----------

An aside: In this post, I’m considering that each of our privacy should be respected - the “happy” scenario. The “unhappy” scenario is when privacy should not be respected for the good of society. Recently, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has received criticism for seeming to ask for a “back door” for security services to review even encrypted communications. According to The Guardian “The changes [to the counter-terrorism bill] would give the Home Secretary new powers to require telecommunications operators to retain data and disclose it to relevant public authorities, so that they can read, copy and analyse it."

There is the immediate difficulty that implementing such a back door in the encryption techniques commonly used in the Internet are impossible, as they are open source, and therefore no single entity can mandate changes. Setting that aside, weakening security for the security services, will inevitably put the tools in nefarious hands, and therefore weaken privacy for all of us, and therefore harm our digital well-being.

The digital family Christmas.

Will it ever be exciting to unwrap digital files from the virtual stocking? blog.mindrocketnow.com

Happy New Year! My inbox is finally tamed, so it’s time to write my first post of the year.  Did everyone have a nice Christmas? It occurs to me that the exchange of presents is the last bastion of the physical over the digital, after all, it’s hard to wrap an e-book. Even though my family has moved away from physical entertainment over the last five years, Christmas day is still dominated by coloured plastic, packaging and a large volume of stuff. We unwrap, play a little, show off a little, and share amongst ourselves. Until recently, those last two are behaviours weren’t possible in the digital world.

Digital media and content protection go hand in hand. Content protection has always relied upon understanding the identity of the consumer in order to grant usage rights. An illustration: I need to enter my Sky ID every time I log into the Now TV app – thankfully it’s pre-populated after the first attempt, otherwise this would be too much of an ordeal to do more than once.

After your identity is established, the second function of content protection kicks in: nobody else is allowed to exercise your usage rights. Another illustration: if you try to read a kindle book that someone else has bought, then it just won’t work. It’s this behaviour of content protection that prevents the sharing round the Christmas tree.

There are a couple of recent notable exceptions that have started to change this inflexibility. I recently set up the concept of a household in Amazon. I get to nominate people and they share some of the benefits that I pay extra for: free shipping with Amazon Prime, and sharing e-books. E-books can be allocated to a household library, and I can assign who can see the various books in that library. For example, the children can only see the age-appropriate books that we’ve bought, and won’t by accident come across DW’s Val McDermid collection.

Previously, to enable exactly this filtering, I bought all the children’s books, and DW bought all the grown-up books. The children’s kindles were then on my account, and my kindle was on DW’s account. Now, we retain our own digital identities, but can share our digital media. The additional benefit this brings is additional functionality based upon identity.

The children’s kindles have a reading club app set up on it. The kindle monitors how many pages are read each day, and tricky words are automatically defined in line with the text. As the designated parent, I receive a report on how much (how many pages) and how well (which words looked up) each child is reading. This is solely on DD’s kindle because it is associated with her sub-account.

I think there are a few interesting innovations illustrated by Amazon’s implementation of the household account. In no particular order:

·      It addresses the major irritation that two people could be in the same address (household), and yet would have to pay twice for exactly the same service – next day delivery to the same address.

·      Books can at last be shared in the household. Books are different from video and music in that people do not crowd around the same kindle in order to read the same book. It’s much easier to watch TV or listen to music with someone else.

·      To share e-books, it is now possible to share the usage rights for the e-books as a digital entity in its own right, with its own usage rules. The usage rule for my e-book reading rights is that I can share my bought e-books only with people already declared to be in my household.

·      Each person still needs a digital avatar, something to which the usage rights can be bound. For Amazon books, this is the kindle itself.

Much of a digital family’s life depends upon sharing. I would like a better way of sharing calendars, and location. In the future, I can see that I will want to share biometric information; I would want to know if my DDs are ill how serious it actually is, and I’d want DW to know if that last cycle to the top of Box Hill requires an ambulance for my return. However, this most intimate information must be secure, as it will form a much more detailed description of identity than previously possible.

There is a rich seam of ideas here – how concepts of digital identity have changed, and the consequence of more extensive digital identities. This year, many of my blog entries are going to focus in this theme. I hope you’ll enjoy them, and share your ideas too.

My final thought takes me back to Christmas. To answer my own question at the top: I don’t think checking email on Christmas Day to see which media files have been received is ever going to replace the excitement of unwrapping the large boxes left under the tree. And Santa is not likely to leave an e-orange in my stocking.

Ho, ho, ho!