From The Online Reporter
- Internet & Antenna for Local Stations Lure Consumers
- BTC Broadband, Other Tiny Telcos Offer Entone DVR with OTA/OTT/VoD
Significance: As pay TV companies continue to increase monthly rates (up 6% last year) and as OTT services offer more and more content, even some originally produced and exclusive content, OTT as a supplement or even a replacement for pay TV is becoming more attractive. What has been missing for most, however, are a DVR, electronic program guide (EPG) for live TV and a method for receiving and recording the major national TV networks — ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.
Consumers can buy an OTA/OTT DVR from either Channel Master or TiVo. However, they are then depending on their own guile to connect it and get it running — or hire a technician to come to the home. The telcos that deploy Entone’s OTA/OTT service have a better idea: Buy their DVR and get it installed and serviced by them.
Call it virtual pay TV (VPTV)’or broadband TV or hybrid TV or even Internet TV — Entone is leading the way. This week, it announced a deal to supply its FusionTV technology to BTC Broadband in Bixby, Oklahoma, which wants to offer a hybrid TV service that offers the triple play of:
- 1) Live OTA (over-the-air or over-the-antenna) TV broadcasts
- 2) Full-function DVR
- 3) Cloud-based OTT services such as Vudu’s streaming library of over 50,000 titles and 50 other online apps such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and Twitter.
It’s intended to attract:
- Some of the many broadband homes that do not have a pay TV service. Consumers’ attitude these days is that they must have broadband — for the kids’ homework, applying for jobs, shopping, looking up information and the like. Not all of them can afford pay TV, especially in an economic recession where middle class families are seeing their take-home pay flat or declining, or in some cases actually disappearing.
- Pay TV subscribers who, under the same economic pressures, want to cut the cord or reduce what they pay for it monthly.
The Entone box is made by the same company that makes the Channel Master DVR, although we could not get the maker’s name. It, like the Channel Master, uses Vudu’s smart TV platform. Entone’s Vudu platform also does not offer Netflix, possibly because a) Vudu does not have a license to resell the service through telcos, b) Vudu may be considering offering its own monthly subscription service or c) the telcos do not want to offer Netflix because it competes too much with their other offerings.
FusionTV’s OTA/OTT service is made possible by Entone’s 300 and 400 series of hybrid STBs and DVRs, which use Broadcom’s dual-core processor to support advanced video and hybrid TV applications.
Entone’s Market Strategy
In the States, there are 1,500 or so smaller telcos classified as Tier 2 or Tier 3 because they each have less than 100,000 subscribers. They are mostly in rural areas where the big three telcos — AT&T, Verizon and Century Link — don’t compete. Estimates are that these telcos’ footprints cover 25%-30% of all US homes.
However, many of them are facing competition from cablecos, so they’re scrambling to find a pay TV service to bundle in with their phone and broadband services. Entone, which sells its gear and services only through service providers, is an answer to their prayers. Entone also sells IPTV gear to pay TV services, so it has a foot in both the paid and “free”camps.
Entone has announced five wins for its Fusion OTA/OTT service:
- BTC in Oklahoma
- Granby in Missouri
- TCT in Wyoming
- Twin Lakes in Tennessee
- VTCI in Texas
Entone’s PR manager Van T Nguyen-Duong told us the company expects that these are the drips that precede a flood. She said the company expects to announce three more wins in a few months and a dozen or more by year-end. It’s a major financial and strategic decision for these telcos so they take their time making the decision.
The Target Consumer
It’s all about how consumers own and manage their content, Nguyen-Duong said. Entone believes that consumers own their content but that the service providers can help them access manage and acquire it because they have the “pipes.” The service providers are closely connected with their subscribers in the small communities where they operate and can offer other broadband-delivered services such as home security and monitoring, photo sharing and off- and on-site technical service.
Asked whether most consumers know about the abundance of free over-the-air channels they can get, Nguyen-Duong said absolutely not. Entone and its telco partners are trying to educate consumers who still think the much ballyhooed analog-to-digital switchover meant they can no longer get the local channels for free.
Nguyen-Duong said the target markets for its telcos consist mainly of consumers in rural areas and small communities who make $30,000 or so a year and have take-home pay less than $20,000 a year. “How can they afford $60 to $80 a month for pay TV?” she asked, and then said they know they must have broadband, at least for the kids and for shopping. Telcos that sell them their broadband can offer to include OTA and OTT TV for another $10 a month, she said, which also gives them a host of other OTT apps.
That’s not cord-cutting, she said, but appealing to the enormous market for the cordless. Its service can connect millions of the pay TV-less to Internet-delivered TV for the first time. The hybrid service — OTT and OTA — that Entone offers is a win-win for both the consumer and the media companies that are selling content via OTT, she said.
Entone’s FusionTV includes software, equipment and service. Service providers offer it under their own brand name. Entone said its technology and services can increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) and strengthen subscriber satisfaction — and eliminate the service provider’s need to make a major upfront investment for content acquisition and deployment of an IPTV-based live TV service.
Plaudits
BTC Broadband sells broadband with speeds up to 60 Mbps over its all-fiber network. It also sells traditional pay TV with over 130 channels, has a VoD service that offers recently released movies and a mobile phone service.
“Our fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment is a key technological ....
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