Here’s an almost-interesting piece about the future of how you watch sports. You work through the need for cable for your sports fix, baseball’s success with streaming, how other leagues follow what MLB does and the need for cable. Cable is always important:
ESPN might be the pied piper for a different kind of strategy, though. Rather than cutting cable and paying only for what you want (the “a la carte” model), you’d pay one price and get everything, everywhere. Yes, you need cable to get WatchESPN, but once you’ve logged in you’re effectively untethered from your TV. Your cable bill buys you access to all the things you want to watch, wherever you want to watch them, on whatever device you choose. And because it’s the company setting the restrictions for the leagues, ESPN’s platform doesn’t have weird local blackouts, or odd weekend restrictions — you just watch ESPN as you always have.
The Verge is also running a War for your TV series. Stock Gumshoe is using Television 2.0 and the new golden age, and really the The $2.2 trillion war for your living room. There are also the game consoles and emerging gadgets.
And it all sort of leads to this piece, which is worth reading in full and defies excerpting, really. But:
Because the percentage of households with a cable or satellite subscription is now declining for the first time in the history of television.
3 million Americans have already cut the cord, including 425,000 in the past 3 months alone.
And according to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, those “cord-cutters” are joined by a new group: the “cord-nevers.” A full 83.1% of new households are choosing to live without pay-TV.
[…]
Robert Johnson said about the shaky state of the cable industry last month at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“In the next two or three years, something’s got to give. At some point, the consumer is going to say enough is enough.”
He’s one of the most powerful men in the pay-TV business, warning his fellow fat cats that their bloated, inefficient industry may collapse by 2014…
TV isn’t just the next great transformation of the Internet Age… it’s the BIGGEST one of all.
Since no one likes their cable service, let us say bring it on.
And, of course, it will change things for us in the classroom. Not everything, but quite a bit.
Newspaper critiques. Budget meetings. Award nominations. Well that’s different for a Wednesday. We submit news clippings from the Crimson to a couple of different contests every year.
The deadline for one of those contests is coming up. We’ve gotten about two dozen awards from this organization in the last three years, so we sat around late into the evening finding the best examples today. Next week I’ll have to send them to the judges.
OK, we sat around for part of the afternoon. The rest of it I think I just rambled on for a while, too. It happens.
If I ever ran for office I might be a micromanager. I visit rest stops in my travels — I have to take breaks to stretch my shoulder and back — and the photography is … dated. Not the best image to share with people visiting our fine state. It is probably 14 pages down on the list of priorities, but still, this could be easily fixed.
The one nearest our home has photographs of the football stadium without upper decks. That’s a 32 year old photograph, at least.
Here’s a photo from a rest area in almost the perfect center of the state. It is encouraging you to visit Orange Beach, a lovely place to be most any day, but on this day in 1981 … well, downright magical:
People see that picture and think “Now there’s a group of somebodies. What a great life.” But they don’t realize they haven’t talked in a lifetime.
She’s a new grandmother. He’s now a guy who is coming to question all these years in sales, but he’s been pretty good at it. They gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. They sent cards to each other on all the big days for the first few years after, she always loved the memories of that trip to the coast, he’s silently been kicking himself for drinking too much and remembering too little … but they somehow lost track in that way people do.
Sad, really. She stopped at that rest stop one day, her kids had to go potty. She walked right by that photo.
“I need to go to the beach,” she thought. But she didn’t make the connection.
Or they could be happily married. The new grandkid could be theirs. He might have been a terrible salesman, but really found his stride in retail.
We’ll never know what became of them. But that photograph might live on forever.
Visit me on Twitter. And a new picture on the Tumblr today, too.
