Comcast's Offer for Time Warner Cable

A few quick notes about the proposed transaction:

• Comcast's offer of $159 per TWC share is very close to TWC CEO Rob Marcus's proposal to sell the company to Charter for $160.
• Comcast's offer has no break-up fee for either side, Comcast can abandon the deal at any time and Time Warner Cable, presumably, can entertain a better offer from Charter or someone else
• Comcast has also offered to divest 3 million TWC subscribers, presumably to address concerns that the merged company would be too big; the "cats & dogs" of TWC's former national division would be likely divestiture candidates, unless some of them are contiguous to existing Comcast systems.
• Comcast has made bold offers before and walked away when investor support for the deal was not there (its 2008 offer for Walt Disney)
• Because Comcast and Time Warner Cable have few systems which compete directly with each other, there would be little direct impact on consumers -- their number of choices of providers would not be reduced. Consumer Reports looks at it this way. Comparing the impact on competition to the stillborn AT&T T-Mobile deal is off-base.
• The deal is good news for the channels of NBC Universal, which now are more likely to gain carriage on Time Warner Cable's systems. NBCSN and Golf Channel, which are carried on digital in Time Warner Cable's New York City system (link is to .pdf), will likely end up with parity (expanded basic) carriage with ESPN.
• The vendors that sell to the companies (non-NBCU programmers, hardware companies, billing systems providers) who will now be dealing with a larger customer and fewer attractive alternatives if they say "no" are the biggest losers if the deal goes through.
• Charter is likely a loser if the deal closes. If it sees increasing its scale a business imperative, the biggest available target will be off the market. Cox and Cablevision are the next biggest available companies and they have rebuffed multiple offers to sell. The cable companies smaller than them (e.g., Mediacom) are much smaller with fewer than 2 million subscribers. Charter would have to buy nearly all of them to increase its scale as much as a Time Warner Cable deal would have.
• Another loser might be Apple. TWC appeared to be creating an app for the Apple TV box; Comcast hasn't been, seeing its X1 guide as preferable.
• Closing price of CMCSA on 13 Feb 2014 (the date the deal was announced) = $52.97. TWC = $144.81. CMCSA x 2.875 (stock exchange ratio) = $152.29. Implies some uncertainty about the deal closing.
• Cablevision will still be the largest cable operator in the New York DMA by subscribers, but the combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable will be a major player in New York and the dominant provider in virtually all of the other top 25 DMAs (exceptions: Cox-Phoenix #12, Charter-St. Louis #21, see Rich Greenfield's chart @ https://twitter.com/RichBTIG/status/433960562309861376/photo/1
• Slate's take on the deal negotiation -- it's not very different from any other time you call the cable company

Update (14 Feb 2014): Mark DeCambre on the website Quartz quotes a Gekko-like Goldman Sachs research note praising the deal for giving pricing power to the new company with the charming pull quote "M&A that drives an industry toward oligopoly is the good kind."
Update (16 Feb 2014): Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times. Barons of Broadband. Pull quote: "The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband."
Update (18 Feb 2014): Another likely loser with this deal is Netflix. TWC was in talks to carry/sell Netflix to its video customers, something Comcast has rejected. Now, per Bloomberg, "the talks are on hold".
Update (19 Feb 2014): As my former colleague Howard Homonoff astutely notes, Google Fiber's announcement that it will enter additional markets is very good news for Comcast in securing government approval for the deal.
Update (19 Feb 2014): Another loser in this deal may be CBS which would see the TWC systems move from the recently-and-contentiously-negotiated deal to an older, more distributor-favorable Comcast deal, according to this LA Times article. It is standard in cable affiliation agreements for the acquirer to have the right to add one or all "after-acquired systems" to its affiliation agreements and delete the systems from their prior agreement. In fact, Comcast would likely do this for all its agreements that are more favorable than TWC's (and should TWC have any more favorable deals than Comcast, Comcast might be able to move its incumbent systems to those newly-acquired deals).
Update (20 Feb 2014): Bill Niemeyer of The Diffusion Group believes that John Malone may not have really wanted Time Warner Cable for Charter because the Comcast/TWC merger noise creates an opportunity for Charter to act under the radar. Maybe, Dr. Malone does prefer to be out of sight of the regulators, but I find it hard to think that anything Dr. Malone does will go unnoticed.
Update (20 Feb 2014): DirecTV's CEO thinks the deal should get "appropriately scrutinized". In the past, DirecTV has criticized Comcast's dealmaking for its regional sports networks.

Aereo Get Its Betamax Moment

If word of this has not found you already, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear the major broadcasters' case versus Aereo, the streaming video provider. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Aereo case is how quickly it has made it to the Supremes.

Not these Supremes

Less than two months ago, at a dinner filled with media folk, I had shared that I thought Aereo was the most interesting media business development to expect in the next 12 months. Later that evening, an experienced FCC lawyer told me that the Aereo case would never be resolved in the next year. I figured he knew better than I and filed the thought away.

I wish that I could claim that I had great insight into Aereo's legal battles, but it appears that the reason my lucky pronouncement proved accurate was an unusual decision made by Aereo.

Typically in such cases with new technologies winding their ways through the court system, the defendant, provided is allowed to offer the service, wants the case to make it to the Supreme Court as late as possible. The theory is that once there are lots of users of the product, shutting down the new service becomes a political issue. (Do you want to take away someone's Betamax?)

Sony's Betamax, the Aereo of its day, as noted by the Los Angeles Times

Since Aereo is launching in many new markets, it would certainly have more customers a year or two from now. However, the wild card in the Aereo case is that there is another company offering what appears to be a similar service, FilmOnX, which has faced similar legal actions by the major broadcasters. FilmOnX has been much less successful making its cases than Aereo has. FilmOnX has lost in court in California (when it operated under the name "Aereokiller" - clever) and lost in court in Washington, DC.

United States Supreme Court, as rendered in architecture

It is not clear to me if FilmOnX uses the same technology as Aereo. Film On X is run by erratic billionaire Alki David. The background of the Aereo CEO, Chet Kanojia, is straight up tech startup guy (link is to a .pdf). The idea that an erratic billionaire built an equivalent system seems dubious to me, but maybe it is less complicated than I imagine (although that would be consistent with Aereo's claim that it can breakeven in a market with only about 6,000 subscribers).

It appears that Aereo faced the following choice:

Allow time to pass. Sign up more subscribers. Possibly win at lower courts. Certainly take the risk that Film On X will be involved in other cases that may hurt Aereo's ultimate position, an argument well articulated by my former colleague Howard Homonoff.

OR

Save the time and legal fees and try the case now. 

One business factor that may have led Aereo to make the choice to get to the Supreme Court as soon as possible is the fact that it very well may not have that many customers. Whether Aereo has 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 customers may not matter in terms of the political dimension of a court decision. It seems pretty clear that whatever the size of Aereo's customer base, it isn't in the millions. Meanwhile, as a cash-burning tech startup -- it has spent at least $65 million -- the shorter the cash-burning portion, the better for the investors. If Aereo loses its case, the investors have found out a few years and many millions of dollars sooner -- perhaps the company can employ its technology in some other, legal way to find a business with returns to its investors. If Aereo wins its case, one risk in the business would be eliminated and it would likely be able to raise its additional funds on much more favorable terms than it has achieved to date.

Also:
Another take, which has a nice discussion of the cloud computing issues at stake in the case (The Vertere Group)

Top Five Posts of 2013

In the spirit of Rob from High Fidelity, these were my top five posts of 2013*:

5. UK Retransmission Consent Dispute: BBC versus Sky (3 June)
4. flareWatch: Cox Goes OTT on Itself (1 July)
3. Cox Has Shut Down Its OTT Service FlareWatch (17 September)
2. Virtual MSO - A Look at the Opportunity (19 July)
1. Nimble TV Hits Its First Roadblock -- Dish (23 July)

*based on page views

Comcast's Xfinity Store: Looking Deeper on the Despicable Me 2 Headline

I was surprised by the reports of the strong showing of the Comcast's new Xfinity TV Store in the sale of Despicable Me 2. 

A strong start for the Xfinity TV Store is counterintuitive in several ways:  Apple's iTunes Store or Amazon.com, the big sellers of downloadable content, are generally considered good retailers of content. Xfinity's brand is not known for downloadable "owned" content. Usually sales for a new business are pretty modest as potential customers wait to see if the vendor is reliable, etc.

Comcast, which is always aggressive in playing up its good news, issued a press release that its new store sold more downloadable copies of the title than iTunes or Amazon or Walmart's Vudu or anyone else. There is another data point in support of a strong start for the Xfinity TV Store: Todd Spangler reported in Variety that the Comcast store was also the top seller of The Hunger Games for its first 2 weeks of release.  While Despicable Me 2 is from Universal Studios, which is owned by Comcast (and may have gotten some extra promotion for that reason), Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, is a true third party. Is it possible that Comcast is already an important outlet in the electronic sell-through market? If so, how and why?

 
While the Xfinity store is available to all US Internet households on the web, there was probably little awareness of it as a purchase option outside of the 20% or so of the households that are Comcast subscribers. When I searched for "Xfinity Store Despicable Me 2" I did not find the sort of product index page like one finds for Amazon or iTunes, I found this -- no download to own online link at all under "Available Online". Instead, the circled text says "The full movie is currently not available Online."

It doesn't appear that Xfinity is providing any special value to consumers. The Xfinity-purchased Despicable Me 2 is not offering any better/different features than those available from other sellers of the title. If anything, Xfinity's TV Store page to market the title is much weaker.

Clicking on the "Available on TV" button on the Xfinity Despicable Me 2 page yielded this screen: As you will note, at this time there is no online rental option, only a purchase option (see inside the marked oval) and no mention at all that consumers making this purchase can also view it online, download to other devices, etc. So the big innovation does not appear to be the play anywhere feature of the purchase, but simply that Comcast is effectively using the pay-per-view movie rental store to sell movies before they are available in the rental window. Comcast isn't doing something better than Amazon or iTunes, they are doing something different.. 

Upon close inspection, the Xfinity store does have two clear advantages over iTunes, Amazon and Vudu. First, the store is available in the cable system's electronic program guide, the primary place viewers search for something to watch. Second, purchases from Xfinity are integrated into the cable set-top box's navigation; the viewer does not have to switch his or her TV to input 2. 

In contrast, purchases from Amazon or iTunes require a separate search (on a computer or tablet or phone) and typically require the use of a separate device (Roku or Apple TV or blu-ray or Chromecast) for viewing on the household's main TV. Also, that TV has to be switched to another input. While switching inputs might not seem like a big deal to many, only 2 of the 4 members of my household can do it reliably and Bright House, the cable MSO, offers a tech support page devoted to the topic. 

Strategically, if the MSOs enter the electronic sell-through business in a bigger way and these movie-rental-searching-during-the-sell-through-window and "input 1" advantages are borne out, the cable distributors could become even more important purchasers of content. The last decade has seen MSO's bargaining power eroding with strong basic cable programmers and top broadcast stations. Being a force in electronic sell-through would not change that. However, on a more macro level, strength in electronic sell-through would tend to improve distributors' bargaining position with content suppliers. For that alone, this is a development to monitor. 

Update (10 Feb 2014): Lionsgate's CEO stated on 7 February 2014 that Comcast represents 15% of the US electronic sell-through market and that he expects other MVPDs will enter the market.
Update (10 Mar 2014): Netflix's House of Cards will be sold in the Xfinity store, which Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit notes "has surprised us" in how well it has done.

Over-the-Top Video and The Innovator's Dilemma

Everyone in the ecosystem is wondering about the future of multichannel television and no one knows what to expect. A good theory can help sort out the unknowable. In this post, I will work through what The Innovator's Dilemma theory suggests for over-the-top video and multichannel television incumbents. The fit of theory and subject is pretty good and helpful for seeing the forces shaping offerings into the future.

"Prediction is very hard, especially about the future" - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist

Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma is a highly influential book about business markets, particularly what happens when a disruptive new technology appears on the scene.

From Christensen's website:

An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include:  lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics.  Because these lower tiers of the market offer lower gross margins, they are unattractive to other firms moving upward in the market, creating space at the bottom of the market for new disruptive competitors to emerge.

The disruptive innovation definition above is a good fit for over-the-top video, notably YouTube and Netflix, but also Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Prime and Aereo. All these services are, in some form, arguably lower quality and, individually, less expensive relative to multichannel subscription television ("cable TV" for short). If you have cable and try to recreate cable TV by substituting one or several of them, you will probably be disappointed overall. (Many have tried cord-cutting and written about it.)

[The one part of the definition that does not fit is that it is not accurate to say that cable TV "was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money." It is clearly a mainstream service by any measure. The service that requires "a lot of skill"? -- that's probably BitTorrent.]

Christensen's theory is that eventually the improvement of the "inferior" new product gets a toehold in a small market that is ignored by the incumbent. Gradually the new product improves, largely through technological advances. Over time that product becomes a better and better substitute for the incumbent product and then, usually all of a sudden, the economics of the incumbent's business are destroyed by the newcomer.

Applying the theory to this case, the toehold market for over-the-top video may be mobile. Selling a separate mobile subscription was basically impossible, as Qualcomm found with its Flo service. However, multichannel television was (and largely is) unavailable on a smartphone and all of the top over-the-top services are easily available on such devices.

How does over-the-top video (OTT) become a bigger threat to the multichannel TV ecosystem:

1. The technical quality will improve (LTE, 802.11ac wifi, gigabit ethernet to the home)
2. The quality of the content will improve (YouTube's investments in channels, Netflix and Amazon's investments in original content, continued acquisition of quality library content)
3. The availability of the service will improve (Aereo's expansion to other markets, more ubiquitous public wifi)
4. The convenience of the service will improve (e.g., better interface design, more accurate recommendation engines, DVR in the cloud, etc.)

The frightening thing for the incumbents is that none of these developments above require OTT services to do anything other than what they have been doing. Notably, they do not have to take on the risk of making a frontal attack on cable and licensing the popular cable channels.

Even more frightening for incumbents is there is a strong recent history of mobile solutions devouring home-based solutions. More than half of households don't use a landline phone and portable digital audio has done a similar number on home high-fidelity equipment. It is lost on no one in the TV business that this happened without cellphones ever sounding as good as a landline nor an mp3 sounding as good as a CD.

The usual strategy for incumbents, well described in Mark Suster's excellent blog post Understanding How the Innovator's Dilemma Affects You. is that the incumbent provider increases "spending on features / performance / functionality. They gather with their cadre of high-requirement customers and have planning sessions about how they can make even more performant products."

Cutting the price is not an appealing option for the incumbents because they do not want to reduce their profits and cannot cut their prices (and costs) sufficiently to compete with the upstarts. After all, these are big, successful profitable business -- they can't throw that away. So, instead the incumbents respond to the competitive threat by improving the product. 

The problem with the improving-the-product strategy is that it does not work in the long term. As Suster puts it "customer requirements don’t grow exponentially relative to their existing line [i.e., current service]...over time to the new entrant's functional offering [gets closer to the incumbent's] and there is a huge and rapid sucking sound that pulls the bottom out of the market as waves of customers 'trade down.'” In other words, the multichannel distributor can add all the value it wants, but that doesn't mean the consumers will continue to see their expensive package as their best option in the marketplace.

[A multichannel distributor, of course, could always cut its costs by dropping channels, especially expensive ones. However, given the competition between cable, DBS, telco TV and upstarts like Google Fiber -- such a strategy would certainly hurt its attractiveness to the large mass of consumers who want multichannel television. Inviting current customers to shop for a new video provider by dropping their favorite channel might also lead to such customers finding a new broadband provider as well.]

So, that means OTT going to kill cable TV, right?

I don't think that is clear that cable TV is a goner. Unlike phones and stereo equipment, home TV screens have gotten much bigger in the past decade. High definition and DVRs have improved the in-home TV experience. If consumers have spent more on home entertainment gear, it seems somewhat incongruous that they would be willing to forego the premium television content that takes best advantage of it.

The role of content in this marketplace seems like a different factor than anything in Christensen's theory. There is nothing quite analogous (from the consumer's perspective) as a supplier of content for a disc drive or a piece of construction equipment.

OTT providers have some of the content from cable TV -- Aereo provides the live broadcast signals, individual programs are available on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix and iTunes. Live sports is available, via the "season ticket" out-of-market packages from MLB, NBA and NHL, but the more popular local teams and national games are not. There is a lot of original content available on Netflix and YouTube at various levels of quality. It is fair to say that the pay TV ecosystem has locked up the early windows on much of the best content that is available on TV and OTT might not be able to offer a material amount of that for a long time.

Still, as Howard Beale notes in Network, one of my favorite movies, TV is primarily in the boredom killing business, and at some price, not everyone needs a full package of first window premium content to kill their boredom.

What seems more likely than the decimation of the pay TV ecosystem, is its gradual move to become more of a luxury good, rather than a 90%-penetrated household utility. The opportunity for OTT video certainly increases as the spread between the cost of cable TV and the OTT alternatives increases. Netflix streaming (and Aereo and Hulu Plus) has held at $7.99 (each) per month for a while, but that might not hold in the future.

The more interesting question is: how do the programmers respond to the (inevitable) decline in the number of multichannel subscribers?

It seems unlikely that programmers will sell their linear services whole to the OTT providers, since the OTT providers probably don't want them [Aereo is the exception, since it is in the linear streaming business already. It will likely add some basic services to join last-year's addition, Bloomberg, and adding premiums that can be sold a la carte like HBO or Showtime or Starz would appear to be consistent with the Aereo model. It is less clear if those programmers would be willing to sell to Aereo, after all Starz famously stopped selling to Netflix because it was messing up its value proposition for pay TV distributors.]

What's likely is that programmers will sell greater amounts of individual programs to the OTT providers -- that is just a bigger play on something they are doing already. Disney's recent deal to send new, original Marvel programming to Netflix is a great example of this. In the past, Disney would have taken this programming -- which is not needed by its current cable channels -- and created a new cable channel.

Defining programming more narrowly -- around the cable networks' brands -- the picture gets fuzzier. The big distributors are not enthusiastic about paying higher license fees for cable networks, but the greater competition in the distribution market has led them to do so -- they can't afford to be without top channels for too long. While conceding the money, the distributors are looking for added value in those deals (e.g., TV Everywhere rights, expanded VOD rights) and one form of added value are longer windows in which the programming is exclusive to the cable network and does not appear on their websites, Hulu, Netflix, et al. After DirecTV settled its standoff with Viacom in 2012, its chief negotiator said “My expectation is that they will not increase the amount of free programming they have online.” The story after Time Warner Cable and CBS settled was similar -- digital rights was the contentious deal issue.

Since the movement of programming on a show-by-show basis is inherently fluid, the speed at which content goes from the cable TV ecosystem to the OTT ecosystem (and possibly back again, as in the Fox-Comcast library deal) can and will ebb and flow with the prices being offered.

This fluidity might suggest that the fit of The Innovator's Dilemma to the disruptive innovation of over-the-top video is not perfect. Cable TV is a mass market product, not an expensive, exclusive one, and it is not just a product, but also a distribution channel for content. This disruptive innovation may reorient the marketplace, but not lead to only a single winner.

Intel Media Lessons

Word has come out that Intel Media, which has hired some 300 people to work on its over-the-top (OTT) cable service competitor, is now looking to Samsung and/or Amazon to assist in the business. That doesn't look good for the first true OTT competitor to cable.

What have we learned here:

1. To compete on the high end of the multichannel television business, you need to have all the channels. Having any significant gaps in the lineup means your product isn't meeting the expectations of consumers for a super-premium service. So, Time Warner Cable's Internet restrictions with some programmers, even if a super-premium service provider has networks 1-15, gaps in the coverage of networks 16-50 are problematic. TWC CEO Glenn Britt made these restrictions public at the Cable Show in June.
2. To compete in the low end of the market, a new entrant must find a way to get more favorable pricing from programmers and there is little reason for the programmers to support such an effort.
3. If the programmers require Intel to meet minimum subscriber guarantees, that creates additional risk for Intel to enter the business beyond the expense of creating the distribution system and marketing it. Perhaps the programmers are unwise to do this -- after all, if Intel doesn't launch, then the multichannel distribution market (buyers of programming) is less competitive than it is otherwise, and that's not good for the programmers (sellers of programming). On the other hand, the programmers all risk annoying/jeopardizing their relationships with the current customers by selling to an OTT provider -- this is new territory and this threat/potential threat has been recognized by distributors for at least a decade. If programmers are going to antagonize their core customers, they might reasonably expect that Intel makes it worth their while. Additionally, there may be incremental costs to distribute their service over the Internet -- programming costs, creating a separate feed with separate advertising, etc.
4. The opportunity to compete with the multichannel incumbents may be smaller than Intel thought when they first pursued this effort. In the last year, it appears that the multichannel subscription television business has peaked, at least in terms of number of subscribers.
5. Perhaps an executive with experience outside the US was not the best choice to lead this business. The media and television businesses are still highly provincial as opposed to international. All of the problems that Intel has encountered were well known to me and likely dozens of other people with long histories in the US multichannel business. For clarity, I don't know Erik Huggers at all and have never heard anyone speak ill of him in any way -- my point is based solely on his CV. Having lived in the UK, I can say that its television marketplace is very different from that in the US in a number of ways -- the huge role of the public broadcaster (BBC), the national orientation of the media as opposed to local, the dominance of DBS (BSkyB) over cable in market share, the requirement that facilities-based Internet providers wholesale their infrastructure to competitors.
6. Any OTT video service faces the potential threat that limits on the amount of data a typical home broadband customer might consume could make using the video service (or using it extensively) impossible or cost prohibitive. This uncertainty certainly (pun intended) makes a big investment in a new business more problematic.

I'm sure there will be a more direct over-the-top competitor to multichannel subscription television someday, but that day looks further out now than it did a few months ago.

Updated (30 October 2013): According to Peter Kafka at AllThings D, Verizon is in talks to take Intel Media off of Intel's hands.
Updated (21 November 2013): According to Reuters' analysis, For Intel, Hollywood dreams prove a leap too far.
Updated (26 November 2013): According to Bloomberg, Intel is asking for $500 million for Intel Media/its OnCue assets

Cox Has Shut Down Its OTT Service FlareWatch

Cox has abandoned its over-the-top service FlareWatch, which only launched around the start of July (link is to my initial post on Flare). The trial of the service ends 27 September 2013 and "Becky" from Cox Customer Care reports that the company will refund customers for their out-of-pocket costs for the service (e.g., equipment). Confirmation is in the tweet below. I believe this news has yet to be reported anywhere else.

A reader of this site and potential Flare customer, Teddy Wong, contacted Cox about subscribing to the service in early September and reported that his "order was cancelled without notice". Certainly not the response one would expect from the cable incumbent with the top reputation for customer service.

Prior to Cox's tweet, an attempt to access the website for the service, watchflare.com, yielded a page with the logo and the message "Service Unavailable", and a "503 Service Unavailable" error message, although through Google I can still reach the page with the Flare pricing and information about the service.

The Flare index page appears to have been taken down

But the detail and order pages are still accessible

Speculating, here's some reasons that Cox has pulled the service, quickly and in a seemingly unplanned fashion:

• Broadcasters and cable programmers have notified Cox that they have not granted rights for such a service.
• Cox has noticed that the lower-priced Flare service is cannibalizing their traditional cable TV service to a much greater extent than it is adding revenue to Internet-only customers
• Cox is noticing technical problems delivering a high quality version of the service

As I noted in the earlier post, I believe that Flare is an unprecedented service. While many cable operators offer some, most or all of their cable TV lineup to devices other than traditional televisions (e.g., web browser, iPad, Roku apps), all of them are providing it as "added value" to cable TV subscribers who also subscribe to the operator's cable Internet service. None are offering it as an alternative. The major broadcasters and cable programmers like the current pay-TV ecosystem and could be threatened by (and unwilling to support) any new precedent.

The only over-the-top service from a traditional operator is Dish's DishWorld service which is delivered via the Internet to Roku boxes, Macs, PCs and several other devices. DishWorld, however, does not deliver any household name US cable or broadcast services. The closest thing to such a service on its lineup is Bloomberg TV, which itself is streamed online at bloomberg.com. Most of DishWorld's 13 English-language channels are all from international programmers (e.g., France 24, RT [formerly Russia Today], Euronews).

Update (3 October 2013): Erik Brannon of IHS speculates/calculates that Flare was shut down because it wasn't profitable enough. This theory does not ring true to me; Cox certainly knew the margin on the service before its launch and could have priced it higher to address this concern. Brian Santo's post in CED sees through the IHS analysis, and adds quotes from Cox which also deny Brannon's speculation.
Update (1 November 2013): Cox is evaluating a next-generation IP video service (like Flare) per Steve Donohue in Fierce Cable.
Update (4 November 2013): Donohue's interview with Cox's CTO Kevin Hart who said that Flare customers were buying the service in addition to Cox's video, which seems surprising and counter-intuitive.