Thoughts While Visiting the Samsung Experience

Times Square rendered in Legos @ Samsung Experience, Time Warner Center, New York

I went to the Samsung Experience a few weeks ago.  If you are not familiar with this place, it is sort of like an Apple Store, except without the store part.  You can't buy anything, it is simply a beautiful showroom for the company's products and a place to try them out in a comfortable setting.  I visit it every month or two as a way to keep up on the developments in consumer electronics - notably 3D TV, Internet-connected TVs and Blu-Ray players.

3D TV continues to be very much a mixed bag to my eyes.  In the (Blu-Ray-based) sampler demo I saw recently, the 3D effect was not very impressive and the quality of the effect seems to vary -- sometimes it looks good, sometimes not so good.  It might might work better in a very dark room.  After all, real 3D is all around you in a lit room.  And 3D TV seems to suffer next to 3D reality.

Google TV is very clunky and laggy, when it was usable at all.  Samsung could learn from Apple and spend some time and set up decent demos of the services related to the products on display.  Without a sample account set up, the Facebook, Twitter and MLB apps are useless and no visitor wants to enter their own information to use them.  Also the Google TV remote is way too complicated (and I am somewhat familiar with the platform from experience with Android phones).  Google TV is hopeless now, but so was the first version of Android.  Roku and Apple TV, both of which I have at home, are far more polished right now.

The Galaxy Tab, Samsung's answer to the iPad, would also benefit from an Apple-style demo setup with some sample photos, emails, Facebook account, etc.  The only things that one can really use out of the box are the browser and games like Angry Birds (both of which are very nice).  The tablet did seem a bit laggy, which I hadn't noticed when I used it on earlier visits.

Samsung's Android phones look awesome.  The Epic has a great looking screen.

Samsung's 59 inch  plasma TV picture is excellent with (2D) Blu-Ray feed.  I wonder how Netflix Watch Instantly will look on it?  Of course Netflix is one of the highest profile apps for the set, but the Experience has not set up a way for one to, uh, experience it.

Tablets used while watching TV, readers in bed

Nielsen has done some research on tablet (e.g., iPad), electronic reader (e.g., Kindle) and smartphone usage.  No big surprises here -- people read in bed and a Kindle doesn't generate its own light (so is less likely to distract someone with whom you might share said bed) and there are already a number of TV guides that work on the big screen of a tablet (none of them work on a Kindle or smartphone).

Smartphone tops for "With family/friends", "Waiting for something", "Shopping/running errands" and "Commuting" -- the most mobile and social activities.

Reader tops for "Lying in bed" and "Other activities" (like, er, reading?)

Tablet tops for "Watching TV" (multitasking or using these guides, I would imagine), "Attending a Meeting/Class" (taking notes or pretending to do so) and "In the Bathroom" (well, it is about the size of a magazine).
 
In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Make Great Bedfellows (Nielsen Wire)

Bandwidth Caps and Over-the-Top Video

Todd Spanger of Multichannel News noted in a blog post today that a Morgan Stanley analyst estimated that a typical household watching HDTV exclusively delivered over-the-top would use 600 GB of data per month and a heavy viewer might use a bit over 2 times that amount 1.4 TB (that's terabytes).  Comcast's cap is 250GB per month; AT&T's is the same for U-Verse, less for DSL customers.

The part of the posting that got me was this:  "The bottom line is that none of the broadband access networks were engineered to absorb this much per-subscriber usage. You can’t efficiently move 18 lanes of traffic down a four-lane highway."

GB per month is not really the capacity problem; the issue is peak time demand.

However, everything in my limited knowledge of cable plant design points to the fact that the engineers were always thinking about how consumer usage would grow over time and what infrastructure could be scaled up to meet that demand.  The concept of a fixed capacity infrastructure as a long term solution doesn't seem like anything any good engineer would have believed would be adequate given the explosive growth of Internet traffic BEFORE HDTV took off and over-the-top existed in any meaningful way.

It seems inevitable that consumers will have very fast pipes in their homes in the not-too-distant future and, if history holds, the unlimited, fixed price plan will be the way that consumers want to buy it.  If the cable operator doesn't provide it, a telco will, or a wireless company will or broadband over powerline (BPL) or someone or something else will.

Delivering HDTV to Typical Household Entirely Over-the-Top... (Multichannel News)

Customer Satisfaction - Verizon still on top

Verizon FiOS had the best scores, but interesting to me is that "All Others" -- namely smaller companies which are probably not as well known -- scored second.  Maybe the better known your cable company is, the worse you think it is.  AT&T U-verse and Dish Network both fell by 4 points.  According to ACSI researchers, U-verse was hurt by an increase in customer complaints about picture quality, particularly on HD channels.  Perhaps there are some limits to pushing a lot of video down a regular phone line.

American Customer Satisfaction Index - Subscription Television Service

Netflix largest source of Internet traffic

Netflix is nearly 30% of peak downstream Internet traffic, according to a report by Sandvine.  This is up from 21% last fall.

If over-the-top has yet to change the multichannel marketplace, it pretty clearly has already changed ISP traffic patterns.  More interesting to me is that video (Netflix and YouTube, BitTorrent, Flash Video and Hulu) are well over 50% of downstream traffic already.

It seems likely that lots of customers are going to have issues with ISP bandwidth caps in the near future.

Netflix Now the Largest Single Source of Internet Traffic (Techcrunch)

Cablevision launches new "fighting" service

Fight Now is devoted to mixed martial arts, boxing, wrestling, etc.  This category of programming tends to be very unattractive to advertisers, despite having a lot of appeal to young men, a tough-to-reach demographics.

Fight Now TV launches on Cablevision (Variety)

NBC May Have Proxy for Some Affiliate's Retransmission Consent

The rub in these agency deals is what happens if the affiliate goes off the air and who makes that call.  The agent (in this case NBC) might want to hang tough to get a better deal, but the affiliate will be the one losing the lion's share of revenue during the disruption.  How this intersects in a potential deal with Comcast?  That should be interesting.

NBC, Affiliates Iron Out Blanket Retrans Deal (Broadcasting & Cable)