As Deadline notes, there’s a huge untapped potential to get more viewers watching streaming programming:

The research firm says that in September, 3.1M unique users streamed TV Everywhere programming at AT&T, Cox, Comcast (Xfinity), Verizon, Cablevision (Optimum), Time Warner Cable, and Dish Network. That comes to just 5.1% of the roughly 60M customers who could have accessed TV Everywhere videos at those companies. The data suggest “relatively weak TV Everywhere awareness among cable, DBS and telco video subs, most likely due to the lack of any serious marketing campaigns to promote the product,” analyst Tony Lenoir says. It also means the services have a long way to go to catch up to other streaming video providers. For example, Hulu had 21.3M unique users in September, while Netflix had 16.2M.

I actually think this could be a critical way to get customers to be quite loyal to cable. The streaming landscape is a deeply confusing place right now: on Hulu alone, NBC puts up everything the day after it airs, Fox delays episodes unless you’re a Hulu plus subscriber, and CBS holds everything on its own site, which has an unbelievably terrible proprietary streaming player. Then, there’s HBO GO, which is a stand-alone service to HBO subscribers, but that is slightly unreliable. And Showtime is working with cable providers to have Showtime Anytime service work through their streaming players. Netflix gets new seasons of things at uneven rates. That’s confusing even for an obsessive consumer like me. If RCN developed a streaming service that made all content available on a consistent basis, with extremely high-quality visuals and fast-loading streaming, that alone would make me affirmatively loyal to the company for the first time in my career as an adult cable consumer. And I bet it would be a real value ad for people who don’t spend ten hours a day watching television and movies.

Over at The Mary Sue, Susana Polo makes an absolutely critical point for the debate about whether the cable model is about to collapse and people about to start cutting the cord en masse:

That the world is ready for streaming, a la carte television to become the default way that folks get their cable subscriptions delivered to them. This week the FCC released their eigth Broadband Progress Report, on the state of broadband internet service in the U.S., and they’ve collected some pretty interesting info. While broadband internet is available in 96% of American households, only 60% of Americans actually subscribe to the service. And of those 60%, only a minority of them actually get download speeds as high as 4 megabits per second, the minimum required speed for actual broadband as defined by the FCC. Most households are getting along with 768 kilobits a second. It’s hard to say whether this is because of subscriber preference, or because, well, many cable companies don’t exactly work very hard to guarantee that the speed they advertise is the speed you get. As Livescience points out, the bare minimum download speed for Netflix videos is 500 kbps, and that’s for particularly poor quality video.

Getting folks to give up cable in favor of streaming video services isn’t a matter of changing a single consumer preference. If cord-cutting is going to be a genuine movement, people are going to have to grow less attached to sports packages and more attached to faster internet, and to start demanding the availability of the latter. That’s a more complex cocktail of cultural changes than simply declaring that the cable companies are out of control.

The kind folks at Bloggingheads were good enough to ask me to do a regular show over there, which means you’ll be getting a lot more culture alongside your politics. I’m lucky enough to have as my first guest the AV Club’s television editor and one of my absolute favorite writers on any facet of culture, Todd VanDerWerff:

There’s a lot in this conversation, including a discussion that I think is really important: which networks and services see themselves as in competition with each other. If HBO, Netflix and FX see themselves in competition with each other, it’ll have a dramatic impact on which movies and premium programming are available elsewhere. Networks like Showtime are in an interesting position here—if they’re not in direct competition with Netflix, there may be fewer pressures on them to invest in streaming products like Showtime Anytime, which it’s preparing to roll out more widely to customers of more cable providers, but it needs to not make the strategic mistake of restricting access to its content to the viewers who might need to sample it to get hooked and subscribe. This is really about the integration of two existing industries—movies and television. And the space for a more truly disruptive product, like Hulu, is wide open.

In any case, I hope you’ll swing by. And if you have requests for folks I should have on the show, holler. I’m excited to spend a lot more time talking to my critic friends, and not only at great length on Twitter.

Google’s announcement last week that its search algorithm will begin downgrading the search rankings of sites that have been hit with numerous claims that they’re violating copyright that have determined to be valid has been treated in some quarters as if it’s a worrisome surrender of a commitment to a free and open internet. But its decision to play ball with copyright holders doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. And if its policy works as designed, it could provide incentives that would be a useful alternative to legislation.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that Google would come around to factoring valid takedown notices into its search results given the extent to which Google wants to be a content company just as much as a search company. On YouTube, Google’s response time to takedown notices is astonishingly fast—it’s not as if Google is new to responding to copyright violation complaints in a forum where it’s in the company’s interest to make content providers feel comfortable hosting their material there. Google Play may not be a seriously-established competitor to iTunes or Netflix yet, but the division is signing and promoting new content deals on a regular basis. And long-term, that’s probably a focus that makes sense. I have to think that Google can make more money from long-form video advertising on licit content in front of YouTube videos and from its share of download sales than it can from passive display advertising on illicit torrent streams. Google will always have interests in internet freedom, because access is a big part of how it makes money. But the company has long had some interests aligned with Hollywood’s, and is moving increasingly in that direction.

Then, there’s the question of incentives. One of the biggest arguments by cyberlockers and other sites that end up with users who distribute some illicit content is that it’s not fair to characterize them as primarily piracy sites. Google’s new policy gives them an incentive to prove their intentions by getting serious about removing illicit content, banning users who are repeated infringers, and making running a clean locker a competitive advantage. Now there’s no question that there are risks of false positives, and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are right to keep an eye out for abuse of takedown notice abuse. It will be interesting to see if Google balances this algorithm change by bumping down the priority rating of copyright holders who file bogus or harassing takedown notices repeatedly—good incentives should work in both directions. But a focus on incentives, and on driving users to licit, quality streams of content, is where this debate should be.

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
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In January at the Television Critics Association press tour, Hulu, the service set up by the broadcast networks to provide streaming content supported by advertising and subscriptions, announced its first original slate of scripted and reality content. Yesterday, they were back with announcements that Hulu will air the new seasons of the popular British shows Misfits, about a group of unlikely superpowered teenagers on probation, and Armando Iannucci’s scabrous political comedy The Thick of It on the same day and date that they air in the UK, and a panel promoting its airing of the Israeli drama, Prisoners of War, that is the basis for Showtime’s critical and commercial hit Homeland. The news that American audiences won’t have to wait to see these shows through a legitimate channel—and that Hulu won’t be bleeping the profuse and wildly creative profanity that is a hallmark of The Thick of It—is the useful, practical news out of Hulu’s session. But these shows herald something even more important: Hulu’s found some of the tools that are starting to define its competitive advantage as something other than a subsidiary of the networks that created it.

The time lags between when shows air in their home countries and when they arrive everywhere else has is one of the major frustrations of engaged television viewers who hear about programming they’re desperate to at least sample, but have no legitimate way of acquiring for months, years, or even at all. Even when Netflix makes it possible for viewers to catch up on past seasons of a show, viewers may come up against even greater gaps between the episodes they can finish and the time when new ones are available. Hulu, which doesn’t have to worry about slotting something into a narrow number of programming slots, is ideally suited to do what networks can’t and Netflix has yet to pursue: get viewers caught up on programming they love and transition them smoothly into the experience of watching along with an international audience they may already be in conversation with.

Similarly, in signing up Prisoners of War, Hulu’s committed to an arena of programming that broadcast networks have essentially removed from consideration: subtitled programming. And it’s done so with the source material for one of the most buzzed-about shows on television. It’s a move to claim a new space, and in particular, one important to dedicated, smart viewers who, because they have to read the subtitles, will be keeping their eyes closely focused on the screen, something that has to make Hulu’s advertisers very happy. In a conversation after the panel, Hulu’s senior vice president for content, Andy Forssell said that the company has been trying to close deals on more international shows, including some deals to bring Danish programming to the U.S. that didn’t quite work out. But if those shows fail to find other homes on proper U.S. networks even as the Scandanavian noir trend continues with the news that FX is planning a remake of Danish/Swedish co-production The Bridge, Prisoners of War could give Hulu the track record to be best positioned to close those deals in the future.

Hulu isn’t giving up on original content, Forssell emphasized. He plans to make more episodes of Battleground, Hulu’s political show, which Forssell told me and The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff was one of the 25 most-viewed shows on Hulu when it was rolling out new episodes. He said he has ambitions to do smarter programs aimed at teenage girls and is looking to target under-served audiences, including African-American viewers. And Hulu will try to keep its productions lean, operating much like Israeli productions or the 10-90 deals networks like TBS and FX have set with Tyler Perry and Charlie Sheen, where actors shoot large blocks of scenes together and out of narrative order to minimize time and money on locations and to make sure they work more consecutive days.

It may take time for the network to find a mix of content and creators that make Hulu truly competitive. Forssell declined to release specific ratings figures, arguing that they were a distraction from the strategy Hulu wants to pursue of giving shows multiple seasons to mature and time to find their audiences beyond a specific ratings period. But he said that Hulu’s best-performing proprietary shows were attracting audiences roughly the size of basic cable broadcasts for each episode, and maintaining roughly two thirds of that audience for the full length of each stream. But its content acquisitions and partnerships should give Hulu time to flesh out its original content strategy, test strategies and business models to increase legitimate audiences for piracy-vulnerable shows, compete with BBC America and PBS for sophisticated audiences with a taste for international programming.

Via Deadline, a report that notes declining viewership for broadcast television even with DVRed viewing within three days, has one positive observation:

Still, Nathanson has some encouraging news for networks concerned that ad skipping will become a lot more commonplace as the number of DVR households grows from 40% now to 47% expected in 2015. New users don’t appear to be as fast on the trigger: The percentage of broadcast commercials skipped by DVR users dropped to 46.7% in the 2011/2012 season from 58.8% in 2007/2008. For cable, 50.4% of the ads were skipped this past season vs. 52.8% in 2007/2008.

There are some elements of the cost of television that are obviously inflated, like escalating carriage fees that aren’t driven by climbing costs of operations and maintenance. But the labor that it takes to put together a television production that genuinely looks good isn’t cheap, and you can see the difference between productions where people are working for scale, and where someone’s hired the full complement of staff needed to make things work, and productions that aren’t working with a full lighting crew, or who are working under waivers from the guilds to pay less than scale, a practice that isn’t sustainable and shouldn’t be what we expect. In other words, there are probably some cost savings television could achieve, but the productions themselves are probably not going to get less expensive, and certainly not if we want television to tackle the kind of grand-sweep stories that have often been the provenance of television precisely because of their costs.

The choice, as it’s always been, is going to be paying more for content up front, whether for something like Hulu Plus or cable, or accepting a lot more monetization of our content. I’d like to think folks are watching ads they have the capacity to skip with their DVRs because they recognize it’s a way of keeping the shows they love in business by convincing advertisers they’re still going to capture impressions. But if laziness gets folk sitting through more commercials, I suppose I’ll take that, too.

There are a lot of people who want a lot of things about the way we watch television to change: to be able to buy channels on a stand-alone basis rather than in bundles, to be able to buy streaming access to premium networks like HBO without having to purchase a cable subscription first, to be able to stream shows that are available through services like Hulu as quickly and smoothly as if they were airing on a network. As much as I would also like to see some of those things come to pass, and as much as some networks would like to be able to offer some, if not all, of those options it’s been hard to get through to folks that there is a complex system governing cable television and internet that makes those changes difficult to make without current successful business models take a major hit that could disrupt the delivery and quality of the programming we currently find so desirable.

But major changes to that system might be closer than we think.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Justice Department is probing many of the elements of the cable and internet delivery system that throw up barriers to alternate means of distributing content. The story’s pegged as an investigation of whether Comcast, in violation of its anti-trust agreement that let it merge with NBCUniversal, is giving preferential treatment to content that streams through its own outlets so it streams faster and cleaner than content that comes over the internet from companies like Netflix. That’s critically important, as is net neutrality generally, but apparently, that’s not the only thing Justice is looking into:

Another issue that investigators have asked about is whether cable companies are acting anticompetitively by making viewers have a cable subscription before being able to access certain online programming. Comcast and some other companies have verification systems requiring viewers to enter their cable subscription details before being able to watch, say, ESPN’s programming on an iPad tablet…

The Justice Department also is investigating the contracts that programmers sign in order to be distributed on cable systems. Some contracts include so-called most-favored nation clauses, which make programmers give the biggest cable companies the best price they are offering anywhere, among other conditions. The Justice Department is questioning whether there are legitimate business reasons for such terms or whether they are intended to stop programmers from experimenting with other forms of online distribution, a person familiar with the matter said.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the investigation, I’m glad it’s taking place. So much of the conversation around what people find frustrating in the current cable regime is erroneously aimed at networks, rather than the regime they operate within. This investigation should recenter that conversation, and hopefully give us more insight into the fulcrums we need to push on to give us an environment where networks can have more opportunities to monetize their content and to pursue new subscribers without risking the ones they currently have.

The Nielsen system, which measures television viewership, is far from responsive to the technology that’s created the modern viewing era, whether it’s the rise of DVR-assisted watching (still only 17 percent of television viewing) or streaming on platforms from Hulu to HBO GO. And it’s helped perpetuate a perception that watching shows in the time slot is the most valuable kind of viewership, even if time-shifting and streaming let viewers watch shows when they can be most engaged in absorbed in them. So it’s good to see, as the New York Times reports, advertisers and networks trying to do research that dispels that perception and develops new ways of rating and monetizing programming. Among the initial results:

Both pilot tests had a similar major finding: that the growing viewership of video online and on mobile devices is not diminishing the appetite for watching television. “Consumers have a desire to build more content into their lives,” said Joan FitzGerald, vice president for television sales and business development at comScore in Reston, Va.

For instance, consumers who watch online video “were greater users of TV” than those who did not, she added. The fact that the pilot test showed “there is not a lot of cannibalization” is significant, Ms. FitzGerald said. Likewise, Carol Edwards, senior vice president for cross-platform sales and marketing at Arbitron in Columbia, Md., said: “There isn’t cannibalization. Other platforms are complementary to television.”

“TV continues to play such a dominant role,” she added, “though there is content available on other platforms.” The tests are important, Ms. Edwards said, because “all the media companies are trying to monetize their content platforms and to be fully monetized, they need to be measured.” Among the findings of the Arbitron test that may be surprising was that of all the people who viewed content on all three screens, the largest demographic group was not the youngest. Adults ages 35 to 49 led, at 36.6 percent, followed by adults ages 50 and older, at 34.8 percent, and then by adults ages 18 to 34, at 28.6 percent

This kind of finding is critically important, and I look forward to the kinds of innovations these kinds of technologies eventually enable. I’d love to know if it’s possible, when someone DVRs a show, for the recording to be retrieved from a cloud rather on the recorder so the ads embedded in it could be continually updated, and made freshly relevant whenever someone chooses to play it. Similarly, I’d be curious to know if Hulu’s able to get higher ad rates on impressions its algorithm suggests are more directly relevant to users. Either way, anything that makes it easier to monetize shows in accordance with how they’re actually watched in terms of both time and intensity, and that makes it easier to support lower-rated shows on networks is good news for smart television.

I was on the train and cut off from internet access yesterday, social media blew up over a site that let people enter in how much they’d pay per month for stand-alone HBO GO. It was a recapitulation of a debate we’ve had here before, about however much people would like to have standalone HBO GO, it’s a move that would fundamentally blow up HBO’s business model, and that HBO can’t approach quickly or lightly given its current commitments to cable companies and the scope of the programing it’s invested in. But the experiment also demonstrated one of the core difficulties in this debate: the fact that the people who talk most about wanting options that would allow them to watch television differently are a vocal minority whose behavior differs from much of the rest of the country in ways they don’t always seem to recognize or acknowledge.

One of the things this experiment exposed is that subscribers aren’t willing to pay enough for stand-alone HBO GO to support HBO’s current programming investments. As Sarah Pavis pointed out at BuzzFeed, people who submitted their quotes to the site ended up producing an average price of $12, lower than many current HBO subscriptions. We’ve discussed this before, but the current HBO price is feasible both because it’s essentially a volume discount, and because the cable companies cover their administrative and customer service costs. What this experiment tells HBO is not that there’s a lot of money for grabs out there, but that if it blows up its business models and its relationships with the cable companies who could cut them off if they offered a stand-alone option, their replacement customers would want to pay less for service than the current ones do. It’s true that HBO wouldn’t be splitting those fees with distributors, but it would have to take on a whole new range of expenses, including administration and some promotion, in the absence of cable support.

And it’s not just that folks are mistaking their preferences for a profitable business model. Josef Adalian at Vulture highlighted this piece from the Economist from last summer, in which HBO estimated that while there are 77 million households that have committed to buying cable but aren’t subscribed to HBO, there are only 3 million households that have broadband but not cable, and that fall into HBO’s target income bracket. Far more subscribers are invested in cable’s basic model, but are yet to be convinced by HBO’s specific product than there are consumers who only want HBO on the condition that HBO move away from the model that’s allowed it to make gorgeous, intellectually rich programming.

In Business Insider today, an industry analyst points out another emerging trend that may have been analyzed out of proportion to its actual adoption: time-shifted viewing of television. 83 percent of television viewing, according to the piece, still happens in the time slot in which an episode airs.

Taken together, these two sets of information are a salient reminder that as frustrated as some people are with the current model of television distribution, and as much as some vocal subset of people are changing their habits, television as it stands is a model that an awful lot of people are happy with. That doesn’t mean that they’ll remain happy with it, or that their viewing and consumption habits won’t change. But it does suggest we may still be a ways out from the point where it makes sense for a network like HBO to blow up the existing model, suffer through several rough years with a clear light visible at the end of the tunnel.