The digital television no show: How the media affected the market opportunity

As have been earlier reported, the digital television growth in Sweden hasn't seen any exponential growth from cable subscribers, despite the fact that some estimated 30 % of the market who were forced to go digital during our transition campaign made lots of headlines in the press during the two years it took to complete the transition. Rather, the growth is showing as being slow-paced and linear, increasing numbers of digital viewers coming both indirectly from new triple play customers and genuinely interested tech people like myself. One really starts to wonder how such a big transition in television broadcasting haven't sparked more interest with the people. Not even much curiosity. 

I believe there must be a good reason behind this disinterest from the mainstream. What is it, though: is it a cultural thing or a lack of innovation and passion from Swedish cable companies? Are standardization issues with DVB to blame, the fact that there isn't a uniformed one-size-fits-all broadcasting technology instead of one for each connection type? (DVB-T, C and S). It might be as simple as the digital transition not focusing on HD channel availability, an area which intrigues far more people than a discreet digitalisation of already running analog channels. After all, on stage in front of the tv viewers there is nothing new going on: they are still watching the same content as they used to do before, more or less, except there is more to choose from at a given moment than it used to be before the transition. There is more content.

Kinks to sort out before digital adoption will grow expontentially

First of all, the television the consumers goes out to buy in their local tv shop (or online) needs to have two integrated slots for digital reception: one for terrestrial and one for cable. Second of all, it needs to "just work" right out of the box and both of them should always allow a basic channel package to be carried out unencrypted for everyone to watch and demo with new boxes or televisions.

Trusting the brand and their hardware-software bundle

After a quick look on price matching websites, I conclude that there are 340 so called STBs (Set-Top Boxes) available for the digital-only alternatives terrestrial and satellite, while there's 23 alternatives for watching analog/digital cable. Obviously there is going to be a problem here, trying to figure out which brand and model to buy among the digital-only alternatives. However, the price competition is unmatched. With digital cable, there aren't many models to choose from because of the fact that there aren't enough customer demand as of yet. Prices are high and the competition is more or less a factor "none to five". Let's think for a second what it means to buy a digital set-top box today: you go to your local tv shop or look online, to try determine which box you want to buy. After 20 minutes you end up buying brand A along with a subscription and bring it home. You install it and plug the cables in. You start to watch some tv as soon as your subscription goes active. But here's the problem: after watching for an hour, the box hangs! The picture freezes and the only solution to get back to watching tv again is to pull the power plug and then put it back in, initializing the box again. You go back to browsing channels for an additional 5 minutes.. and you discover that there's something wrong, but this time it's the channel you're watching having no sound for no obvious reason. Flipping channels and flipping back again fixes it. This is pretty typical and considered "normal behaviour" while it actually never should happen. It doesn't matter much which box you buy into, they all have some little bug that might drive you nuts one way or another. 

This is of course a matter of maturity and hardware vendor responsibility. Some vendors you can trust more than others. Which one to trust is best found on established forums here and there on the web.

Things still needed to be done

* An eye-opener for vendors to provide well-working, high-quality and production stable firmware

* No sneaky subscription contracts (hidden card fees with recurring, annual payments)

* The ability to watch the same content on more than one tv WITHOUT paying extreme extra fees for it (potential soon to be-customers simply aren't tolerating that)

Well, that's pretty much it for now.

Feel free to comment!

How the Swedish analog cable television methodology lead to a stalemate

Commentary and analysis of the slow progress in digital cable

I remember how as a kid we soon got this new thing called cable television at home. It was something relatively new in the area I lived in and not everyone I knew had it ... yet. The idea was that your neighbourhood board of members met with cable companies to hear about their offers for cable television. Which company seemed like the most appropriate for our neighbourhood's needs and was the price deal reasonable or not? Once a deal was struck, every resident in the neighbourhood had to choose which cable tv package they wanted: either the basic or the extended package. Over time, however, the price dropped for households and it became more reasonable to move over in favor for the extended package. More time passed on, and eventually all that was left, was the extended package which at this point had changed to become the standard cable offering (analog only). At the same time, they had a small optional try-out for digital cable too. It was a set-top box with a couple of premium channels for those who felt like trying that out. I think the cable company wanted to see if there was any interest in the technology or not.

Meanwhile, a competing cable company started offering digital cable as an option back in the mid-1990s or so, more or less. Not many customers opted for it, but there was no demand yet, as the basic cable channels covered 99.9 % of peoples' television needs, AFAIK. If you wanted more you could always opt-in for analog premium channels. Digital was something exotic and experimental you could say.

Along the way, the premium channel companies decided to turn off analog signals and only offer the premium content with digital signals. This was alright, except of course for analog pirates who were a bit sad over not being able to receive free premium content for any longer. 

In 2005, terrestrial television towers began switching off the analog signals to go digital-only, in a transition period of approximately 2 years time. It was a political decision and they concluded that the switch-off was to be completed before February 2008. In the end, it was settled that they should be successful in completing it with good marginals before that date, namely October 2007. At the time of writing, in August 2007 they are yet to switch off the last couple of analog transmissions, but they are getting very close to their goal.

  Meanwhile, the biggest cable provider has consistently made press releases about the fact that their customers don't need to do anything in order to continue watching television. They are not affected by the analog switch-off, they have said. At the same time, they are also pushing more and more for their customers to consider switching to digital cable, where they can choose between Small, Medium and Large packages depending on household needs.

The Swedish populations' reactions to the transition from analog to digital television have consistently been either negative or ignorant, depending on whether they themselves are directly affected or if they are just hearing and reading about the process - in the media. Everywhere that I have seen people comment about this matter, no person at all have said that they are in favor of the move and neither have they said that they are anticipating it with excitement. When analog cable households have been asked questions about their awareness of the analog switch-off, response always comes out the same it seems: 

"I have cable television. I am not affected by the switch-off. I can continue viewing tv 'business as usual'".

So, while both satellite providers in Sweden have been digital-only since the analog switch-off for satellite broadcast in 2001, and the analog switch-off for terrestrial viewing soon is completed, the cable households are left with choosing themselves when they want to make the switch to digital viewing. This far, estimates show that somewhere around 90 % of them have voted to stay with analog without intent of switching. They want to continue watching tv as usual, the same way they have watched it all their lives. No matter the age groups, they all say the same thing.

The reason behind the reasoning is what I find most interesting, and I think that cable providers should consider investigating not *what* their customers want, but *why* they want it. Only then can they get more people to sign up for digital cable. That's what I think at least.

Evaluation of FreeBSD 6.2

Last week, I tried out Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X to give FreeBSD 6 a try in the virtual hardware world which sounded like a challenge suitable for someone who have had nothing but headache experiences with FreeBSD installations in the past. Being a former Linux software enthusiast I was used to doing things the GNU/Linux Way™ as opposed to doing it the traditional UNIX way. The main shell is configured with /bin/sh in mind instead of Bash. As a result the common Linux user gets ticked off who normally think pressing the TAB button for command completion is something to take for granted. Naturally it's always one of the very first priorities to take on. So I tried to fix that annoyance, but it wasn't easy to know where to start. I noticed the possibility to set things up during the initial setup process - however, I had forgot to install Bash before creating the user account and that was certainly a big mistake. If someone else reading this does the same mistake as I did, I think the easiest way to fix things is to launch vi and edit /etc/passwd as superuser or when logged in as root. Look for the /bin/sh section on the line that says your user account. For instance, it can look something like this:

jdoe:*:1002:3:John Doe:/usr/home/jdoe:/bin/sh

Changing that last piece to say /bin/bash, when you know for sure bash is in fact installed, will do the trick. Remember to try this piece of advice with some care: first be sure what you write in there actually is verified as correct, since it's a highly sensitive system file that might just as well lock you out completely from the system if you put in even the smallest typo in there. Also, don't forget to logout and re-login to confirm your system changes.

Moving on to the actual operating system itself, I must say the installation actually went on much smoother than I had expected, even with the virtual hardware that FreeBSD had to accept. The only thing that went crazy was the X server which is forgiving when you account for the poor graphics driver that VESA is in a window inside another OS (in this case as you hopefully recall, Mac OS X). There were a lot of packages to post-install, but once I had run xorgconfig and grasped which resolution and depth to use for the mysterious virtualized Cirrus graphics card, everything was up and running without any terrible issues. It did work, after all, and the colors looked alright. It was however acting slow which I blame the lack of Parallels Tools for.

Conclusion

Easier than you can imagine to install if you go for the Standard Install option (found on sysinstall's ncurses menu). With the auto-configuration alternative things went well for me. I must recommend that you never run FreeBSD with an X server if you virtualize that OS, because it won't exactly be the best experience you've had in your life. If that's what you're after, why not install Linux instead? For command-line server usage, though, FreeBSD is one of the smoothest and quickest operating systems I've tried virtualize. Go FreeBSD 6.2!