Another 1971 classic on all week being played in Streamabout.
Forget "I'm still standing" and just get this now. A real beauty of a record from the brilliance of Reg Dwight and Bernie Taupin. It's something really beautiful in the 'Honky Chateau' domain and 'Tumbleweed Connection'.
Really - it's something special. Absolutely adored in here. Rick Wakeman played on it as did David Glover.
"Boston at last and the plane's touching down...." Love it!
HBO are in talks for broadcasting over a web service like Apple TV and Google as an 'a la carte' version - in other words, pay-per-view.
HBO Go is already on Apple TV but only for subscribers only - so this pay-per-view version makes total sense and something we blogged about before. In fact in April 2014, where we suggested (!) that the only way to go for cable TV was "to introduce pay-per-view to supplement subs".
You can search the blog top left of this page or copy here;
http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2014/04/pay-tv-is-going-to-be-in-decline.html
This will push HBO to compete with Netflix given they have 'True Detective', 'Game of Thrones' and many other quality series.
A huge amount of online viewers watch 'on demand' rather than on subscription and this will capture those. This is also now a fundamental issue for 'Sky' this side of the water and they need to take notice.
But online broadcasting, online TV, is taking a further twist. Better content online will continue to drive viewers away from traditional TV Stations. Their days are numbered.
(And thanks to Adforce's Kevin Foley for pointing it out. Always on the ball.)
Updated March 9th - HBO Announce Apple as their streaming partner so the service will be available on all Apple devices.
YouTube is 10 years old and without it, businesses like Streamabout, simply wouldn't exist. So hats off to YouTube...but....
What seems to be changing its dominance, is market behaviour and audience reaction. Bought by Google for 1.6 Billion usd in 2006, it's still not profitable despite revenues of 4 billion usd in 2014 - that's about break-even (which is ridiculous even in itself).
Faced with competition such as Vimeo, Vice, Vine, Snapchat and so on, makes life a bit harder for YouTube but their biggest threat is Facebook. The point is that when I see a video on a friends page on Facebook, it's probably something that I might like too - because they're friends and because they'll be 'like minded'. On YouTube, I have to search and search albeit through subscribed channels. So the viewing relevance is very different.
Facebook looks like a video sharing site, YouTube looks like a video hosting platform especially as you can upload video to Facebook directly rather than sharing a YouTube link giving Facebook ownership of the Ads.
The recent YouTube kids version marks a great initiative which brings back audience relevance as does, some of the channels - notably in Sport. But it's not as effective as Facebook even with over a billion monthly views. Facebook has 50% more views and produced nearly 3 billion usd in profit last year.
The growth of autoplay on Facebook (where videos automatically play when you see them) and currently on trial with Twitter - but not on Youtube - is a big failing.
One wonders is YouTube becoming complacent?
But one thing is for sure - it's all about Video, Video and more Video.
