The War for Your TV
It’s amazing how much things can change in a few short years, and FreeCast has come a long way since the company’s founding in 2011.
One thing that sticks out in my mind from those early days is a video from Nilay Patel at The Verge.
It’s funny, because just as Nilay was sitting on the couch describing this new era of television, the FreeCast team was sitting in this very office building it, as we prepped to launch Rabbit TV.
At a time when Netflix and other libraries were soaring in popularity, Rabbit TV would take a different approach, coincidentally the one described above.
One service with all of the movies, all of the TV shows, with music, games, and more, all accessible from anywhere and any device, via the internet.
The Rabbit Multiplies
Over the years, media industry experts have hopped from one area of interest to another. First it was Netflix-style libraries, then it was traditional TV networks offering their own over-the-top subscriptions; curation and skinny bundles have all had their time in the spotlight.
But amid this never-ending search for the next big thing, Rabbit TV subscriptions were multiplying like, well… rabbits. In 6 months, our paid subscription service reached over 1 million sales, beating out video rivals like Netflix and Hulu, as well as free social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to become the fastest tech startup to 1 million users.
Thanks to our retail partnership with Telebrands, securing shelf space in thousands of nation-wide stores, our vision for the future of television was catching on, and fast, eventually reaching almost 4 million subscribers.
As the iTV Doctor Rick Howe pointed out, selling 4 million of anything in the TV space is no small feat.
The Commercial Evolution
Rabbit TV was running full steam ahead, but the licensing deal with Telebrands that produced it was nearing the end of its sales lifecycle. Our eyes were set on further commercial opportunities beyond big box retail. Originally conceived as a set top box, SelectTV was going to be our gateway into these new markets, from household living rooms to the hospitality industry, one box that brought everything Rabbit TV did to any existing television set, requiring only bandwidth to deliver a low-cost but robust television experience was sure to be a gold mine.
After showing off this technology at several industry trade shows, we expected a large wave of interest. What we got was a tsunami, perhaps more akin to the Noah’s flood.
We quickly realized that we’d never be able to meet the demand we were facing in-house, and changed our strategy.
Rather than being tied to first-party hardware, we decided to open up the SelectTV platform, allowing all of the diverse interested parties to suit it to their specific needs, and more importantly, allowing for virtually any hardware manufacturer to produce a device that would work with it.
SelectTV was re-born and launched as a consumer-facing service, a complete user interface taking everything we had learned from Rabbit TV and putting it into a more polished package.
But the real improvements were “under the hood” and largely unseen by consumers.
With SelectTV, we had created an entire infrastructure for delivering next-gen TV via the web. One that would allow other partners to brand the service as their own, with full control over the content and membership experience.
This was a major leap forward from the single-license Rabbit TV platform, which also aggregated content, but wasn’t as flexible.
The Future is Now
While FreeCast has been building out the SelectTV platform, the media industry has been wandering from one idea to the next, in search of a way to reverse the lost revenues as the consumer exodus from cable TV accelerates.
But this wandering is leading many of the biggest names in the tech and television industries right to where we’ve been all along!
From Apple to Amazon, plenty of massive tech and media companies have tried various approaches, with varying degrees of success, only to eventually return to the approach pioneered by FreeCast: aggregation of content from multiple sources into a single unified guide.
With the OTT video space still relatively young, everybody’s been going for the lowest-hanging fruit first.
Networks and studios began by licensing content to Netflix, Amazon, and others, taking the check and essentially outsourcing their video-on-demand offering to these third parties.
Realizing that they’d created a monster in doing so, many networks responded with Netflix-style libraries of their own, assuming that if Netflix could charge $10 a month and attract so many users, they could too.
More recently, “skinny bundles” have been on the rise, essentially taking cable-TV style packages of linear channels to the web. It’s another familiar and easy idea.
But not one that solves the online TV puzzle for consumers, nor for the industry.
The heart of the problem is that nobody’s working together. Consumers don’t take sides in these content wars, they want and expect access to everything. But the media companies’ strategies still enshrine the zero-sum thinking of the old days, when a dozen channels on the dial and no other way to watch video content meant watching Show X on channel 2 meant you couldn’t possibly also watch show Y on channel 4.
It’s time to give that up, which is precisely why FreeCast has invested so much in building an agnostic entertainment ecosystem that allows all content providers to come together and monetize their offerings in an open marketplace that also provides a single seamless experience for the consumer.
In the war for your TV, we believe that these companies should spend more time fighting for you the consumer, rather than fighting for each other. And after several long years of disruption and progress, we believe we’re closer than ever to making that a reality.
So, in a nod to our friends at The Verge, here’s a video we’ve put together, with an update on that war for your TV from a CEO on the front lines of it all.
Please enjoy and let us know what you think.
