Janko Roettgers

Secretive cable TV upstart Layer3 TV is getting ready to launch in Chicago (IL) in the coming weeks. Some of the money used to finance the launch comes from two previously unannounced investors: French telecommunication company Altice, through newly acquired US subsidiary Suddenlink, and Paulson Co., the investment company of famed hedge fund investor John Paulson.

A Layer3 spokesperson declined to comment on unannounced investors, but confirmed plans to launch in Chicago soon. “After an oversubscribed trial run in Texas, we look forward to making the Second City first in cable,” he said. Layer3 TV wants to compete with traditional cable companies by offering consumers a modern, 4K-ready set-top box, a DVR that records up to eight shows at the same time and no long-term contract obligations. The company launched a beta test under the Umio brand in late 2015 in Texas, and is now getting ready to enter a second market with its debut in Chicago. Layer3 TV has started to hire sales representatives and other necessary staffers to prepare for its roll-out in the city, and targeted local consumers with banner ads.

[Commentary] HBO is never going to unbundle, except when it is: Executives of the premium cable network have long insisted that they won’t offer its HBO Go streaming service as a Netflix-like standalone Internet subscription in the United States.

But HBO is already running an Internet-only service in northern Europe, and it’s now looking to take that proposition to other countries, including possibly Japan and Turkey. HBO isn’t the only network that’s been testing the waters on Internet-based video services.

DirecTV is finally making the NFL Sunday ticket available to football fans without a pay TV subscription. The satellite TV provider is about to launch a new online service, dubbed NFLSundayTicketTV, which will offer access to NFL games that were previously only available to DirecTV subscribers. However, it looks like eligibility is limited to people who can’t get DirecTV.

The bigger drawback of the service is that many sports fans won’t have access to it. Prospective buyers have to enter their home address to see whether they’re eligible, and many are turned away. It looks like DirecTV is checking whether applicants live in single-home residencies, which could theoretically get satellite TV, or apartments, where satellite dishes are often blocked.

Slingshot, a local internet provider in New Zealand, wants to give its subscribers a little extra perk: The Internet service provider just added a new “global mode” to its Internet plans that allows its customers to access video services like Netflix or Hulu without getting in trouble for coming from the wrong country (hat tip to Broadband Reports).

Slingshot’s global mode is essentially a virtual private network (VPN), meaning that it reroutes any traffic through servers situated in other countries. Slingshot subscribers using global mode may look like they’re located in New York as opposed to Auckland.

Google’s Chromecast team has found an interesting way to pair Chromecast streaming sticks with mobile devices that are not on the same Wi-Fi network.

Pairing is done through inaudible, ultrasonic sounds, which should make sure that your neighbor won’t suddenly rickroll your TV screen.

Chromecast Engineering Manager John Affaki said that the goal was to make the social use of Chromecast in the living room easier.

Google’s YouTube app already allows users to build collaborative queues for on-the-fly YouTube parties, and Affaki said that the support for these kinds of queues will be added to the Chromecast software developer’s kit to bring it to other apps as well. However, the challenge is that users need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, and sharing Wi-Fi passwords can be cumbersome.

“The initial step of getting on the same Wi-Fi network can be really complicated,” said Affaki.

Comcast is looking to test a new platform for the distribution of online videos through its new X1 cable set-top boxes by the end of 2014, the company’s SVP of Video Matt Strauss confirmed.

Strauss said that the service will be evaluated through what he called “limited tests.” He said that it will have some similarities to YouTube, allowing content creators to directly upload their videos to a server. These videos will then become available via a dedicated app running on Comcast’s X1 box, which the company has been gradually rolling out across its markets.

Without elaborating, Strauss said that the focus won’t be on user-generated content, which YouTube obviously started out with. However, YouTube has put a much bigger focus on professionally-produced and serialized content in recent years, and that seems where Comcast is aiming at with this initiative as well.

Strauss added that Comcast will be able to offer content producers a number of monetization options, which could include advertising as well as transactional fees, but said that the company is still evaluating its options.

Google released an US-focused version of its video quality report, which offers users a way to check which of their local Internet service providers (ISPs) deliver the best-looking YouTube streams.

The report is singling out some ISPs as “HD verified” which YouTube Product Manager Jay Akkad defined this way: “If your provider can consistently deliver HD video, a resolution of at least 720p, without buffering or interruptions -- it’s HD Verified.”

The report also shows which ISPs are capable of delivering SD quality video without buffering, and which ones deliver videos at a lower performance, or in other words will leave you completely frustrated. To get to these results, YouTube monitored streams over a 30-day period. Only ISPs that were capable of delivering HD at least 90 percent of the time are being called HD verified.

[Commentary] There’s been much speculation about the possibility that HBO could one day directly compete with Netflix by offering consumers a way to subscribe to its HBO Go service without signing up for cable.

HBO executives have long said they’re not interested in such a proposition, so here’s a different thought: What if AMC took the plunge instead and became the first network to leave the traditional pay TV world and sold its service directly online?

AMC is currently in 99 million US households, which means that the network makes about $32.6 million per month from retransmission fees. So if 3.2 million people paid $10 a month for a Netflix-style AMC subscription, it could ditch the retransmission revenue stream entirely.

By going online, AMC wouldn’t just reinvent itself. It would also reinvent television for the Internet age, and in turn change the economics of media on the Internet.

If TV executives had their way, then Netflix would look a whole lot more like its network-owned competitor Hulu or Amazon’s streaming service.

Executives from Nickelodeon, FX, Showtime and AMC explained that they would like Netflix to follow those services in doing more to promote their networks.

FX Networks EVP of Research Julie Piepenkotter quipped: “Breaking Bad did a whole lot more for Netflix than Netflix did for Breaking Bad.”

Piepenkotter went on to complain that TV shows on Netflix don’t feature an intro, also known as bumper, that tells viewers on which network they originally aired. She mused that part of HBO’s reasoning for licensing its content to Amazon as opposed to Netflix was that Amazon allows for such branding, and added that her own network also has a much better working relationship with Amazon due to this branding.

FX will even tell its viewers that they can catch up on previous seasons of its drama Justified on Prime because Amazon keeps the FX branding on Justified, she said.

Still think American TV audiences don’t like to binge? Think again: Seven out of ten US TV viewers consider themselves binge viewers, according to a study released by Miner & Co.

63 percent of those binge viewers burn through TV show episodes in one sitting at least once a week, while 17 percent even do so every day.