Coda

San Diego — Cox Communications and the San Diego Padres will become the second tandem to pair with Major League Baseball Advanced Media to enable customers to watch streamed ball games within their local TV territory.

Beginning with Channel 4’s simulcast of a July 16 game between the Padres and Colorado Rockies, Cox’s high-speed broadband service customers can watch the streamed contests.

Using an authentication process that will be enabled and managed by MLBAM and Cox, the MSO’s high-speed Internet customers can watch Padres games live on their computer anywhere in the team’s home television market.

The package is available for $49.95 for the balance of the season, or $19.95 for any 30-day period. Where available, games will be delivered in high definition, using the highest quality live streaming pioneered by MLBAM this year in its MLB.TV premium package.

The deal evidently provides a way for non-Cox video customers to get access to the games that will be simulcast from Channel 4, which has been the subject of a program-access complaint with the Federal Communications Commission by AT&T.

A Cox spokesman declined to address that issue specifically. He did say, though, that the new local market broadband package provides another way for San Diego Padres fans to access the ballgames.

The partnership differs from one announced earlier last month by YES Network, the New York Yankees and Cablevision Systems in that the local streaming package in that regional sports network’s four-state territory is only available to customers of the operator’s Family Cable (expanded basic) video package, as well as its broadband service.

Deal terms were not disclosed, but they are likely to be similar to the pact constructed in New York. According to the SportsBusiness Journal, MLBAM will garner 50% of the revenue from streamed Yankees games, with YES, the Yankees and Cablevision carving up the balance.

“Now Cox customers have another convenient way to enjoy Channel 4 San Diego’s award-winning coverage of Padres baseball,” said Craig Nichols, vice president and general manager of Channel 4 San Diego.

Added MLB president and chief operating officer Bob DuPuy: “We are very pleased to partner in this important joint effort to deliver greater access to Padres fans within their local market.”

— Mike Reynolds

New York — Video-on-demand suppliers have cranked up efforts to deliver products for high-capacity “RS-DVR” services, after the Supreme Court this week declined to review a ruling that Cablevision Systems’ network-based digital video recorder complies with copyright laws.

Vendors including SeaChange International, Cisco Systems, Arris and Concurrent are gearing up to deliver VOD systems with much higher ingest and storage capacity to meet higher performance requirements. (See story, p. 3.) Most current VOD systems may not be suited to cost-effectively build a Remote Storage-DVR service, as it has been deemed legal, according to industry executives.

Cablevision’s RS-DVR is designed to provide subscribers with dedicated storage space in the headend. That architecture allowed the MSO to successfully argue that the service was no different than an in-home DVR.

But the RS-DVR presents serious technical challenges. For one thing, every time a subscriber presses “record,” the system must separately ingest the video stream and write it to disk. In a cable system with, say, 2 million subscribers that have access to an RS-DVR, if just 30% of customers were recording a program at any given time that would mean the system would have to be ingesting 600,000 streams at once — well beyond the capacity of any existing VOD infrastructure, said James Brickmeier, Concurrent’s vice president and general manager of video solutions.

“Technically, we’re capable of building these things,” he said. “The questions come down to the financial aspects of building these systems.” Brickmeier said he expects to see VOD servers that are “financially viable” within 12 to 24 months.

SeaChange, for one, claims it’s ready with a system that can handle an RS-DVR service. The company has developed a system, available now, that can ingest 4,000 standard-definition streams simultaneously and provides 100 Terabytes of storage in a seven-rack-unit server configuration, according to vice president of products Bang Chang. He added that by the beginning of 2010 the company expects to double that capacity to 8,000.

“That’s the key, we believe, to make RS-DVR viable,” he said.

— Todd Spangler

Bethpage, N.Y. — The reported impending sale of the National Hockey League’s Montreal Canadiens to the Molson brewing family for as much as $550 million could have an unintended beneficiary — Cablevision Systems.

Cablevision, which also owns the NHL’s New York Rangers, earlier this year said it was investigating the split-off of its MSG unit — which includes the National Basketball Association New York Knicks, the WNBA New York Liberty, Madison Square Garden arena and other entertainment venues, and the MSG Media sports channels. According to a research report by Collins Stewart media analyst Tom Eagan, if the Canadiens sell for $500 million to $550 million — the deal still has to be approved by the league — it could significantly boost the valuation placed on the Rangers. In his report, Eagan wrote that the Habs sale, coupled with the anticipated sale of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs (said to fetch more than $850 million) could add another $3 per share in incremental value to MSG. Eagan added that his $350 million valuation for the Rangers, “now seems conservative based on this comparison.”

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a research note that he believed the Knicks and Rangers could now fetch about $1.5 billion alone, well above his previous valuation of $1 billion for all of MSG.

— Mike Farrell

Sunnyvale, Calif. — Yahoo is shutting down the Maven Networks online video-management services group, which the company acquired last year for $160 million.

Maven’s platform had been used by more than 30 media companies, including Fox News, Scripps Networks, A&E Television Networks, CBS Sports, Hearst and Gannett. Yahoo had hoped to use Maven’s technology and customer base to expand its inventory for online-video advertising by allowing clients to buy ads across multiple publishers.

— Todd Spangler