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By JENNA WORTHAM
in through
Silicon Valley, butanother
at a faster clip. Dozens
of homegrown tech companies have
On Tuesday,
ofis simple.
the ButSuplatform.
Predicting Aereo
that your city was
will be thein
next front
Silicon Valley
actuattracted millions of users. Start-ups connected with New York’s major inally making it the next Silicon Valley is something else entirely — as New York
like media, advertising and commerce are finding particular success.
is slowly
finding out.
preme Court
with
what once seemed like a pre- dustries
The Federal Communications Commission
But no New York start-up has been a breakout hit, the sort of blockbuster
A few years ago, officials and executives in New York proclaimed their amwith
a
multibillion-dollar
valuation that has become so commonplace in Silicon
to build thethat
city into a
a powerful
hotbed
for tech innovation.
funposterous bition:
notion:
third
party
couldOfficials
grab
was
up next.
Its announcement late WednesValley.
neled money into start-up incubators and approved a bid from Cornell UniversiAnd that has led to some disappointment for people who helped set the
Despite
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ty
to
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Roosevelt
Island
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next-generation
broadcast technology
signals
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day
that content providers could be charged
sights so high.
campus to rival Stanford’s. Social media darlings like Foursquare,
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downtown
Manhattan,
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of Brooklyn, were hailed as surefire breakouts.
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Still Starting Up
Still Starting U
ANNA PARINI
By JENNA WORTHAM
Since then, money has poured into the city’s tech sector — not as much as
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I’m not saying the jig — er, business model
— is up, but if your platform, your programming
and your audience are all under attack, the degree of difficulty in selling big packages of entertainment over cable is increasing.
I should point out that when I called Laura
Martin, a co-writer of the Needham report on
the consequences of an unbundled cable business, she was having almost none of it. The
HBO sale to Amazon? A back catalog of little
consequence. The Comcast merger? It makes
a lot of sense to her and still seems very likely.
(She also noted that subscriptions were up at
Comcast.) She says it is about time that Netflix
and its ilk pay their fair share for carriage, and
she doesn’t buy the numbers suggesting television is losing mind share.
Ms. Martin said that television viewing
continued to rise no matter how many screens
vied for attention, and cable channels were
moving quickly to stay relevant in a smallerscreen environment.
“With the advent of TV Everywhere, we
think the TV bundle has never been stronger,”
she said.
Other than that, we were in complete agreement.
Ultimately, it isn’t any one thing that will
pull apart what has been a durable generator of
profits; instead it will be the accretion of options
and the changing habits of consumers who want
to choose their programming according to their
tastes, rather than having it pushed at them in
bulk by a cable company. No less than Steve
Jobs once reminded me that change happens
slowly and then it happens all at once.
I’m looking forward to the day when I can
buy only what I want to watch, or eat, without
economic penalty. In other words, no, I do not
n
want fries with that.