On the one hand ... TVEyes sounds like a great, useful service.
On the other hand, once all of the legal challenges are out of the way, I can't imagine there won't be a bunch of other companies swooping in to undercut them. $500/month for a service like this? I'm thinking that has the potential to go down significantly and quickly, with competition.
For instance, I can imagine a cut-rate service that doesn't do speech-to-text but instead relies solely on closed captioning. Or a plan that monitors only a limited subset of channels. It might not have all the features of TVEyes, but may have enough to hurt TVEyes' business if it doesn't lower prices and offer a limited tier itself.
It might not make sense for such a service to pop up now, while the legal issues are unsettled, but if TVEyes bears the litigation burden to get those issues settled, I can't imagine it wouldn't face stiffer competition down the line.
$500/mo sounds like peanuts for what a service like this provides. For a business that would use this type of information (e.g. TV shows like Daily Show or Colbert or a political campaign) it's both worth more and cheaper than doing it in house. The power bill alone for all those TV-tuners/DVRs would be more than that!
... or at least something similar. In other words, they do it themselves. That's the only way I can explain their uncanny ability to find a dozen clips containing a certain word or phrase across very long time frames.
A tangent, but I thought I remembered The Colbert Report staff developing something like this in-house. After a bit of searching, it turns out that staff members had actually developed and spun-off a segment writing and producing tool [1].
Are you saying you can set up an infrastructure to record every TV station and then distribute clips via multiple platforms, and charge a small amount of money for the service?
This market is extremely mature now. Between TVEyes and Critical Mention, it would be very difficult to get a foothold. The disruption occurred in the 2002-2005 timeframe.
IMO, you should never attempt to compete on price alone.
On the other hand, once all of the legal challenges are out of the way, I can't imagine there won't be a bunch of other companies swooping in to undercut them. $500/month for a service like this? I'm thinking that has the potential to go down significantly and quickly, with competition.
For instance, I can imagine a cut-rate service that doesn't do speech-to-text but instead relies solely on closed captioning. Or a plan that monitors only a limited subset of channels. It might not have all the features of TVEyes, but may have enough to hurt TVEyes' business if it doesn't lower prices and offer a limited tier itself.
It might not make sense for such a service to pop up now, while the legal issues are unsettled, but if TVEyes bears the litigation burden to get those issues settled, I can't imagine it wouldn't face stiffer competition down the line.