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November 2017
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NFL Expands Streaming Even Further With New Deal With Verizon, Which Will Make Mobile Streaming Non-Exclusive

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Long-time readers of Techdirt will know that for as long as I've written here, I've screamed for professional and college sports leagues to offer better streaming options. It has never made a lick of sense to me that an industry so reliant on eyeballs and advertising revenue would want to limit either by keeping people from watching their games. While we're not where I'd like to be, much has changed in the intervening years. Streaming from pro sports leagues has advanced considerably, both in terms of quality and availability. And, perhaps more importantly, this march has only gone in the direction of more and better streaming options.A march that continues into the present, in fact, as the NFL appears to be on the verge of inking a new streaming deal with Verizon that is just as important for what it does not include as what it does. We'll start with what Verizon gets from the deal, which is an end to the hilarious limit on screen size for the NFL streaming product.

Verizon and the National Football League are in talks to sign another streaming rights deal. According to a Bloomberg report, the wireless provider and the NFL are close to finalizing a new deal that would let Verizon stream games to Internet-connected TVs, tablets, and phones. Verizon's previous deal only allowed it to stream games to devices with screens that are 7-inches or smaller, so the new deal would open up NFL games to Verizon customers who primarily consume TV content on smart TVs, tablets, and other large devices.
This tells us a number of things. First, it tells us that Verizon is betting relatively small phones aren't the only devices that NFL fans want to watch NFL games on. With the explosion of Smart TVs and mobile tablets with 4G connections, fans have never been more ready to stream an NFL game from so many places, whether it's on the go in transit or in front of a computer screen or tablet at home. Likewise, these deal terms tell us that the NFL too sees value in expanding streaming generally (more on that in a minute). No longer attempting to limit this deal specifically to smartphones, the NFL is knocking over the dam keeping streaming at bay. This, in case it wasn't obvious, should be shiver-inducing for terrestrial and cable TV networks that used to be the dominant players for sports broadcasts.But what's not in the Verizon deal is what demonstrates just how big an opportunity the NFL sees in streaming.
According to people familiar with the matter, Verizon would also lose exclusive rights to air games on mobile devices as part of the deal. That means that while Verizon customers would have more device options for watching football, it may not be the only one to stream NFL games. Other wireless providers or streaming TV providers, such as Sling TV or DirecTV Now, may be able to strike their own deals with the NFL and provide streamed games to their subscribers through their own apps.
That's a big deal, particularly for a league that has operated with exclusivity deals essentially as a business mantra. Born of the era of network television, the NFL has long maintained these types of close broadcast partnerships, but now that is slipping away when it comes to streaming. And ultimately that's the only move that makes sense, as eyeballs and advertising revenue will be spread far and wide through the NFL's own network, making the real estate for ads on its broadcasts all the more valuable.Streaming keeps expanding in pro sports. It's a great thing for everyone other than cable TV.

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Vulnerability Found In Amazon Key, Again Showing How Dumber Tech Is Often The Smarter Option

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As with most things in the internet of things space, secure, smart door locks have traditionally been frequently shown to be neither. In fact, a recent study that looked at 16 different smart locks found twelve of them to be easily compromised. And again, many of these vulnerabilities were of the vanilla stupid variety, with passwords being transmitted unencrypted, letting anybody with a modicum of technical skill and a Bluetooth sniffer to pluck your front door access code out of thin air. Like most things in the IOT space, companies have been so eager to make a buck they've left common sense standing on the front porch.So when Amazon introduced its new $250 Smart Key system a few weeks back, most people were understandably skeptical. The product promises to securely let Amazon delivery folk unlock your front door and place packages inside, with an accompanying camera that tracks every move the deliveryman makes to ensure personal security. But the idea of Amazon delivery personnel gaining access to your home immediately raised all manner of questions among journalists, ranging from obvious questions of personal security to what happens if Amazon lets fido out by accident:

"Amazon flat-out says that, if your pet has access to the front door, you should not use the service. Dogs don't take kindly to strangers entering the home, and cats may try to bolt through an open door. Then again, Amazon also touts the joy of allowing pet sitters and dog walkers to access your home with the smart lock."
This skepticism is understandable. Amazon already has a live microphone sitting in millions of customer homes worldwide, and the idea of letting Amazon also open your front door at will is a bridge too far for many. As if on cue, reports quickly emerged last week that justified this concerns, highlighting how the Amazon Key camera system could be easily exploited to disable system safeguards. Researchers at Rhino Security Labs demonstrated that by using a simple program within WiFi range, the camera can be not only disabled, but frozen -- presenting the image of a closed door while burglars happily pilfer your possessions.As with many of these vulnerabilities, Rhino Security researchers note that the attack isn't particularly complicated, leaving traces neither in the image recordings or the system logs:
"In their demonstration, shown in the video above, a delivery person unlocks the door with their Amazon Key app, opens the door, drops off a package, and then closes the door behind them. Normally, they'd then lock the door with their app. In this attack, they instead run a program on their laptopor, Rhino's researchers suggest, on a simple handheld device anyone could build using a Raspberry Pi minicomputer and an antennathat sends a series of "deauthorization" commands to the home's Cloud Cam."
Amazon is promising an update that resolves the problem shortly, though the service has -- as countless IOT devices have before it -- already acted as an unintentional advertisement to the fact that dumb technology often remains the smartest option.

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