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Friday, May 22, 2009

Satellite, Telcos In 'TV Everywhere' Camp

How do you control online video content, only give it to those customers that have bought it; otherwise, more consumers will drop their cable subscription and watch everything through the web. "The idea: to reinforce the value of paying for television service, by serving up TV episodes or even live programming, to customers' PCs or other Internet devices simply by providing a user name and password." Is this done to eke out additional dollars or to simply reinforce value to those already paying for the brand on cable. And it preserves the cable model.

"Programmers, however, have expressed a preference to deliver Internet TV content via their own, or affiliated, sites." any interest quote but I am not sure it is true. Cable risks losing subscription revenue when they make it free to consumers on the web. And if programmers believe they can charge for access to their website, they may be mistaken. Consumers really don't want an a la carte experience, paying for content on each site they visit. Cable's packaging philosophy has enabled consumers to get access to channels they might never have the chance to find and view on their own. And helps to disperse the costs across a larger number, thereby reducing the cost per sub amount while increasing the value proposition.

Ultimately, the consumer wants the flexibility and convenience to decide what, when and where they want to watch content; push it to the PC, the big screen or even the mobile. And we prefer to only pay once for the content as we believe we should control where we watch it and not have to pay multiple times for different devices. Will the world end up this way; it certainly keeps changing.