Cable Companies - "The fight has just begun"

As many know, I have recently given up my cable television subscription, and replaced it with faster internet access and a wideband connection from Timewarner.  Cable television, with it's set times for viewing shows, and it's lousy DVR and HD that never seemed to work right, had worn out its welcome at my house.

Sadly, my dreams of watching all of my shows on the internet, like I do now, may not last forever.  Because where there's money to be made, don't doubt there will be someone there to make it.

That someone is the cable companies themselves, who, fearing the flight of people just like myself to the World Wide Watching Web of online viewing, are preparing the next round in the fight for my eyeballs.  A recent article in Businessweek discusses "TV Everywhere", in which "viewers can watch shows for free, but only if they're cable subscribers first. In other words, as long as you tap a subscription code into your device—any device—you can watch anything you want, whenever you want."

Uh-oh.  

Already, HBO has been trying out this format in a few select cities, and found that people who were already paying for HBO, and got access to watch shows online, didn't spend any less time watching HBO on TV than on their laptops.  Time Warner executives and Comcast executives began to meet, and dream up a new model where cable companies would create this new model...as long as you could confirm that you were a cable subscriber, you'd get access to all of the same channels and shows online.  The model would use the existing infrastructures and establish interfaces.

Initial concerns and issues would be that the rest of industry would have to sign up for this model...meaning, the rest of pay TV and content providers would have to join up with the cable companies.   And while it seems impossible, never estimate the amount of clout, and money, that the large cable companies control and have at their disposal.

While both companies were on board,  on large disagreement between the strange marriage of Comcast and Time Warner was how to go about this...create one portal online site where all users would go to get their content?  Or let the studios keep their own sites...like abc.com, nbc.com, etc.  They agreed to the latter, and began the grand experiment of trying to woe the studios.

Apparently, the studios and content providers are eager to play ball...while upstarts like hulu.com and other such sites are showing new shows a day or two after, they aren't really making large amounts of money for the studios...and far less for cable companies.  And with the cable companies begin the largest customers of content, studios are less inclined to move towards working with start-ups that are competitors to their big money clients - time warner , comcast, verizon, and directTv.

The race has begun before we've even started.  Last year, Comcast began testing out Fancast XFinity TV, which follows the TV everywhere model.  Only subscribers to who pay for digital cable and broadband service from Comcast are eligible. Says the article, "Subscribers can tune into two dozen channels, from CBS to Animal Planet, and view 19,000 full-length TV shows and movies. They can use it on as many as three PCs and get most episodes 24 hours after they first air on TV. Much of that was available on Comcast's free site, but now shows on HBO and the Discovery channel have been added to the lineup."

So what does this mean for us as internet TV viewers?  Well, the countdown clock is ticking.  With the cable companies intent on keeping their cable subscription profits intact, and the tv studios and industry eager to please their largest paying customers, it looks like an unholy marriage is forming that will one day wipe out the hulu.com's on the online world. If all the content is funneled into one online source that you can only get access to by having a cable subscription already, what will this due to the rapidly shrinking TV audience, and the notion of "free online content".  Is it really "Free" if we are paying for Time Warner's internet service?

In the end, I feel that TV needs to become MORE like the internet in order to survive.  Already, Verizon Fios is going that route, making their digital cable service more like that internet in that you can watch TV, use Facebook, check weather, and Twitter on your TV without changing the channel.  Also, cable television should become more customizable.  Do we really need 700 channels?  I personally only watched about 10 or so, and would happily pay about $10 a month to get only those.

Read the whole article at Businessweek