“As the big picture comes into focus though, it looks like the cable guys are playing the lead roles, using the fees they pay content providers as leverage. Cable, satellite and telecommunication companies pay $32 billion a year, according to media research firm SNL Kagan. The alphabet soup of newbies is still waiting in the wings for a moment that might never come,” Grover, Lowry and Edwards report. “What happened? Part of the answer is TV Everywhere, a service in its infancy, conjured up in strategy sessions by Jeff Bewkes and Brian Roberts, the chief executive officers of New York-based Time Warner Inc. and Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. They took a lesson from the music labels, which looked up one day to find that Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. had taken control of their inventory.”
“The cable guys came up with a quick, technologically simple fix: Viewers can watch shows for free, but only if they’re cable subscribers first. As long as you tap a subscription code into your device — any device — you can watch anything you want, whenever you want,” Grover, Lowry and Edwards report. “It’s worth hitting pause here for a moment. Right now, Time Warner is offering the service in only a few markets. Comcast has rolled out a trial, or beta, version to about 80 percent of its subscribers, according to the company. There are plenty of kinks to be sorted out.”
Grover, Lowry and Edwards report that when “Apple CEO Steve Jobs began renting out TV shows online, the cable companies beat back that onslaught by beefing up their video-on- demand offerings and giving subscribers free shows with a few clicks of the remote.” Still, “TV Everywhere has a ways to go before the cable guys can declare victory.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “84 Mac Guy” for the heads up.]
