TV Everywhere: Pay TV Operators’ Battle for Survival

Yonatan Sela 20 Aug 09

The increasing popularity of online video tremendously affects nearly every aspect of the content industry. Pay TV providers in particular fear that the popularity of the cable, satellite and telco TV subscriptions they offer will constantly decrease, as websites like Hulu offer ads supported premium content in high quality for free. Pay TV operators’ ability to differentiate themselves on the content side is endangered, ultimately making them irrelevant in the long run. So what can pay TV operators do? In short, the answer is TV Everywhere: authentication mechanism that ensures certain premium content (movies, TV Shows, sports events etc.) is available online only for viewers who prove their subscription to a pay TV operator (primarily cable, satellite, telco TV).

Generally, as long as content owners cannot support their business through advertising alone, they would largely rely on subscription revenues from pay TV providers (for instance, in US nearly 30% of revenues from content come from pay TV). I have recently written about video ads’ inability to solely support online premium content over time (you can read an interesting article playing with the idea Hulu should add a subscription model, or just listen to the man behind Hulu, NBC’s CEO Jeff Zucker, simply saying it). Therefore leading cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner, followed by DirecTV, have declared their intention to offer an extension of their subscription online by offering their premium content to PC users. Thereby, users will enjoy their TV package anytime, anywhere, and get online access to content which hasn’t been available in the past (legally) outside the TV screen.  

In order for the video industry not to suffer the fate of the music industry, American multi-service operators are aiming for a model in which they remain the pipeline for content consumption – in the web as well. Europeans operators are likely to follow suit. Here at Tvinci we provide the tools that enable operators to quickly launch a web TV service which is complementary with their TV content offering (see our work for the content of mobile operator Orange here). In the upcoming IBC exhibition in Amsterdam Tvinci will present its unique authentication solution, enabling operators to offer their subscribers access to content on the PC, set-top box and mobile/portable devices. Using Tvinci’s authentication solution TV Everywhere is utilized not just as a survival tool for pay TV operators, but as a real contributor to their revenues in the present –I’ll write more about it on my next post!

Posted in All posts, Broadband Video, Internet TV, Monetization, Operators, Pay TV, TV Portal 2 Comments so far

1. David Wicks 20 Aug 09

   You can be sure that cable and satellite operators will charge subscribers for this as well…

2. Simon Lopata 24 Aug 09

   The questions are how, when and will everybody that needs to be on board in order to make this happen - will indeed do so.
   In any case, I like this vision, it might help preventing the content we get on the from being in low quality and incomplete