TV Everywhere has quietly developed into a booming ecosystem that, while not accelerating at the speed many pundits had hoped for, is nonetheless changing the way we watch video, and it's continuing to evolve as content owners become more comfortable with it.
A report out today from In-Stat, for example, says the video encoding market is poised to grow to a $460 million business by 2015, and that may be a conservative estimate as content providers and service providers look to find new markets and new delivery avenues for programming.
Elemental CEO Sam Blackman, who last month announced his encoding company had snared a major deal to prepare Comcast content to stream on its Xfinity TV Everywhere play, told me in June that his business had zero growth--as in it just keeps adding zeros to the end of its annual revenue.
"In 2008 we had six figures of revenue," said Blackman. "In 2009-2010 we had seven figures of revenue, and I think there's a very good change we'll have eight figures of revenue this year. An order of magnitude every other year... if we can keep that run rate up we'll be all right."
Avail-TVN, at the Cable Show in June, said it would deploy in excess of 100 channels of content, as it offers service providers a TV Everywhere solution. Time Warner Cable and Cablevision have both pressed forward, despite legal battles with iPad apps that put virtually their entire lineup onto the tablet, and there's little doubt that tablets will migrate further and further afield this year.
Comcast, set to release earnings on Wednesday, has pushed out its Xfinity service to nearly all of its footprint, and there's plenty of talk that it will eventually push beyond its own service area to offer Xfinity to anyone with an Internet connection.
HBO GO is pushing its way onto more service providers, most recently Charter Communications, and consumers are gobbling it up.
In-Stat's Research Director Michelle Abraham said, content providers expect as much as 75 percent of their content to be available online in a few years."The industry is at the start of multiscreen delivery and TV Everywhere," Abraham said.
TV Everywhere had a rough start, but is there really any doubt about how it will finish?--Jim