A cover story in Business Week Magazine titled "Revenge of the Cable Guys," skewers the cable industry for creating TV Everywhere as a way to control "free" online TV content by "using the $32 billion they pay content providers each year as leverage" to keep them off new platforms that are not attached to cable subscriptions.
TV Everywhere in its simplest form is the ability to see content from any Internet connected device in any location--as long as you are a cable subscriber. In order to access the content, a subscriber must type in an authorization code. The concept is being hyped and trialed primarily by Comcast and Time Warner. According to the Business Week story, the idea of TV Everywhere was "conjured up in quiet strategy sessions by Jeff Bewkes and Brian Roberts, the CEOs of Time Warner and Comcast."
The goal of TV Everywhere, the story concludes, is to take what's becoming available free online from small Silicon Valley start-ups like Boxee, Roku and Sezmi, and put it behind the walls of the cable subscription model. It will get traction because "the makers of movies and TV shows are attached to the billions they receive from the cable companies and are understandably reluctant to engage in grand experiments with upstarts touting unproven business models" that include moving content to new platforms unattached to any cable subscription.
For more:
- see this story in Business Week
- and this blog
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