TV Everywhere's Move Pick Is a Puzzle

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, July 17. 2009 at 03:00 PM EDT 13 comments

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When Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) finally launch their first trial of paid-TV content available over broadband networks, they'll be using Move Networks Inc. technology to do so.

The choice is surprising for a number of reasons, including the availability of competing technologies, existing partnerships with Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE), and the lack of support from some content providers involved in the trial.

Comcast and Time Warner's broadband video initiative -- dubbed On Demand Online by the MSO and TV Everywhere by the content provider -- seeks to allow users of paid-TV content services to use them over a variety of devices and networks.

To make the service attractive to consumers, Comcast and Time Warner need to deliver high-quality video while also offering up a secure, yet easy-to-use authentication scheme.

Certainly Move has quality on its side. The company helped popularize high-quality video streaming with its adaptive bit-rate technology, which adjusts the quality of a video stream to match the end user's available bandwidth. For a trial deployment that involves serving video to a number of different customers over a number of different network conditions, picking an adaptive bit-rate technology seems to make sense.

The choice of Move Networks is interesting in part because it's a startup, and it's no longer the only vendor offering such technology. Over the past year, both Adobe and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) have made competing adaptive bit-rate streaming technologies available through their own video platforms.

Making the technology decision even more surprising is the fact that Comcast and Time Warner have both thrown their support behind Adobe Flash with recent partnership announcements.

Comcast may be excused from this particular point of contention, since the press release it signed up for was around broad industry support for Adobe as a technology to be used in digital TVs, set-top boxes, and the like. And to our knowledge, the TV Everywhere at this point is about making premium video content available on PCs. It's worth noting, however, that Comcast relies on Adobe Flash for the on-demand content found on its Fancast video portal.

But Time Warner doesn't have the same excuse. Its partnership with Adobe -- announced less than six months ago -- is all about the company using Flash for online initiatives in its Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., and Home Box Office Inc. divisions.

At the time it was announced, many speculated that meant that Flash would be the video technology Time Warner would use to finally use to bring its premium HBO content online, but now that might not be the case.

Finally, there's the matter of all those other content partners, many of which already use Flash for their own video sites. CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), which uses Flash for its TV.com video portal and its CBS Audience Network, seems particularly unhappy with Move as the enabling technology.

When asked about the selection of Move technology for the trial, CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith expressed his displeasure with the decision. Among the reasons Smith gave was a lack of penetration for the Move client -- especially compared to Flash, which Adobe claims is installed on 98 percent of all Internet-connected PCs.

"The last thing we want is another client that people will have to download," Smith said.

Smith said that CBS, which announced it was joining the trial earlier this week, would press Comcast to switch technology providers before the technical trial becomes a commercial deployment.

"I don't mind using it for a 5,000-person trial, but if it gets bigger than that -- Come on, we're talking about the big leagues here," Smith said.

Comcast declined to comment on the reasons for selecting Move's technology. When asked for comment, however, spokeswoman Jen Khoury stressed that the initial rollout was a technical trial and that the final technology chosen for a commercial deployment of On Demand Online could vary significantly from what the company starts out with.