Lack of Standards Threatens TV Everywhere

Written by Steve Donohue

Tuesday, August 18. 2009 at 12:10 PM EDT Post a comment

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NEW YORK -- A lack of standards and a legal debate may keep the cable industry's "TV Everywhere" efforts from being widely deployed for at least another two years, top industry executives predicted Tuesday.

"The hurdles -- at least as we see it -- are huge. I've seen in the last 20 days about 40 different proposals for what TV Everywhere means to each individual company," CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith said at a panel session at the Paley Center for Media, where executives discussed efforts from cable operators and content suppliers to allow viewers to watch programming from their pay TV subscriptions on the Internet.

"There's no consensus. There's no standards," Smith added.

Smith, Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman, and thePlatform vice president of marketing Marty Roberts debated when TV Everywhere and similar efforts will be widely deployed and whether content suppliers should aggregate programming on a single site, or point pay-TV customers to individual sites containing streaming video versions of their favorite shows.

"I think it will be no later than 2012 -- maybe even 2011," Bowman said when asked if he expected TV Everywhere would launch commercially.

Smith concurred with that timeframe, while Roberts predicted that Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), which owns thePlatform, would deploy TV Everywhere commercially in 2010. "We're going to make it happen next year," Roberts added.

Comcast recently kicked off a technical trial with 5,000 subscribers nationwide to test an authentication system that would allow cable subscribers to view their pay TV content online.

With Major League Baseball and other content providers expressing concerns about piracy, the authentication system is the key to making projects like TV Everywhere succeed. Roberts compared the industry's efforts to those of social networks, which allow subscribers to access their content on computers, on mobile platforms -- and in the case of Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)'s FiOS product, on the TV.

"The good news is we're actually following the paths of the social networks -- Facebook, MySpace, and Google are doing a lot of things with OpenID -- looking at your online identity and how you can move it around," Roberts told audience members at the panel session, which was moderated by Multichannel News editor in chief Mark Robicheaux.

While Comcast and other pay-TV providers hope to group huge content libraries from programmers on a single Website, Bowman maintained that big content owners would prefer to keep viewers on their own sites.

"The notion that there's going to be massive aggregation on the Internet -- 500 networks... I think it's highly unlikely. I don't think content publishers are going to say, 'Here, take my content to a completely new medium, and have at it,'" Bowman said.

Bowman suggested that projects like TV Everywhere may not yield a single site that will contain content from dozens of programmers. Instead, the authentication system the industry develops may be used to point pay-TV subscribers to several different sites to view their pay-TV content online.

Smith defended the idea of programmers storing content on their own sites, rather than keeping it on a site that would aggregate content from many different suppliers. "It's not like you're traveling 50 miles on the way to the next theater. You're clicking. Stop obsessing about where it is," said Smith, sporting a pair of Nike camo sneakers.

Smith emphasized that TV Everywhere would allow CBS and other programmers to appease advertisers by allowing them to track how many viewers are watching their content and ads on multiple platforms. He also said TV Everywhere may one day allow networks to place targeted ads in TV, Internet video, and mobile versions of their shows, depending upon the profile of the viewer.

"In the ideal world you can see where on the big [TV] screen you can see an ad for Coca Cola. On the Internet it's a Diet Coke ad because we know you like Diet Coke," Smith said.

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