Time Warner announced today that it and Comcast will work together to make high-definition program available online for free. The press release from Time Warner is the standard, self-praising rhetoric, but it also includes a provision which our good friends at Hulu do not: namely that “video subscribers can watch programming from their favorite TV networks online for no additional charge,” meaning that you’ll have access to this content, dubbed by the companies as TV Everywhere, online if and only if you are a subscriber to Comcast to Time Warner. In effect, Time Warner is trying to give the crowd that’s jumping onto the broadband-only boat a reason to stay subscribers to their cable television service.
Perhaps the biggest oddity in that announcement is that there does not seem to be any sort of centralized portal for the content. One of the nicest things about Hulu is that I can watch programming from a lot of services from one location. But, at least initially, content will be available in a smattering of places, including comcast.net and fancast.com. Hopefully Time Warner will get it together and make some central portal for all the shows they will be offering.
Time Warner does own the rights to many of the shows that are on Hulu, so it will be interesting to see what they do to make TV Everywhere the more attractive streaming option, as they no doubt want it to be. One possible route, and a very smart one at that, would be to deliver content to Hulu as they do now, but continue do so after some elapsed time interval. TV Everywhere users, however, would have access to content online when it aired on standard television. That could get a lot of people to stay with cable.
Isn’t it nice when something you think should happen actually does?
