Cable Portability, Interactivity are Goals
NEW ORLEANS -- The cable industry would do well to make its services more portable and interactive, the better to compete with rampant free content, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy said late Monday at the NCTA convention. “I would encourage the industry to sit down and look at” ways to let subscribers view more programming away from home, he said. “There’s not a lot of federated identity, which means there’s not a lot of ability to move from one screen to a different neighbor’s house,” McNealy said. “I want all of my stuff connected, and I want the service providers” to do it “so I don’t have to.”
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Content is moving to a “social network” model, in which people share video clips and other material, and away from a one-way broadcast model, he said. “Content providers are trying to find some very creative ways to tap into that.”
Cable operators and programmers are pursing the interactive part, though full portability isn’t in the cards anytime soon, they said. “Two screens is here,” on which users simultaneously watch TV and use a PC, ESPN President George Bodenheimer said. It’s going to be “an awfully long time” before free content usurps programming like what his company sells cable operators, he added. Viewers are used to watching ads “as the price of free,” MTV Networks Chairman Judy McGrath said. “We're pretty careful about where we put content” like free video streaming.
Programmers are telling Time Warner Cable they want to put programming online and not charge to watch it, said President Glenn Britt. “But guess what? We do mind that.” The industry must make it easier for people to get programming anywhere, anytime, he said. “I don’t have a panacea to this, but the way a lot of content works today is ‘Let’s divide it up into as many slices as possible'” before distribution. “We're a long way away” from the type of seamless, portable distribution touted by McNealy, but Time Warner Cable is working on it, Britt told reporters. Interactive advertising and other interactive applications and an open platform are “where the industry is going,” said NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow, citing Tru2Way.
The trick is to combine TV’s “quality and experience” with PCs’ interactivity, said Charter CEO Neil Smit. “I'm hoping to see more connections between the two, and using one to drive the other.”