TV Everywhere Seen Meeting Consumer Expectations—In a Few Years

Were TV Everywhere a product sold by a single company, a fix would be in place for MVPD subscriber problems remembering passwords and user names, knowing where to find past episodes of a particular show and other issues, executives from Comcast and Time Warner's TBS said. But they said broadcasters, cable programmers and MVPDs all are part of TV Everywhere, and often have different apps or ways to access video other than on the TV. There are "dozens if not hundreds of companies that are trying to work together to pull this off," said Jeremy Legg, TBS head-strategy and product monetization. There has been "remarkable" progress given it's an industrywide initiative, "but it still hasn't done enough," he said. "I don't think we've done, candidly, that great a job as an industry."

Others agreed the industry has more to do, and said it may take a while to wrap up that work. "We've invested a lot to make sure the experience is one [subscribers] want to use," said Jimshade Chaudhari, Dish Network director-video product management. "We've promised that as an industry, and we've underdelivered a lot." Pay TV is a "very complicated ecosystem," one in which "we're all tied together," said Albert Cheng, Disney/ABC Television Group chief product officer, digital media. "It's a little hairy. We took all this time to figure out how to resolve all these issues."

It will take a while to clear the remaining hurdles to more customer use of TV Everywhere, executives said. It took two to three years for the industry to get the necessary rights clearances, and it may take about as long to meet consumer expectations, TBS' Legg said. Comcast is "still working toward" its goals, said Vito Forlenza, senior director-TV Everywhere content and product strategy. "You'll see us blur the lines this year of the in-home and out-of-home experience as much as [circumstances] will allow." Some consumers don't know about TV Everywhere, which has suffered from a lack of consistency across offerings, Forlenza and others said.

To limit how often MVPD subscribers forget their TV Everywhere login names and passwords, Comcast, Dish and others offer "social identification," where MVPD customers use passwords from websites like Facebook to see the streaming video. Because Dish has made TV Everywhere easier for its customers to use and log in to, it has seen "tremendous growth" in such usage, Dish's Chaudhari said. But it's not always clear to consumers what TV Everywhere is or how it differs from other products like Netflix, executives said. If that issue and the identification authentication problem aren't addressed, the pay-TV industry eventually will lag behind rivals, they said. Chaudhari said Dish's new over-the-top video product, unveiled earlier at CES (see 1501050037), doesn't compete with TV Everywhere and is meant to be "an alternative service to keep you in the TV ecosystem."

The industry is making the necessary tweaks, executives said, with some saying it may be a turning point. Under the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, an effort is underway to make TV Everywhere more consistent across providers, so for instance it's clear where to log in, Comcast's Forlenza said. He's part of a CTAM committee working on that, and also the Open Authentication Technology Committee, an association of companies like CBS, DirecTV, Fox and Viacom or their business units that is working on technical standards. Comcast is "very active in both those industry groups" to "come up with sort of a standardized TV Everywhere experience," he said in an interview. "There is a lot of momentum" industrywide, Forlenza said, adding that he has gotten a "good feeling" from other companies that they're committed to the effort.