Do we really need more ways to watch The Closer?
Apparently so, as "Comcast and Time Warner Inc. will work together on a nationwide trial, set to begin this month, that will provide new and recent episodes from top TNT and TBS series over the Web to 5,000 of the operator's cable TV customers." (Comcast rival, Time Warner Cable, which was split off from its parent company in March, also has plans to pursue similar trials.)
The model, which the companies have ominously dubbed "TV Everywhere," will initially provide full episodes of TBS and TNT shows "only to customers who subscribe to both cable TV and broadband services, over only a Comcast-provided Internet connection through a subscriber's cable modem, and via only the Comcast.net or Fancast.com portals." If the trial is successful, more cable programmers will presumably join in and those restrictions will be loosened, though it will continue to be a subscription-based service.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is confident about the potential of "TV Everywhere" to compete with the "a la carte, ad-supported" content offered by Hulu.com (itself a joint Venture by NBC Universal, Fox and Disney), which has enjoyed a rapid rise to popularity since its launch in March of 2008. Said Bewkes, “If you advocate show-by-show [distribution], that will blow up the model. You'll end up paying more because you won't have the ability to have niche networks, you won't have the ability for ad support.”
The truth of that statement remains to be seen but, frankly, whichever model emerges victorious, the real losers will be the American public. I was all for Hulu (ad-supported digital democracy, hooray!) until it released those obnoxiously self-mocking commercials (watch here and here) suggesting that its content providers were aliens seeking world domination through the gradual softening of human brains. While the tone was jocular, the message had an unshakable ring of truth -- the more that innovative technologies are used to peddle the same tired, mindless content to an even broader audience, the more we become victims of a corporate culture that increasingly devalues the human cost of its actions.
Nevermind the fact that the United States ranks a dismal 15th internationally in broadband access, according to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, now we're supposed to pay for the opportunity to turn the Internet into a television? Are we really so hell-bent on our own destruction that we're willing to pay to have reruns streamed to our laptops?
Don't answer that -- I have a feeling that I don't want to know.
Source: [Multichannel News via Free Press]
