ON-DEMAND FUTURE WILL COMPLICATE CABLE BUSINESS, EXPERTS SAY
ANAHEIM -- If, in future, TV viewers get everything they want, whenever they want it, as some predict, cable’s rights and responsibilities may become much more complicated, panelists said at Western Show here last week. Comcast Senior Dir.-New Business Development Steve Heeb predicted there would be combination of network and home-based personal video recorders (PVRs), but warned cable companies would have to adhere to copyrights no matter which technology they adopted. He said he could see situation where he would “have to be the nasty MSO” and, through his network, have to remove movie from home PVR: “You don’t want to tick off customers but at the same time, we have to live in a world where we absolutely will honor the rights management of studios when we get content or else we'll never get content again.” He said encryption was one possible solution.
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Warner Bros. Chief Technology Officer Chris Cookson was more optimistic conflicts could be resolved. He said he didn’t believe anyone in industry was arguing that customers shouldn’t be able to time-shift their viewing or record broadcast TV and retain it for personal use. “The issue the studios are having as an industry with the whole issue of recording is the ability people are now gaining to become retransmitters of content,” Cookson said, meaning viewers can’t pass programming on to others. He didn’t mention ReplayTV, which is being sued by several studios over new device that can do just that.
On-demand all the time would present major shift in current advertiser-based entertainment approach, said Cox Vp- Multimedia Technology John Hildebrand, potentially leading to product placements within programs themselves. Cookson said federal law wouldn’t allow such placements in children’s programming, where advertising must be separate and distinct from shows. Heeb said product placements could be “very dangerous” to cable’s business of offering premium channels. “There’s a reason that people pay a lot of money on a monthly basis for subscription services like HBO, Showtime, Starz, all that kind of stuff, and the reason is they hate commercials,” he said. Executives said on-demand services would be key if cable was to compete with satellite for viewer dollars.
Aides to FCC commissioners said they wouldn’t prejudge proposed EchoStar-DirecTV merger but acknowledged that their annual report on video competition had shown “tremendous” change in market landscape in recent years. Question is important because Commission could weigh proposed merger in 2 ways: Either as marriage of 2 top DBS providers or, in wider context, as multichannel video competitor to cable. Chmn. Powell’s adviser on mass media issues, Susan Eid, took cable industry to task for its movement toward offering high- definition TV (HDTV). She implied MSOs were moving too slowly. NCTA Gen. Counsel Neal Goldberg, speaking from audience, pointed out that Comcast recently had rolled out HD tier in some areas and Time Warner and Cox were carrying some HD signals.