Bewkes Predicts TV Will Be OK on Retrans Fees as Long as Shows Not Given Away Online
Broadcasters will do OK in getting retransmission consent fees for their stations to be carried by multichannel video programming distributors, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes predicted Wednesday night. “I think they will be fine as long as they don’t give away their programming on the Internet,” he said in a brief interview after speaking to a dinner hosted by the Economic Club of Washington. “Because you can’t ask for retrans if you're giving it away at the same time.” Time Warner’s own initiative for its cable channels to be seen online by video subscribers who buy the company’s channels from their MVPD is going well, Bewkes said of TV Everywhere.
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The cable industry’s business model is “unlikely” to shift to a la carte, with subscribers being able to pick and choose individual channels, Bewkes told us. Prices for popular cable channels may continue to rise, he predicted. Prices will be “going up more for the good ones,” he said of cable networks’ fees. Bewkes also repeated past statements that Time Warner doesn’t see Netflix as a serious competitor to the cable programming TW owns. Bewkes noted that Time Warner has no position on retrans, since it doesn’t own broadcast-TV networks.
Bewkes sees a “pretty vibrant piracy market” in developing markets including in China and other countries in east Asia, where residents view U.S.-produced programming whose producers aren’t properly compensated, he told the event. “We should support protection of intellectual property and try to do it in a way that it is equal to how we support physical property,” Bewkes said. “We should try to do that because intellectual property is increasingly important to maintaining the most important human activities on the planet.” Governments should promote “a free trade regime in the world,” he said.
TV Everywhere is “doing great,” Bewkes told us of the service. All of HBO’s subscribers can get the service, with about 20 percent of those subscribers only getting access through their MVPDs recently, Bewkes said: “Eighty percent of Turner subs have it, but only for the Turner networks” like CNN and TNT. “A lot of the other networks haven’t yet done those deals, or flipped the switch,” Bewkes said of cable channels owned by other companies. “We've encouraged everybody to do it for the sake of the viewers, so the viewers understand, ‘Hey, I can get all my favorite shows on demand, whenever I want.’ You know, so they all start using it."
Time Warner doesn’t regard Netflix as serious competition for TW cable networks’ programming or subscribers, but does view the company as a customer for TV show reruns the programmer can’t sell for more money elsewhere, Bewkes said. “There’s a good place for Netflix in subscription VOD,” he said. “It’s basically taking serialized shows that otherwise don’t sell that well in syndication."
Time Warner, for instance, has sold Netflix year-old shows from TW’s CW broadcast-TV network “because we got more for them on subscription VOD than selling them in syndication,” Bewkes told us. Netflix doesn’t offer HBO or other Time Warner-owned cable networks significant competition for subscribers or programming, he said. “They've done a little more competition for … syndicated network programming.” Netflix, which doesn’t offer news or live or entertainment sports, continues to see itself as a complement to cable, a spokesman said. “There’s plenty of room for both.”