• Advertising Age , Tuesday, March 3, 2009 11:15 AM

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has a plan to put all cable programming on the Web in places like Hulu, MySpace, Yahoo TV and even YouTube, Ad Age reports. Of course, there's a catch. To get it, you'll have to prove you subscribe to pay TV. "If you want to watch your favorite TV network or shows through broadband on any device -- PCs or mobile -- you can do it as long as you subscribe to any multichannel provider," Bewkes said. "It's a natural extension of the existing model."

Dubbed "TV Anywhere," the initiative is intended to be an industrywide effort led by Time Warner. Bewkes said he expects to ready a test of it later this year. "This is not just for the cable industry," he said. "It's about keeping the health of all these fantastic networks while making them available at no extra charge on the online platform."

As Ad Age points out, cable TV is one of the few sources of subscription-based content that American consumers have shown a willingness to pay for. But the networks' cable TV contracts are also what keep most of their programming off the Web. Fifty percent of the networks' revenue comes from their cable partnerships; they don't want that revenue to suffer the same fate as newspapers and record labels.

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