Commentary

TV Everywhere: More Like TV Somewhere

More program delays are afoot in the TV Everywhere process for broadcast and cable, satellite and telco companies  -- and stomping around in your living room won’t help.

Recently ABC joined Fox in restricting access to content. Want to see network shows the day after they first air? Not so fast. If you're not a cable, satellite or telco customer, you’ll have to wait eight days for that “Nashville” or “Mindy Project” episode.

To be fair, 90% of U.S. TV homes use a pay TV company -- cable, telco or satellite -- to get their network TV programming. So no foul, right?

Sorry, the trend smells. TV content owners and distributors talk up the word “education” when  describing their efforts to convince consumers what they need to do to get to TV Everywhere content. But at the same time, networks and distributors have been rolling out TV Everywhere really slowly -- and unevenly.

So AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon might be ready with TV Everywhere for, say, ABC and Fox  content. But not for NBC, CBS, and CW. For example, Watch ESPN and other Watch Disney apps haven’t been available for DirecTV subscribers.

So this may be what's really happening: TV Everywhere initially is a cover-your-ass business that looks to protect legacy TV partners and distributors.

TV ain’t free. It really hasn’t been for a long time. Those in control of their precious content intend to protect it with bigger zeal than in previous periods. And those who distribute it want to hold on for as long as possible.

Educating the media masses is about getting viewers to understand that they need to enter account numbers and their TV providers --- at perhaps each and every TV Everywhere entry point.  

Sounds crazy. Years from now all this will be easier for sure. Right now, many praise how well HBO Go works.

But in the interim, there will  be more than a few asterisks: Your TV provider may not be on the pull-down list for some content owners' or content distributors' TV Everywhere apps -- for an undetermined period of time.

Networks are not used to selling anything so consumer-unfriendly. Welcome to TV Somewhere

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1 comment about "TV Everywhere: More Like TV Somewhere ".
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  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, January 8, 2014 at 6:57 p.m.

    With a video recorder hooked to a TV antenna, TV is wholly free. Commercials? What commercials?

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