• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, July 12, 2016

Except for the fact that I loathe the show, I wish I could say I was among the first people to watch a live stream of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” last night, when the broadcast network began offering itself up online.

So I didn’t but you could have, along with everything else Fox shows in primetime.

The network started its own version of TV Everywhere, which means if you subscribe to cable or satellite, you can live stream Fox on digital devices after “authenticating” yourself as a subscriber, then getting a code and entering it on your digital device. In theory this should take no longer than five minutes.

NBC and ABC offer much the same thing. CBS All Access is a version, but it costs $6 a month and offers you a library of programming from CBS but also from studios CBS owns. Many cable networks authenticate.

The Fox stream lets you see Fox as you would at home, with local commercials. But you can’t watch it other than prime time, and you won’t see NFL games, or I guess, any pro sports that get played in primetime.  Still it’s not nothing.

And yet, though TV Everywhere has been around for years and years and it’s free (!) for otherwise hooked up viewers, it still just woos 17.4% of all pay-TV subscribers. There are other ways to cook those numbers to make it look like TV Everywhere is, like, everywhere, but it’s not.  

In the meantime, millions of young people are growing up with a growing disregard for TV. It’s not like they don’t watch it.  But it is safe to say they don’t embrace it.

They are streamers, and they’re not likely to be streaming Fox. In fact, Adobe points out that while TV Everywhere has been picking up steam on connected TVs (from 16% in 2014 to 21% in 2015), it’s losing iOS authenticators. Those went from 45% to 36% in the same period.

“Fox’s decision to live stream primetime possibly will help make pay-TV stickier, convincing some subscribers to hang around a little longer,” writes Jim O’Neill, principal analyst for Ooyala on his blog.  “And, of course, it also doesn’t upset the retransmission apple cart and gives local affiliates the opportunity to present a local face online.But dipping its toe into the streaming water isn’t really enough.”

Though it’s pretty easy to do, TV Everywhere could have been easier. Maybe a cable/satellite subscriber could have gotten one code to enter, rather than a new one fetched before signing in for every service. Maybe broadcast and cable networks could have promoted it better. A lot better.

And maybe broadcast stations and the networks themselves could have negotiated as if their long term futures depended on it, not just next quarter’s.

Meanwhile, as Adobe also points out, there has been a quickening pace of content providers. Once that was Netflix and Hulu and MLB.com. Now it’s Noggin and SeeSo and HBO Now and Scream TV and AwesomenessTV and Fullscreen, that initiated direct to consumer services. They couldn’t care less about TV Everywhere, and I’d say, neither do most of their customers.

ON THE BEAT: PewDiePie is in the news because Warner Bros got scolded (that’s what it amounted to) because it didn’t make it clear it was paying the ‘Pew (and others) for positive mention of a new video game.

But I’d most like to see what Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie is cooking up with this Twitter message today: “anyone have examples of videos bg dragged out for watch time. Like awkward painful pauses that could be cut etc? send me plz!” 

pj@mediapost.com