• Advertising Age, Monday, March 2, 2009 9:32 AM

Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner CEO, has a plan to put all cable programming on the Web in places such as Hulu, MySpace, Yahoo TV and YouTube. But to get, it you'll have to prove you subscribe to pay TV through cable, satellite or telco.

The way it works is that you, as an individual or a member of a household, would be able to have online access to almost all the programming included in your pay-TV package. With broad industry buy-in, it wouldn't matter if your TV provider is Verizon FiOS, Time Warner Cable or DirecTV. You log in, put in some subscriber information for a pay-TV operator, and unlock a host of cable shows not currently on the Web.

With TV advertising flat, operators such as Viacom have sustained themselves with subscriber revenue, but some of those subscribers are dropping their cable connections and viewing TV only via broadband. Bewkes' initiative, "TV Everywhere," is intended to be an industrywide solution for that migration, and Bewkes expects to test it this year. "This is about keeping the health of all the networks while making their content available at no extra charge online," he says.

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