Earlier this week, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and News Corp. COO Chase Carey urged their media company peers to roll out TV Everywhere services as urgently as they can.
TV Everywhere refers to any service that grants pay-TV subscribers access to TV content on Internet-connected devices. Broadcast and cable networks and pay-TV operators are the purveyors of TV Everywhere services.
“We’ve just got to do it faster,” Bewkes said. He and Carey were speaking on a panel at The Cable Show in Boston on Wednesday. Carey agreed that “it should go faster,” adding: “we get too hung up on protecting the rules of the past.”
According to Deadline, which initially reported the media executives’ comments, Carey was making a “subtle swipe” at pay-TV operators, who would lose control of their lucrative TV packages if subscribers could directly access shows from programmers like Time Warner or News Corp. using Web-connected devices.
Bewkes also took a swipe at pay-TV operators, suggesting that Silicon Valley companies are better equipped to give consumers the interfaces they want. “We can’t develop the best, world-class interfaces at the scale that a distribution company has. Silicon Valley, the Internet industry, is a global industry and that’s what they do. We should harness that….Don’t try to hold that back. Consumers won’t allow it.”
Representing pay-TV operators was Pat Esser, president of Cox Communications, who noted that “along the way you’ve got to negotiate agreements…and we’ve got to figure out how the economics work. We all have a relationship with the customer. What we have to understand is that this business is becoming more complex.”