Filling in today for my good friend Lydia (life with a four-week-old sometimes gets in the way of regular essay writing) gives me an opportunity to pontificate on the significance of Time Warner
Cable's newly announced Look Back service, which it will be launching with a slow rollout starting in October.
Look Back, a free digital cable feature, will enable viewers to watch any show (in
theory) at any time after it has aired, on the day it's on. So, if you miss "Lost" on Wednesday at 10 p.m., you can catch it at 11, but by midnight you're out of luck. Look Back is an evolution of
Start Over, a similar TW Cable initiative that let you watch shows in progress from the beginning (but you couldn't start them after they'd aired).
Like Start Over, Look Back runs on
infrastructure built into the cable network; shows are stored on TW servers and viewers don't need any special equipment to take advantage of the program. This makes Look Back a baby step toward a
network DVR, a technology that raises strong feelings in the industry. Unlike a DVR however, there's no fast-forward built into Look Back; viewers can't skip ads.
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Network DVRs have three big
problems holding them back. The biggest one is that they're possibly illegal; Cablevision's attempt to trial a full network DVR (which would let subscribers record and view any show) got smacked down
by media companies, which argued that network DVRs amounted to Cablevision's rebroadcasting programming without permission.
The second issue has to do with user interface: Even consumers that want
to use advanced cable services have a hard time figuring out how to navigate VoD EPGs. While AppleTV, TiVo, and Digeo's Moxi show that video user interfaces can be easy to use, that expertise is not
widely disseminated within cable operators.
And the third factor has to do with trust and ownership. Consumers like feeling as if they own content; to the extent people use their DVRs to
archive content for the long term, they may mistrust solutions that leave their favorite episodes somewhere "in the cloud."
Look Back, with its narrowly focused value proposition, may help
overcome all three of these issues. Viewers who own a DVR will scoff at Look Back's lack of utility. However, most U.S. households don't yet have a DVR, and there's nothing like a free offer to
encourage people to try something out. A limited value proposition also means the UI can potentially be simple (though we'll see how TW executes there), and sets consumer expectations away from
archiving and toward simply staying caught up with favorite shows.
The limited value proposition also makes it more likely that media companies will go along with Look Back, at least for now.
There's clearly a slippery slope here, from Start Over to Look Back to, say, "watch any show that's aired in the past week," to putting the whole program guide on demand. But, assuming commercials
stay unskippable, and that consumers too mainstream for DVRs like the value proposition, I think it's a slope that media companies might willingly slide down.