Can TV survive TV Everywhere?

One of The Media Wonk’s day jobs is as an analyst and curator at GigaOm Pro, the subscription-based offshoot of the popular GigaOm web site (to which I also occasionally contribute some blatherings). On Monday, the Pro site is issuing a new report The Media Wonk wrote (subscription required) on TV Everywhere, the effort by leading cable MSOs as well as some cable programmers to make pay-TV content available online to cable and satellite subscribers.

For those of you in the Bay Area, The Media Wonk will also be appearing on some panels at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco, where the TV Everywhere report will be distributed free to attendees. Come one, come all.

The report is a good read (if I do say so myself) on the nuts, bolts, whys and wherefores of TV Everywhere. But there’s one question I didn’t really discuss in it because anyone professionally interested in TV Everywhere has probably already answered it to their own satisfaction, and it sort of would have obviated the need for the report in the first place.

First proposed by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and quickly taken up by Time Warner Cable (soon to be a separate company), along with Comcast and Verizon FiOS, TV Everywhere is self-consciously an effort to preserve the traditional pay-TV business model as viewership shifts irresistibly away from  traditional pay-TV platforms.

Multichannel News, earlier this month:

At a National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications Conference general session Wednesday, panelists said operators and programmers need to find a solution quickly, as consumer demand to access content on multiple platforms continues to grow.

Mark Garner, senior vice president of distribution, marketing and business development for A&E Television Networks, said the industry continues to face a challenge in finding the right business model to offer content on multiple screens. The current strategy taken by some networks to offer content free on their Web sites jeopardizes the current affiliate fee-based distribution model with operators that, he says, represents 45% of A&E Networks’ overall revenue.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for maintaining the current business model,” Garner said.

And from September:

“TV Everywhere is an all-around win for those of us who love television,” Time Warner Cable chairman, president and CEO Glenn Britt said in a statement. “It will give our customers more control over content and allow them greater access to programs they are already paying for, while enhancing the distributors’ and networks’ robust business model that encourages the creation of great content.”

Fine. But how many cases can you point to in other media businesses wherein the incumbent providers were able to sustain their traditional business models with respect to digital distribution? Not many, I’d venture to say.

Music? Fuhgetaboutit. If “record companies” survive in something like their current form (which I would call a long-shot in itself) the single revenue-stream model of selling high margin “albums” containing 10-15 songs will not be how they do it.

Movies? Ask Bob Iger.

Broadcast television? As I wrote last month for GigaOm Pro:

In addition to his Hulu comments, [News Corp. COO Chase] Carey also suggested last week that News Corp. is laying the groundwork for a battle with cable operators over retransmission consent for Fox Broadcasting content. “We need to move that business [broadcasting] to a place where we are getting fair value,” he said, according to a report on the SportsBusiness Daily web site. “You have to have conviction and do what’s necessary to do.”

What’s necessary to do, in Carey’s view, is to get cable MSOs to pay for the right to retransmit free broadcast programming. “It’s about trying to get our business to a place where it can be a healthy, long-term business,” he said. “It starts with making dual revenue.”

Newspapers? Please.

Books? Too early to tell but the pricing structure emerging for e-books suggests publishers are going to need to start thinking in terms of multiple revenue streams.

If the pay-TV companies manage to pull it off it will be notable not just for their own sake but because it would mean they had bucked the tide of both history and technology.