(Atlanta, GA) While technology shifts make it difficult to find the right path to profitability, the key to staying ahead of the game is to keep your eye on what consumers are doing with that technology. That was one key conclusion flowing from a panel discussion of seven cable and programming executives held here at the NCTA show.
“We have wonderful physical plant in place and we can use new technology to do wonderful and infinite things,” Glenn Britt, CEO of Time Warner Cable said. But, he said, “the consumer is the key” to deciding where operators should head next.
“If the consumer wants the DVR we can’t fight it,” David Zaslav, President of NBC Universal Cable said. “DVR, [Time Warner’s] Start-Over, VOD…the consumers are saying they like content but they want to have the opportunity to consume it in different ways and on different platforms.”
While the primary mode of distributing video is television, and it will stay that way for some time, “we have to follow the consumer behavior but we need to be aggressive about being on these different platforms to find out what consumers are doing,” Zaslav said.
Consumer expectations of television will change dramatically as the 2009 analog cut-off data for broadcasting nears, HDNet CEO Mark Cuban said. Consumer electronics retailers will start in about two years’ time to push HDTV sets in a major way, elevating consumer demand for HD channels. “We’re looking at an analog cut-off date of 2009 and in a couple of years the wars will begin.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:19 PM | Print | Comments (0)(Atlanta, GA) The word from very good sources here at the NCTA show is that a group of Hollywood studios is preparing a lawsuit against Cablevision regarding that operator’s networked DVR offering. Despite Cablevision’s contention that their attorneys have concluded that networked DVR is permitted within the copyright laws, several sources close to Hollywood have said that they don’t see it the same way.
Networked DVR takes the DVR concept a step further by allowing the viewer to store program selections not in the home, but in servers maintained by the cable operators. Cablevision says that the Supreme Court’s decision in Sony-Betamax permits the storage of programs for home time-shifting, and that its networked DVR option does nothing more than this.
The studios, however, contend that the Court’s Betamax decision ruled that home time-shifting is fair use under the copyright laws and that what Cablevision is doing, and what the rest of the cable industry is preparing to do, is not, in fact, home time-shifting. The storage of the programming occurs outside the home, and therefore is not clearly covered by the Court’s decision.
This distinction about where the recording occurs — in the home versus in the operator’s server — is one key factor why the studios haven’t filed a similar suit about existing DVRs. Moreover, in their pending lawsuit, the studios are unlikely to pull in the current generation of DVRs.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:47 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
