Even with Comcast's new Web Site, 'TV Everywhere' Still Isn't

The Washington Post

Subscribers to Comcast's TV and Internet services have been getting a little something extra lately: access to a Web site that lets them watch many of the channels their bills cover. 

The site, called Fancast Xfinity TV (http://fancast.com), builds on an earlier version that left out premium channels. The Philadelphia-based carrier launched it in December and brought it to the Washington area last month. 

Fancast Xfinity is the most ambitious attempt yet to implement an idea called "TV Everywhere." Under this concept, channels and providers work together to provide online access to shows and movies -- but only to people who already pay for conventional, offline viewing on televisions. (Verizon is testing a similar service called Fios TV Online.) 

That authentication requirement makes logging onto Fancast Xfinity a little more complicated than watching a sitcom on Hulu or one of the networks' own sites. In addition to subscribing to both Comcast's TV and Internet services, you also need to install a Comcast Access program -- which itself installs extra video and support software. 

Once you've entered the user name and password of your Comcast account -- I used a temporary one arranged by Comcast's public relations department because I don't subscribe to its services -- you authorize your computer for access to the site. You can also authorize two other computers at any time. 

This wasn't any particular trouble to set up on a Windows 7 laptop. On a Mac, however, I could use the site only in the Firefox browser -- for reasons unexplained in its system-requirements page, Fancast Xfinity doesn't work in Apple's Safari browser on the current version of Mac OS X without extra tweaking. 

Comcast touts an inventory of 19,000 TV shows and movies, but that impressive-sounding total falls well short of what its cable boxes can deliver. Sports are mostly out, but even among the comedy, drama and documentary offerings, you find strange gaps. For example, its HBO content is just as spotty as that channel's new HBO Go site, leaving out the likes of "Entourage" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Its AMC selection excludes "Mad Men," while Apple's iTunes Store sells entire seasons of that show. 

You can't blame those gaps on Comcast, though. Each network has to decide whether it wants to build an audience by giving viewers more ways to watch its work -- or whether it would rather stick with last decade's business model. 

You can, however, blame Fancast Xfinity's usability issues on Comcast. This site provides far fewer ways to manage your viewing interests than Hulu; you can't add shows to a queue or have the site add new episodes to that playlist automatically. It doesn't say whether particular titles are in high-definition or something less than that. And its lists of what's available are categorized sloppily. "Slumdog Millionaire" is filed under "comedy," for instance. 

Picture quality varied wildly, even over a fast, 15 megabits-per-second Fios connection. A Food Network "Throwdown With Bobby Flay" show could have the look of a VHS recording; MTV's "The Real World: D.C." came closer to standard-definition TV quality; an episode of "The Wire" looked better yet (but sometimes mysteriously slowed down); the first chapter of HBO's "Band of Brothers" came over in crisp high-definition that looked terrific even on a 40-inch HDTV (but I had to reboot the computer to get out of a cycle in which Comcast Access asked me to authorize the laptop for viewing, had me sign in again, then asked me to authorize the laptop for viewing again). 

Bear in mind that Fancast Xfinity is free to Comcast subscribers. And even with its quirks, it provides a convenient way to catch up on missed episodes, sample new shows and follow your favorite programs -- like a TiVo in the sky. 

In that respect, it's a far better way to breathe new value into a cable subscription than stuffing still more channels into a programming bundle. 

But what about people who don't subscribe to Comcast but might gladly pay less for online-only viewing? My experience suggests that's technically possible, but Comcast doesn't seem interested in poaching customers from competitors that way. Wrote spokeswoman Kate Noel: "Right now we have no plans to offer this as a service separate from their television service." 

Fair enough; this site is Comcast's business to run as it sees fit. I'll just say this: I can only wish my employer were doing so well that it could afford to ignore potential markets. 

Revenge of the Cable Guy

Business Week

If you think online TV will be free forever, think again. The cable companies have a plan to keep control—and stick you with the bill

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bunch of small companies in Silicon Valley thought the future of television was theirs. Soon, the thinking went, TV would be everywhere. Frequent fliers would tune in on laptops and vacationers on tablets from the beach. If so inclined, you'd be able to watch Glee on a cell phone in a tree house. The network suits and the cable guys just didn't have the digital chops to make it happen. Fueled with venture money, tech companies with names like Boxee, Roku, and Sezmi pursued their dream of untethering viewers from their TV sets—and owning a piece of the advertising revenue.

As the big picture comes into focus though, it looks like the cable guys are playing the lead roles, using the $32 billion they pay content providers each year as leverage. The alphabet soup of newbies is still waiting in the wings for a moment that might never come.

What happened? Part of the answer is TV Everywhere, a service in its infancy, conjured up in quiet strategy sessions by Jeff Bewkes and Brian Roberts, the CEOs of Time Warner (TWX) and Comcast (CMCSA). They took a lesson from the music labels, which looked up one day to find that Steve Jobs and Apple (AAPL) had taken control of their inventory. The cable guys came up with a quick fix, one so technologically simple that you don't have to be a geek to get it: Viewers can watch shows for free, but only if they're cable subscribers first. In other words, as long as you tap a subscription code into your device—any device—you can watch anything you want, whenever you want.

It's worth hitting pause here for a moment. Right now, Time Warner is offering the service in only a few markets. Comcast has rolled out a trial, or beta, version to about 80% of its subscribers. There are plenty of kinks to be sorted out. And as usual when it comes to show business, nothing is quite as simple as it appears. For TV Everywhere to work, the behemoths of the business must stand together and stamp out the rampaging weed called free. After all, if you can get programing for free—real free—why would you ever pay a cable bill?

SELF-PRESERVATION

That's what was worrying Time Warner's Bewkes in the fall of 2008. Back then, Time Warner ran the country's second-largest cable operator (spun off in March 2009) and was also a content provider. Bewkes had previously been in charge of the company's HBO unit, turning the premium cable channel into a profit machine with 30 million subscribers.

Bewkes watched with growing alarm as Hollywood stampeded online to offer TV shows and movies for free, say two Time Warner executives. At the time, Hulu, a video site operated by Fox (NWS), NBC Universal, and Disney, (DIS) was about a year old. For TV addicts, Hulu was a near miracle. Miss the latest episode of Damages on the FX channel? If so, you could watch Glenn Close play a conniving lawyer on Hulu 24 hours later for free. Hulu's owners shared the advertising revenue from the site, but everyone knew it wasn't making money and there was no clear path to profitability. As he watched one entertainment company after another put their TV shows and movies online for free, say the executives, Bewkes began to fear that the pay TV industry would eventually find itself in the same untenable position as newspapers.

That's when the scene shifts to Wisconsin, where HBO was running an experiment in Milwaukee and Green Bay. HBO was letting people watch its programing online as long as they could prove they were HBO subscribers.

The results of the test were unexpected: Viewers who tuned into Big Love on their laptops didn't spend any less time watching HBO on their TV sets. Bewkes was buoyed by the possibility that the same model might work more widely and that his cable properties might be able to keep subscribers from gravitating elsewhere, says a Time Warner executive involved in the discussions. Bewkes told his team: "We can't just talk about it, or play the victim. We need to build a model," the executive recalls. The Time Warner CEO was unavailable for comment.

It wasn't the first time the cable industry had found itself in danger of being outflanked by tech-savvy rivals. In 1999, TiVo began selling a handy little box that allowed people to record dozens of hours of TV shows on a hard drive. After a certain amount of handwringing, the cable guys struck back with overwhelming force. They figured out the technology and marketed their own digital video recorders, for which they charged subscribers an extra $10 or so a month. Next came Apple. Along with Amazon.com (AMZN) and others, Steve Jobs began renting TV shows online. The cable companies beat back that onslaught by beefing up their video-on-demand offerings and giving subscribers a bunch of free shows with a few clicks of the remote. "The cable industry has been very good at not jumping too early on a technology, and watching it play out first," says Colin Gounden of Grail Research, which advises companies on new products. "They have a knack for getting the timing right."

The new attack from Silicon Valley was the most serious yet, because it threatened to permanently cut the coaxial connecting the cable companies and their subscribers. "We wake up every day and there is some new competitor out there—a Roku or a Boxee," says Melinda Witmer, Time Warner Cable's programming chief. "People like to think of cable operators as monopolists, but we face a lot of competition just to keep the business we have." Technically there was nothing too complicated about Bewkes' plan to expand the Milwaukee experiment.

The new service would need a way to automatically confirm that people were paid-up subscribers. Other than that, TV Everywhere, as Bewkes called it, would mostly use existing online infrastructure and established user interfaces.

"FRIEND, NOT A FOE"

Far more daunting was the prospect of persuading the rest of the industry to join up. Unless most of the pay TV and content players banded together, TV Everywhere wouldn't work; viewers could simply flock to sites that didn't require a cable subscription. Bewkes, say two Time Warner executives, decided to float his proposal with Roberts, the chief of Comcast, the largest cable system in the U.S., with 24 million subscribers. In early 2009, Bewkes began wooing Roberts, traveling from his New York City office on Columbus Circle to Comcast's imposing 57-story headquarters in Philadelphia.

Roberts long ago realized that online video was important to the future of his company. In 2006, Comcast had created an interactive media unit that poached heavily from Silicon Valley. The company's first major development project was Fancast, a video site like Hulu that offered hundreds of shows free to all comers. Roberts, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had unveiled Fancast at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early 2008. Before long, says one Comcast executive, he began thinking about a service that would offer much more content—but only to Comcast subscribers. When Bewkes came calling he didn't have to convince Roberts of the importance of preserving the subscription model online. And like most everybody in the cable industry, Roberts was aware of HBO's online experiment in Wisconsin.

Roberts and Bewkes initially disagreed on one big point, say two Time Warner executives who say they can't speak on the record because the discussions were sensitive.

Roberts believed subscribers should be required to go to a central site operated by their pay TV provider in order to view cable shows. Bewkes, true to his divided soul as a content creator and distributor, felt users should be allowed to tap into any cable channel's Web site as long as it was part of the TV Everywhere ecosystem. Bewkes, say the executives, reasoned that letting individual channels keep their own sites would allow them to maintain their brands. Eventually, Roberts agreed.

WINING AND DINING

The Time Warner executives say Roberts and Bewkes saw the cable industry's annual convention, held last April in Washington, D.C., as an opportunity to proselytize about TV Everywhere to the rest of the industry. During one panel discussion, Roberts told his audience that online video was "a friend, not a foe" and that for Hollywood it represented a new way to make money "in this horrific advertising environment."

In Hollywood, studios and cable channels were hearing a very different message from the Silicon Valley upstarts who wanted to cut deals for their programing. Netflix's (NFLX) Ted Sarandos pushed studio executives to give his company the latest movies for its online video service. Steve Jobs proposed launching a stripped-down cable service that would cost consumers $30 a month. Boxee founder Avner Ronen says he traveled to Los Angeles from his base in New York so many times that his "plane knew the way."

Phil Wiser, founder of Sezmi, an online TV subscription service, says his goal was simple: to "replace cable and satellite." He flew executives from NBC Universal, Sony (SNE), the Discovery Channel, and others to Sezmi's offices in a converted horse barn in Northern California, where he wined, dined, and pitched them. Sezmi wanted the content creators to allow him to use their movies and TV shows for an à la carte service that would give customers the freedom to pay for only what they wanted to watch. The studios declined, so he decided to borrow the industry's subscription model. Owners of Sezmi's $299 set-top box would receive network and cable shows for $19.99 a month, about a third the cost of a typical cable subscription.

Wiser told the studios that he would match what cable was paying for episodes of such shows such as The Real World, Top Chef, and Damages. It was an unprecedented offer for a startup, but only one company initially agreed to make its content available: NBC Universal, which is already available on Hulu. Wiser says it took another 18 months to lure more content providers, including Turner Broadcasting (TWX) (owned by Time Warner) and Discovery Networks. What's more, Wiser acknowledges he had to pay the content guys more than they get from the big cable companies. When Sezmi boxes went on sale in Los Angeles in February, the service was missing ESPN, The History Channel, The Food Network, HBO, and other popular channels. "Trying to do this is not for the faint of heart," says Wiser, a former Sony (SNE) executive. "These firms see dozens of new pitches every week, so they're skeptical."

Skeptical—and satisfied. The makers of movies and TV shows are attached to the billions they receive from cable companies and are understandably reluctant to engage in grand experiments with upstarts touting unproven business models. Joshua Sapan runs Rainbow Media Holdings (CVC), which controls AMC, IFC, the Sundance channel, and others. He says tech companies have approached him about licensing AMC shows, but, he asks: "Why would I license my channel to someone and give them Mad Men the day after it shows up on AMC?"

Back at Time Warner Center in New York and One Comcast Center in Philadelphia, the cable operators began to realize they had the studios locked down. As Frank Biondi, former president of the media giant Viacom (VIA), puts it: "Why would [the studios] make a deal with a competitor to their largest customer and risk angering them?"

In summer 2009, Bewkes and Roberts joined forces to take the TV Everywhere model out for a spin with 5,000 Comcast subscribers across the country. Those viewers were able to tap into programing provided by cable channels TNT and TBS, both owned by Time Warner. The speed with which the industry moved on from that trial balloon is a measure of just how important locking in subscriber revenue is to cable's future. In December, Comcast rolled out a beta version of the new service, now christened Fancast XFinity TV. Time Warner Cable has a trial going with nearly 10,000 customers in Syracuse, N.Y., New York City, and Columbus, Ohio. Verizon Communications (VZ) is testing a service nationally, and DirecTV, the satellite operator, plans to as well.

Comcast's service is the furthest along and provides a window on where TV Everywhere is headed. Only subscribers who pay for digital cable—and take Comcast's broadband service—are eligible. (The company is still working out how to bring XFinity TV to the third of its subscribers who get broadband from other companies.) Subscribers can tune into two dozen channels, from CBS to Animal Planet, and view 19,000 full-length TV shows and movies. They can use it on as many as three PCs and get most episodes 24 hours after they first air on TV. Much of that was available on Comcast's free site, but now shows on HBO and the Discovery channel have been added to the lineup. Eventually, Comcast aims to let subscribers access XFinity on their smartphones and tablets.

TV Everywhere has a ways to go before the cable guys can declare victory. There's a ton of stuff to figure out—how the ad model will work, devising a new ratings system with Nielsen. And then there's the question of profits. The cable guys like them, and they're not real comfortable with free. So chances are, down the line, the costs of the new free will probably sneak onto subscribers cable bills. And you know what? We'll all keep paying.

The Decade In Television: Cable, Internet Become Major Players

USA Today

For TV, it was a decade of Lost and found.

At the broadcast networks, which saw their overall numbers drop by around 8 million viewers, it was 10 years of ratings decline. Yet if those viewers were lost to broadcast, they were found by cable — and what those viewers found was an ever-expanding range of choice.

But don't cry for broadcast yet. They may be smaller fish, but they're still by far the biggest in the electronic pond. (Even in this decade of dispersion, 52.5 million people watched NBC's 2004 Friends finale, a number unlikely to ever be matched by a cable series.) And the upside to smaller ratings: Lower expectations allow shows to thrive that would never have survived back when every series had to be a blockbuster.

So, what did the 2000s bring to TV? Here are six trends for the 10 years:

'Lost' and the rise of the Internet

This was a great decade for drama as shows such as The Wire, Rescue Me, Boomtown, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, 24, Grey's Anatomy, True Bloodand Pushing Daisiesall made their debut after 2000 (and 1999's The West Wingand The Sopranosjust missed the cutoff). But if you want one show to represent the stretch, go with ABC's Lost for its sweep, grandeur, ambition, achievement and ability to play by, and yet ultimately alter, commercial TV's rules.

Though quality clearly matters most, Lost also owes its success to timing. Lost was designed to create and encourage passion just when advertisers became willing to reward passionate viewing. And that passion has been amplified by the decade's booming commercial arena: the Internet, which enabled fans to focus (some would say obsessively) on the show's myths and feints and allowed the writers (some would say obsessively) to plant ever more clues for those fans to find.

It has created a community unlike any other — and it's one of the reasons Lost will be one of those series people cherish and remember for decades to come.

'American Idol' and the triumph of reality

We've always had shows that featured "real people" (including the '80s show Real People); we just didn't think of "reality" as a genre. Not, that is, until 51.7 million people watched Sue and Richard on CBS' first Survivor finale in 2000, and networks suddenly realized the dramatic potential of snakes and rats.

So the floodgates opened, and as long as you avoid drowning, much of the water is fine. Look at the epitome of the genre, American Idol, and consider not just the stars it has launched and the entertainment it has provided, but also the impact it has had on TV. Without Idol, Fox is not the top-rated network — and un-Foxian, serious hits such as 24 and House never take hold.

If talent shows, dating shows and contests were all reality had to offer, we'd be fine. Unfortunately, there was also an MTV show called The Osbournesthat inspired a thousand faux biography series, starting with almost-celebrities, moving to people related to celebrities, and now landing on people who are simply desperate to be celebrities. Which is why no triumph is ever celebrated unanimously.

'CSI' and the popularity of procedurals

CSI did not invent the procedural (a self-contained show that follows the procedures used to solve some mystery, usually but not always a crime). What it did was reinvigorate the form with newly invented forensic techniques for solving crimes and newly invented TV techniques for showing them. The result? One of the most popular and influential shows of the decade.

An instant, unexpected hit, CSI helped CBS end NBC's Thursday hegemony and fueled its climb to the ratings peak. Its influence extends from the obvious clones — two more CSIs and two NCISes — to pretty much every mystery on the air, from Bones and Numb3rs to Cold Case, Castle and House. Even the show's look is influential: Every time you see a bullet plunge through skin into some internal organ, you're seeing CSI.

'Mad Men' and the dramatic growth of basic cable

In 2000, when you said "cable series," you pretty much meant HBO, which started the decade with holdovers Sex and the Cityand Sopranos and quickly added Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Underand The Wire. The network remains a factor, but the energy and the Emmys moved to basic cable. From pioneers such as The Shield, Battlestar Galactica and Monk to current standard-bearers Rescue Me, Breaking Bad, The Closer, Damages, Burn Notice and Emmy champion Mad Men, basic cable has come into its own as a source of original programming.

The basic networks found an economic sweet spot between premium and broadcast, producing fewer episodes than broadcast and doing so much more cheaply than both. Many of the shows are light "blue-sky" entertainments (such as new USA hit White Collar), but at the networks' best, they've also found an artistic midpoint, series that are smaller, often more somber and leisurely than ratings-driven networks shows can be, but more commercially viable than HBO's more esoteric offerings.

'Leno' and the fall of NBC

How disastrous was this decade for NBC? In its final season, Friends drew more viewers than all four of NBC's current Thursday sitcoms combined. The network hasn't produced a single true scripted hit all decade (with the possible short-lived exception of Heroes), and doesn't have a single scripted show in the season's Top 20. The only two achievements current management can claim are dismantling a "must-see" lineup that had lasted 20 years and "supersizing" sitcoms, a creative nadir that masked and exacerbated the network's failure to create new hits.

That's until this year, when NBC turned five hours of prime time over to The Jay Leno Show, horrendously damaging the rest of its schedule, its affiliates' local news, its own late shows and NBC's and Leno's reputations. It's not just that the show is awful and a failure, though it's a failure of historic proportions. It's that it's lazy, cynical and ill-conceived, which was pretty much NBC's trademark for the past 10 years.

DVRs and the influence of time-shifting

From a business standpoint, this decade may end up mattering less for what we watched than for when and where we watched. Most of us still watch shows as the network gods intended: on our TVs, when they air. Even those increasing numbers of us who have recording devices use them to watch semi-live, adding in a 15- to 20-minute delay to bypass commercials.

But changes are coming. In the next decade, our ability and propensity to watch anytime and anywhere is likely to grow as TVs and computers combine and delivery to handheld devices becomes more sophisticated.

One thing, however, will remain the same: There's no such thing as a free program. People who think otherwise, who think they'll be able to see any show they want without watching ads or forking over some fee, are kidding themselves. You'll pay for shows in the coming decade, or you'll no longer have them.

It's as simple as that.