(By Harry McCracken, Time Magazine, Jan. 09, 2012)
Hollywood
has long specialized in artfully managed, highly profitable scarcity. A new
film debuts in theaters. Months later, it arrives on DVD, Blu-ray and
pay-per-view. Next, on premium channels like Showtime. When the flick finally
gets sliced to smithereens on some basic-cable station, you know that pretty
much every last nickel has been squeezed out of it. Reinventing this time-tested business model
for the Internet age hasn't been easy. Increasingly, consumers want to watch
whatever they want whenever and wherever they choose, on an array of
gadgets--TVs, PCs, smart phones and tablets. Studios and networks are working
to make that happen, and despite the pesky holdouts (no American Idol, no
regular-season NFL), the proportion of programming that's available online has
never been higher. At the same time, content owners remain cautious about doing
anything that might cause too many folks to switch off prime time, stop buying
DVDs or quit paying for cable.
In 2012 the
way we watch TV will continue to be shaped by these conflicting
agendas--innovation tempered by paranoia. "A lot's going to change,"
says Phillip Swann, president of the industry news site TVPredictions.com
"And it's all going to stay the same." Just look at Netflix. The company that
crushed the once mighty Blockbuster by mailing DVDs and dispensing with late
fees now has more than 22 million customers streaming movies and TV shows over
the Internet. Netflix has made its way onto more than 700 kinds of devices,
including HDTVs, game consoles, smart phones and tablets. It's also on
middlemen like TiVo and the sandwich-size Roku, which offers access to tons of
channels via the Internet. Netflix is
starting to view premium-cable channels as archrivals--and to act like them
too. To shore up subscriptions, it is helping produce exclusive content,
including an Americanized remake of the BBC series House of Cards in 2012 and
new episodes of the canceled cult favorite Arrested Development in 2013. It
will also start streaming DreamWorks cartoons before their cable debuts.
Netflix's
new ambitions help explain why Starz terminated its distribution pact with the
streaming service, a decision that will deprive Netflix subscribers of Disney
and Sony releases starting in February. It's also why HBO (a subsidiary of this
magazine's parent company, Time Warner) is adamantly uninterested in selling
such shows as Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones to Netflix or Hulu, the
streaming service that's a joint venture of all the major broadcast networks
except CBS. But the cable companies that
aren't playing nice with third-party streamers like Netflix aren't trying to
undo Internet TV; they're launching their own watch-us-anywhere services. HBO
is ramping up HBO GO, which puts its current programming lineup and past
seasons onto PCs, smart phones and tablets. Starz says it's working on
something similar. Comcast offers 65,000 on-demand choices from its Xfinity TV
website and apps combined. And since none of these companies want to encourage
consumers to dump cable TV altogether, they are making their Internet services
available exclusively to people who pay for conventional cable. Cut the cord
and the Net services go away too.
The
broadcast networks' attitude toward online distribution is almost as
passive-aggressive. In August, Fox started protecting its prime-time-ad revenue
by delaying free Hulu availability of its shows until eight days after their
broadcast debut. Don't be startled if other networks, which currently put shows
on Hulu as soon as 24 hours after their initial airing, make similar moves in
2012. Get ready, too, for Hollywood to
introduce you to a technology called UltraViolet. Backed by all the major
studios except Disney, it lets you buy a movie on DVD or Blu-ray and then
unlock a digital copy for streaming and downloading. A handful of UltraViolet
titles are already out, at the same price as standard discs; many more will
appear this year.
With no
single video service offering anything close to a comprehensive selection,
hardwaremakers are left trying to stitch multiple content deals into a coherent
whole. Microsoft's recent software update for the Xbox 360, for instance,
features ESPN, Hulu, Netflix, Verizon FiOS TV and other services, with more on
the way. But the most interesting thing about the Xbox as a TV device isn't the
wealth of stuff to watch. It's the pairing of Microsoft's search engine and
spoken commands, like "Xbox Bing Breaking Bad," to help you hunt down
a particular show. All this fractured
abundance can leave you pining for Internet TV that's genuinely easy to use.
Even Apple, the grand master of simplification, hasn't introduced an iPod-like
breakthrough. Its Apple TV box suffers from some of the same content and
usability challenges that other products do.
Still, rumors persist that the company is building its own HDTV for
release as early as fall 2012. A tantalizing passage in Walter Isaacson's book
Steve Jobs, in which Apple's genius confides that he's "finally
cracked" the code for making TV simple, has put the rumor mill into
overdrive. So for all the intriguing
things that other companies are doing, many industry watchers are going to
spend 2012 obsessing over unannounced, possibly imaginary Apple products. Steve
Jobs may be gone, but the notion that he might yet transform TV is alive and
well.
No comments:
Post a Comment