Time Warner Cable, like others in the pay-TV industry, has been
essentially paying off content partners to prevent web-based streaming, Bloomberg reports.
Incentives to lock-out content providers from streaming their
properties online include monetary bonuses and threats to drop
programming. Deals brokered between TWC and its partners are largely
private, but some of their details were leaked to Bloomberg by anonymous
inside sources.
"Exclusivities and windows are extremely common in the entertainment
industry," said NY-based TWC spokeswoman Maureen Huff in response to
Bloomberg's report. "It’s absurd to suggest that, in today’s highly
competitive video marketplace, obtaining some level of exclusivity is
anticompetitive."
Admittedly, deals peppered with stipulations of exclusivity aren't
exactly a new thing. With more than 300 deals under its belt though, TWC
makes no bones about its feelings toward would-be online disruptors.
Huff added, "In fact, the amount and scope of exclusivity and windowing
in Time Warner Cable’s arrangements with programmers pales by
comparison to that found between other players in the entertainment
ecosystem."
In a nutshell: we do it, but others do it more.
Other companies, like Charter and AT&T, are also guilty of similar
practices. AT&T is purportedly paying less to content providers who
simultaneously provide online streaming while Charter claims to use such
incentives and penalties to protect its cable-based "ecosystem".
If you're thinking deals like these are to blame for the poor state of TV streaming though, AllThingsD reports
that may not necessarily be the case. Citing TWC as an example, its
executive sources claim the company doesn't have those types of
arrangements with the biggest players in the industry, names
which include the likes of Viacom, Discovery and NBC. Hugely successful
media companies have tons of bargaining power and often aren't so
short-sighted to lock themselves into a no-streaming deal.
Rather, TV streaming outfits like Apple TV, Google TV and possibly even Intel
have difficulty striking bargains because purchasing content to stream
online is identical to the process used by cable companies: they must
spend large sums of money on inflexible channel bundles -- a practice
which the industry uses to subsidize its least popular properties with
its most desirable ones. Even worse, since tech companies generally
don't have much clout with big media, they often times wind up paying more than companies like Comcast and TWC for the same content.
{Source: TechSpot]
{Source: TechSpot]
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