Time Warner CEO wary of 99 cent TV rentals

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Time Warner CEO wary of 99 cent TV rentals

Speaking at the Royal Television Conference in London, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes cautioned against potential deals with Apple and/or Amazon that could harm sales of TV shows to other networks. “How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?” Bewkes said. “These new entrants must meet a few criteria: They must provide consumers with a superior TV experience, and they must either support or improve the overall economics that funds and creates the programming in the first place.” NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, who has a history of playing hardball with Apple, recently voiced similar concerns about Apple’s 99-cent TV rentals, saying, “We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content. ... We thought it would devalue our content.”

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Comments

1

Assuming this isn’t just more double speak for “we are afraid of Apple gaining any control over episodic “television” entertainment”, I am, once again, amazed at the lack of vision from these idiots.

People can - and do - get your content for *free* within hourse, sometimes before if the satellite broadcast to affiliates is intercepted, through bittorrent. Send all the “copyright infingement” letters you want, the fact will remain that there are tens of millions of people across the globe watching your content as first runs and nobody but the ISPs are making a dime. You simply cannot pay enough staffers to sit around logging IPs to make a difference even if you should succeed in buying off the federal government to protect your dying industry from itself.

Broadcast television for non-live entertainment is as outmoded a concept as the LP length $18 music album, you guys just haven’t admitted it yet. Every single day, more people are DVR’ing your content, bittorrenting your content, Netflixing your content, and fewer and fewer people are sitting there captive to the ads served up at premium prime time rates.

So, fine, maybe first run $0.99 rentals of TV will actually decrease the amounts you can convince one of the major networks to pony up for broadcast rights, but maybe that’s exactly what needs to happen. Every year you don’t give people what they want, you create more consumers who consume but don’t make you any money and, like it or not, eventually, you aren’t going to have advertisers lined up to pay either. Your lack of vision is, at best, staving off the inevitable a few years, because major networks are not immune to the forces of basic economics, and then your deliberate failure in creating the post-broadcast infrastructure is going to bite you in the arse ten times as hard.

Posted by Code Monkey in Midstate New York on October 1, 2010 at 5:53 AM (PST)

2

<< NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker “We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content. ... We thought it would devalue our content.”

Is that possible? to devalue content from NBC? nothing from nothing still leaves nothing.

Posted by hydra-calm on October 4, 2010 at 8:40 AM (PST)

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