Who's In Charge of What You Watch... You Are - Steve Yanovsky - MediaBizBloggers

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal discussed the new Amazon subscription service that will deliver TV shows and movies over the Internet This is now one more company that is trying to control what we watch in our living rooms or bedrooms This subscription service rivals those introduced by Netflix and Google Inc These and others have clearly declared war on the cable television and satellite providersThe interesting consideration as this battle begins to unfold is the discussions that took place in the cable television industry in the mid 199039s The discussion or concern focused on a la carte subscriptions for cable subscribers That is you would only pay for the networks you wanted So if there were secondary and tertiary networks on your channel carriage that you never watched had no interest in watching you didn39t have to pay for them Cable operators only had to pay programmers for the actual number of sub39s that took the channel and subscribers had a much lower bill than they had originally It would be a winwinBut since basic channels live on two revenue streams sub fees and ad sales they were terrified Under this scenario their sub fees would be much smaller because viewers only paid for the channels they watched and MSO39s only paid for the actual number of subscribers taking a channel Also with substantially smaller universes programmers could only charge for the actual number of subscribers taking a channel not the total number of sub39s an MSO hadPretty frightening numbers if you were a cable programmer looking at smaller audiences In fact the second Quarter of 2010 experienced the first reported decline in pay TV subscribers for the video providers This can be turning of the tide as we consumers have so many other ways to enjoy the same video contentAs we know this idea never came to be as cable subscribers we do not have the freedom to pay for only the channels we choose But we may get there through a whole selection of alternative video providers The ones mentioned above are just the beginning Apple is working on a device that streams Internet video directly to television sets so it has been reportedUnlike Apple Netflix and Google the large media companies are caught in an unenviable position They are wary of encouraging a shift to web based viewing as it can lead to consumers eliminating their cable subscriptions and therefore the sub fees they enjoy for their cable net39s Quite a high wire act Hulu owned by three of these media companies has launched a premium service for 10 a month Will this complement television viewing or replace it Now that Hulu is charging it will be interesting to see what happensSo the idea that video on demand and a la carte programming choices are coming have come is an exciting one The consumer will finally be in charge of what they watch when they watch it and how much they have to pay for it Marketers and their agencies will have to figure out how to get in front of these independent viewers in ways that still have meaningful scaleSteve Yanovsky a marketing and marcom consultant with Customer Focused Solutions can be reached at stevestevenyanovskycomRead all Steveamp8217s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Steve Yanovsky MediaBizBloggersCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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