December 31, 2008 3:55 PM
New Twist to TWC-Viacom Brouhaha: Go Online Young Man!
Holy crap, this is an interesting twist.
One thing I forgot to mention in my post this morning about the scuffle between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom was TWC's complaint about Viacom making so much of its content available online, which in their mind devalues the content available through TV.
I've heard these sentiments expressed before and they're actually pretty understandable: why should I pay to be able to deliver content that you're giving out for free elsewhere?
But then this story took an interesting twist. In preparation for the nearly two dozen Viacom channels that are about to get switched off in about 8 hours, TWC's taken an interesting tact: they're encouraging disgruntled customers to go online to watch their favorite Viacom shows.
In fact, they claim they're going to be actually helping them both find the shows and figure out how to watch this online video on their TVs.
On the one hand, I can see how they're doing this to make a point, that if Viacom's going to put all their content online and then try to get TWC to pay more for it, then screw 'em.
But on the other, they're not only acknowledging that cable TV's becoming increasingly irrelevant, they're even helping push their customers in that direction by helping them realize that they don't need to subscribe to cable to watch TV!!
As someone who watches most of his TV online I can attest that we're still a long ways away from online video being able to totally replace TV, but even still this is a fascinating development that may be a bellwether of things to come in 2009. And whatever the result, it certainly makes for good theater!
