TV Everywhere
TV Everywhere (also known as authenticated streaming or authenticated video on-demand)
Under the model, broadcasters offer their customers the ability to access content from their channels through
among others. Broadcast television networks have also adopted TV Everywhere restrictions for their online content, albeit in a less broad-scale adoption than their cable counterparts.Television providers and broadcasters have touted the advantages of being able to access content across multiple platforms, including on the internet, and on
Rationale
TV Everywhere services were developed in an attempt to compete with the
In particular, broadcasters and providers have emphasized the use of TV Everywhere services to allow
History
Precursors
Introduction and adoption
In 2009,
In 2010, broadcasters and television providers began a wider roll-out of TV Everywhere-based services; for the 2010 Winter Olympics, NBC Sports offered live and video on-demand access to events throughout the Games that required users to authenticate for access.[8] Also in February, HBO launched HBO Go, a video on demand service exclusive to HBO subscribers on participating providers.[9] In September 2010, Disney would begin launching an array of TV Everywhere-based services, including WatchESPN (a successor to ESPN360 offered to ESPN television subscribers), and similar apps for Disney Channel and Disney XD.[10]
In August 2011, Fox became the first over-the-air network to restrict on-demand access with a TV Everywhere-based system; "next day" on-demand episodes (either through its website or Hulu, itself a joint venture between Fox, NBC, and ABC at the time) would only be available online to users authenticating themselves as a subscriber to a cable or satellite provider, or those who subscribe to the Hulu Plus service. All other users would be subject to an eight-day delay.[11] On September 1, 2011, fellow Fox property Big Ten Network (a college sports network dedicated to the Big Ten Conference, operated in partnership with Fox Sports) also launched a TV Everywhere service known as BTN2Go.[12]
Expansion
Matt Strauss, Comcast senior vice president of digital and emerging platforms, considered the 2012 Summer Olympics to be a "watershed" event for TV Everywhere services; NBCUniversal announced that a total of nearly 10 million authenticated devices accessed its online coverage during the Games across both the NBCOlympics.com site and NBC Olympics Live Extra app; in particular, parent company Comcast accounted for 3.3 million devices from 1.5 million users.[13] Following the Games, the app was rebranded as NBC Sports Live Extra.[14]
TV Everywhere services also began to appear in Canada in the early 2010s, with the Canadian launch of
In May 2013, ABC released its Watch ABC mobile app, which allows viewers on participating providers to access live streams from participating ABC affiliates.[19][20] In December 2013, ABC confirmed that it would impose a similar restriction to Fox for "next day" on-demand episodes beginning on January 6, 2014, with seven-day exclusivity for authenticated users and Hulu Plus subscribers.[21] NBC unveiled its own plans for a similar TV Everywhere app to its affiliate board in April 2014.[22]
In November 2015, after negotiations surrounding
Shift to subscription-based services
In the late-2010's, a number of major media companies began to shift their priorities towards direct-to-consumer, subscription-based streaming services, in order to specifically attract cord cutters and increase their competitiveness with competitors such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Some of these forays either subsume content previously distributed via a TV Everywhere model, or represent a hybrid approach of a service that can be obtained direct-to-consumer or via a television provider (through authentication or promotional offers):
- In 2018, ESPN launched ESPN+, which began to subsume much of the overflow content that had previously been available at no extra charge to ESPN subscribers via WatchESPN.[27][28]
- In 2018, Bell Media merged its OTT service
- HBO and NBCUniversal both launched streaming services in 2020, HBO Max and Peacock. HBO Max replaced both HBO Go and a previous direct-to-consumer offering, HBO Now, and is available to HBO subscribers via television providers at no additional charge. Peacock's ad-supported premium tier is similarly offered to television subscribers via agreements with individual providers, such as NBCUniversal parent Comcast. [31][32][33]
Reception
The TV Everywhere concept has been met with mixed reception. Some broadcasters were initially hesitant to introduce TV Everywhere services, with concerns that they might affect advertising revenue and not be adequately counted by
Media activists have criticized the concept as protecting the existing
In July 2014, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield criticized the video on demand services offered through TV Everywhere systems for being ad-supported. In examples from FX and TNT, he noticed that ads often repeated, and that in TNT's case, its version of an episode of The Last Ship included 20 minutes of unskippable ads across 45 minutes of programming. In conclusion, he contended that viewers would rather wait for programs to appear on subscription streaming services rather than use TV Everywhere services.[35]
Viewer awareness
Despite efforts by broadcasters to educate viewers on TV Everywhere services and how to utilize them (including Fox, which produced a promotional video starring
For the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2014 Winter Olympics, NBC worked closer with providers to help educate users, and produced customized marketing materials and video tutorials featuring Carson Daly (2012) and Ryan Seacrest (2014) to help inform users. As an incentive, NBC also allowed authenticated users to enter a sweepstakes to win a trip to London (2012) or Rio de Janeiro (2014).[39][40]
Still, with dissatisfaction with the system and the
In April 2014, the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) unveiled an industry-wide initiative for marketing and educating subscribers about TV Everywhere services provided by broadcasters and providers; these efforts include a stylized "tv everywhere" logo which the organization intends providers to use as a unified brand to denote TV Everywhere services. The logo consists of interlocking rectangles, representing multiple "screens" (platforms) for viewing content. The association also provided design recommendations for TV Everywhere user experiences, aiming to alleviate the confusion that had been experienced by users during the authentication process.[43][44]
Adoption
In a December 2013 survey of 4,205 pay television subscribers,
Amid criticism of NBC's coverage, adoption of NBC's TV Everywhere services during the 2014 Winter Olympics was still significantly large: on February 21, 2014, coverage of the Men's hockey semi-final featuring the U.S. and Canada recorded the largest Live Extra audience in NBC Sports history, with 2.12 million unique viewers, augmenting the average NBCSN television audience of 3.9 million.[46][47] ESPN's coverage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup drew similarly heavy online viewership: during a group stage match between the U.S. and Portugal, at least 1.7 million concurrent viewers were using WatchESPN (though, not all of the viewers were necessarily watching the game).[48]
In December 2015, research firm GfK estimated that 53% of the United States' pay television subscribers have used a TV Everywhere service—an increase from 42% in 2012, that overall use had doubled since 2012, and 79% of those surveyed found the login process easy. However, only 25% of those surveyed were aware of the term "TV Everywhere" or the CTAM logo, leading to the firm believing that consumer awareness and education was still a "critical missing piece" in the adoption of these services.[49]
Platform non-neutrality
In 2014,
During both the FCC's
On December 15, 2014, Comcast enabled the ability to use HBO Go and Showtime Anytime on Roku devices.[51] However, Comcast still blocked HBO Go on PlayStation consoles until December 2016.[52][53]
Password sharing
There have been instances of users deliberately sharing their TV Everywhere login credentials, or having them sold without their owner's knowledge on the black market, in order to allow others to view programs without subscribing to the channel. Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge, and ESPN's executive vice president for affiliate sales and marketing Justin Connolly, have considered this practice equivalent to piracy. In December 2017, it was reported that television providers and program distributors had begun to implement measures in order to discourage this practice, including reducing the length of login session, reducing the number of concurrent streams allowed on a single account, and monitoring unusual usage patterns such as large numbers of concurrent streams on a single account—especially those originating from outside of the customer's region, or during major programs.[54]
In August 2019, as part of its latest carriage agreement, it was announced that Charter and Disney would "work together to implement business rules and techniques to address such issues as unauthorized access and password sharing."[55]
By contrast, HBO's then-CEO Richard Plepler argued in an interview that intentional password sharing did not impact their business, and was a "marketing vehicle" that could help attract new subscribers, while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings similarly argued that "household sharing leads to new customers because kids subscribe on their own as they start to earn income".[56]
References
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