Last month FOX announced it was instituting an eight-day delay on streaming its shows to Fox.com and Hulu. That is, unless you’re a subscriber of a participating cable, satellite or IPTV service through the TV Anywhere initiative — or a Hulu Plus customer.
Not surprisingly, now there’s word that ABC is planning to follow suit. “You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in a conference call last week.
It looks like subscriber authentication will become the prevailing model for online/mobile video of current TV shows, allowing networks to preserve lucrative distribution deals while growing mid- to long-tail revenue. “The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it,” Iger explained.
So is an eight-day delay that big of a deal? Well, if your friends are talking about a show on Twitter and Facebook the day it airs, the delay becomes more of an issue. So in a way, fueling the social conversation works to the advantage of cable, satellite and IPTV companies who own the immediate window of distribution. I think it’s a safe prediction that distributors will more aggressively enable real-time social conversations, which only works to their advantage in preserving their business model.