Here’s a link to an article that summarizes Disney’s Bob Iger’s thoughts on TV Everywhere.  What I find entertaining about this article and Iger’s comments is that they act as though the music industry died.  The music industry is alive and thriving under both the old and the new business models.  TV will be the same way and fighting change with DRM or by trying to make people authenticate to watch their favorite shows will be pointless because it’s too easy for anyone to screen capture content and rebroadcast it.

When I think about this issue, my thoughts go to my husband’s behavior.  He hates commercials and he hates waiting for episodes of a show to come out.  Since he’s not one of those folks at the water cooler, it’s not a priority to him to watch a show while it’s current.  Rather he waits until the season is over and then watches blocks of episodes on demand via Tivo.  He believes this as safer than Bittorent (after all you don’t know if someone has put something malicious in one those free movie or TV show files — why doesn’t the entertainment industry scare the beejeebees out of people with this argument???) and it’s definitely less work and waiting than BitTorrent.  He also feels there is value in being able to watch whatever he wants for $15.99/mo.  We still have cable, but that’s because we have a legacy deal with our broadband service provider and we don’t want to upset that apple cart.  My feeling is let the people view first run for free with commercials like they would on broadcast TV and then sell commercial free rebroadcasts or, heck let the rebroadcasts be free without commercials after a couple of weeks.  The folks who are hooked on the show will watch the first run.  As for the commericials, I will state this AGAIN:  If you want people to watch commercials, make good commercials and keep them fresh! A TV ad campaign really should last more than 2-weeks or a month at most.   I also think well integrated product placement  is a good strategy (nothing would sell more items to ‘tween girls than Miley Cyrus actually using the product in her shows).  Anyhow, I look forward to seeing if the TV and the movie execs can fight their way out of this paper sack.  Hopefully, they will bring in some savvy folks in under the age of 45 to tell them how to do this properly.