The reality of the idea of TV Everywhere, where people can view content for free on the web, as long as they have a pay TV license for that content, is that it could technically be full of loop holes.
For instance do you allow TV to be watched only from the same home network that has the TV attached to it? Well satellite can’t do that. Or do you allow family members to view the content while they are on the road. Whichever route you chose will require a difference technical security structure.
Which is perhaps why CableLabs, the US R&D collective for the cable industry, has been asked to look into the area and come up with a set of standards that will enable TV Everywhere.
Now CableLabs has issued a request for information to define elements for a common technical approach. The deadline for responses from vendors is December 11th and we would assume that the vendors helping out Time Warner, which has had the longest trials, and those helping Comcast, would be keen to respond. The DTH industry has been supportive, but slower off the mark in TV Everywhere, but somehow need to be supported too.
“We are issuing this RFI at the strong urging of our members,” CableLabs president and CEO Paul Liao said. “It is their belief that a common technical approach will offer greater choice to consumers, and will enable competition among technology providers to support the market.”
All of which should perhaps be interpreted as, ‘we’ve been locked into technical approaches in the past, such as proprietary conditional access systems, and we’re not about to let that happen again.’
The other major operator pushing for TV Everywhere is Comcast which says it has a 5,000 subscriber and it expects to launch it as a fully fledged service before the end of 2009. Comcast calls its services On Demand Online but gets over some of the technical difficulties by only allowing the service over its own broadband lines and from its own Comcast’s Fancast and Comcast.net portals. TV Everywhere will quickly find itself renamed ‘TV Everywhere – but only at home’ unless it widens its remit and allows all the family members some method of accessing the service while on the road.
CableLabs has broken its request into segments like service architecture, technical interface specifications, resource attributes specifications, infrastructure components and security and wants to support models which provide both free content or advertising supported.