What if ABC had an app on your TV for watching all shows ON DEMAND?
First, a big announcement from the BBC: the iPlayer is coming directly to your TV.
The BBC's iPlayer allows fans to watch recent episodes online after they've aired on TV. It has become a very popular app (the 'Hulu of Europe', if you forgive me for saying it). The BBC is now bringing the iPlayer directly to the TV, on Samsung Connected TVs. They're doing this via the Yahoo platform, so it will likely be on more TVs as well. Imagine, here in the States, if ABC decided to build a TV app that allowed you to watch previous episodes of 'Lost' on your TV, whenever you wanted. No more need to record the show via your DVR. And ABC could place a few unskippable ads within the stream (a la Hulu), thereby more effectively tracking and monetizing time-shifted views compared to DVR. Great win for consumers and maybe ABC.Who loses in this scenario? TiVO, Netflix, and (most importantly) the MSOs. Basically, all the "middleware" between content and consumer lose, IF this catches on with the major content providers. That's a big IF.
There are political and economic forces that will likely prevent (or at least stall) this type of "disintermediation" from happening. Remember that the content providers (ABC) make about half their revenue from licensing their content to the MSOs (cable companies). The relationships between content providers and the MSOs are extremely tight, even while they are love-hate relationships. They have lived co-dependently for 3 decades. It's going to take some time and a lot of pain to unwind those relationships. ABC is going to hesitate jeopardizing those relationships for an experiment with a small population of Connected TV users.
Here's the BBC iPlayer story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6966236/BBC-iPlayer-to-be-built-in-to-Samsung-TVs.html#article
By the way, how could Apple allow the brand "iPlayer" to slip through their fingers?
