By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In a deal announced today that could spawn a replication of the multi-tiered pay TV network scheme (first run, second run, rerun) on the Internet, cable service provider Comcast will be partnering with cable network parent company Time Warner (no longer related to Time Warner Cable) to make replays of shows seen on TNT, TBS, and potentially other Turner networks down the road available online first to paying Comcast customers.
The deal will lead to Comcast extending its "On Demand" brand to the Web, using a platform that will not only enable advertising but also provide a ratings service to advertisers. Most likely, this will be an analytics service provided by the Nielsen Company, which Comcast endorsed in January 2008.
Although early analysis of the partnership has centered on the cable provider's interest in capitalizing on "second-run" content before it all becomes free for downloading, the move actually may not actually change much with regard to the status of Turner Networks programs. While broadcast networks' "second runs" tend to be available shortly after their original air time, on sites such as Hulu, TV.com, and YouTube, TNT shows such as The Closer, Saving Grace, and Leverage are only made available through that network's own portal at TNT.tv (though TV.com often provides links to this portal). Unlike the major sites which use Flash, TNT and TBS.com utilize a version of Windows Media rights protection which clearly removes platform independence from the equation, and whose plug-in has failed to install correctly in Betanews tests with at least six different browser configurations -- the latest such failure taking place in Firefox 3.0.11 on Windows XP, at the time of this writing.
What's more, Turner already delays the streaming premiere dates of its programs often until a week or more after their first-run airdates, so the window of opportunity for Comcast to take advantage of exclusivity already existed. The first beta tests of "On Demand Online" will involve 5,000 Comcast customers, who will also very likely become participants in Nielsen tracking as a result. In their joint statement this morning, the two companies professed their interest in promoting the business model of second-run to paid subscribers, third-run later, as a kind of principle they're calling "TV Everywhere."
In his part of the statement this morning, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes remarked, "TV Everywhere is no longer just a concept, but a working model to deliver consumers more television content over broadband than ever before. We consistently look to make our popular, branded content more accessible to consumers in order to grow our business." Nonetheless, nobody has said exactly how this principle will be promoted, or whether we'll actually hear anything about "TV Everywhere" beyond this initial agreement.
Right now, ABC has joined NBC and Fox as stakeholders in Hulu, while CBS is the principal stakeholder in TV.com -- none of them, arguably, have an interest in delaying viewer access to their programs. And while those companies are largely known as broadcasters, they and their parent companies are all involved to varying degrees with cable channels.
Meanwhile, perhaps the most noteworthy holdout in this "TV Everywhere" is Comcast itself, which has its own stake in many cable channels that could have provided programming to this effort, including E! Entertainment Television, Style Networks, and sports channel Versus.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Greiner's new Web page borrows a New Zealand-based newsletter (which appears to be out of publication since last October) to demonstrate how a non-validated Web page appears when rendered by Outlook. Betanews checked out that newsletter: Abiding by many of the suggestions made by professional Web designers, the CSS for "Soul Purpose" was all embedded in the document -- there were no links to external stylesheets, eliminating one opportunity for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. E-mail clients that do support full CSS often prefer the code to be embedded in the page rather than linked, so "Soul Purpose" was following the rules.
Today, Taiwanese mobile phone maker and principal hardware supporter of the Android platform, HTC unveiled its third Android handset, Hero, which is the first to make a departure from the familiar Android UI.
David Wadhwani, Vice President and General Manager of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe said, "As the first Android device with Flash, the new HTC Hero represents a key milestone for Android and the Flash Platform. With close to 80% of all videos online delivered with Adobe Flash technology, consumers want to access rich Web content on-the-go. The collaboration with HTC offers people a more complete Flash based Web browsing experience today and presents an important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future."
I have a copy of Portraits, a book of Steve McCurry's photographs, on my bookshelf. The Afghan girl is on the cover -- you know the photo, yes you do, and those eyes have never left you. McCurry photographed Sharbat Gula in 1985 when she was a 13-year-old refugee, and about seven years ago he found her again, living in a remote region of Afghanistan.
August 15, 2009 > Have you been putting off that Win7 RC download? Get on the stick, because the end is nearing. Microsoft expects to release Windows 7 to manufacturing in July, and 
Wednesday's tech headlines 
Mr. Jaquith reached out to Mr. Anderson (pictured right) -- who is currently the editor-in-chief of Wired -- and his publishers at Hyperion before going public with the saga on Tuesday in the company blog. Mr. Anderson said he'd correct his "screwups" online by the time the book is released (in July) and in future editions; Hyperion said that was good enough for them.
With the iPhone's 3.0 software update, Apple's iconic touchphone finally has access to AT&T Navigator, the carrier's branded GPS software solution provided by TeleNav, and the first turn-by-turn GPS app for the iPhone.