TV Everywhere is nowhere.
In a colorful rant aimed at the media executives gathering in Sun Valley this week for Allen & Co.’s annual mogulfest, one media analyst blasted the current state of TV Everywhere — the five-year-old concept introduced by Time Warner that was supposed to save the media ecosystem as we know it.
It was to do so by “authenticating” existing cable-company subscribers so they can access the same content piped into their homes by streaming it through all sorts of mobile devices.
The concept’s execution, however, has been so “viewer unfriendly” that the analyst, Rich Greenfield of BTIG, considers it more a step back than forward.
“Online video should be so much more compelling of a user experience, not the same (or even worse) than traditional television,” he wrote in his plea to end what he called “ad nauseam.”
To make his case, Greenfield dissected a recently streamed episode of TNT’s “The Last Ship.”
On completing the exercise, he found that TV Everywhere viewers had to endure 20 minutes of unskippable commercials and promotions to watch 45 minutes of the program they wanted to see.
(Network TV, by comparison, has only 14¹/₄ minutes of commercials for each hour of programming.)
Compounding viewer misery was excessive repetition within the streamed program’s 20-minute commercial block. Three Chevy ads ran in a single break, for example, whereas the same Verizon ad appeared four times throughout the episode.
Greenfield found the streaming exercise so frustrating he predicted that, rather than continue to pay hefty cable fees, hordes of future cord cutters will elect to “wait a year for the content to come out on an ad-free SVoD [subscription video on demand] platform such as Netflix.”
Either that or they’ll revert to pirating — which, the analyst noted, “never has ads, is free and is very easy to watch.”