TV on the PC: Useful Sanity Check

Joseph Laszlo | April 20, 2007, 04:50 PM

Multichannel News is reporting that TW is pulling the plug on its 9,000 household cable-TV-on-PCs trial in San Diego, due mainly to the fact that the technology won't scale.

Data from the trial aren't especially encouraging, but they're a very good corrective to the starry-eyed optimists who insist on talking like the PC and TV are converging. Bottom line: only 1% of the trial participants actually used the service on any given day, even after nearly two years of trial.

Time Warner reads into that the comforting (for TW) view that "Long-form television is not something the average American wants to view on a computer screen, said Peter Stern, executive vice president of product management for Time Warner."

I partly agree with that [Jupiter report on Programming for the Three Screens]; certainly I'm a fan of bridge technologies that facilitate moving video content from PC to TV.

But I draw a slightly different conclusion from TW. Long-form linear, broadcast-style TV is a hard sell to consumers on their PCs. But that's because the PC is the venue of anything you want, anytime you want it. Our data suggest that frequent video viewers are increasing in number at a very strong clip [clients are welcome to get in touch to chat about that]. But I think if any kind of long-form video takes off, it's going to have to be delivered on demand, not in a linear, tune-in-or-you'll-miss-it fashion.