Broadband TV | Advances rattle cable companies
Networks experiment with putting shows online

About one-third of people who subscribe to cable TV or satellite services said they would drop that service if they could get TV shows they wanted over a broadband computer connection, paying a flat fee.

Those survey results give cable executives the willies, said Gerry Kaufhold, an In-Stat analyst, and it isn't just Google that has them scared. Right now, the National Football League is giving Comcast and other cable operators fits by offering several choice games online at www.nfl.com/nflnetwork.

NFL and the cable boys are scrapping over NFL demands that cable operators run its channel on the cable operators' basic tier and fork over 2 cents a day per subscriber for the privilege. This amounts to about $484,000 a day for Comcast, which instead offers the NFL Network on a premium tier, sparing the bulk of its subscribers the added cost.

"The NFL is using the cable modem to try to show the cable operators just how popular their games on Thursdays and Saturdays are," Kaufhold said.

TV networks also are experimenting with putting their fare online, trying to get a handle on how it fits into their business models, he said.

"Broadcasters are using Internet delivery to figure out where and when people will watch episodes of shows they missed," he said.

One interesting trend is that a show broadcast on a Tuesday evening during primetime is often watched on the Internet on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays over the lunch hour. This suggests that when people miss a favorite show on TV, they try to watch it from work on a computer while munching a sandwich, Kaufhold said.

For some series, when a viewer misses one show, the plot line is lost and viewership drops, he said.

"Providing shows online may actually bring back eyeballs to watch later episodes on TV," he said. "But providing those shows as video-on-demand over cable may not help because people don't have access to TV during their lunch hour at the office.

The chairman of Ofcom in the UK, has predicted that internet delivered content will soon overtake broadcast television. He said that a new approach to regulation will be required and that this will be crucial to the future economic success of the communications industry.

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