I visited Hulu, my first stop for all-things Web video, and saw the message "Watch on Fox.com" when I called up the latest Masterchef episode that had aired on TV the night before. Huh, that's never happened before, I thought. As directed, I navigated my browser to Fox next. There, the episode I wanted to watch was not yet available. So I put on something else -- and I listened to commercials and advertisements supporting another network.

ABC will soon follow Fox's lead. "We'll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a [cable] subscriber," Bob Iger, the head of Disney, ABC's parent company, told stock analysts earlier this week. "The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it's one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it."

With these two giants already on board, it looks like the subscriber authentication model will soon become the prevailing one for television on the Web. It's a paywall for television. Networks are looking to stop viewers from cutting the cord, or getting rid of their expensive cable television, even though they've already built platforms and assembled teams for monetizing their video on the Web with pre-roll ads, interstitials and more.



Will this work? I don't think so. I think this is just delaying the inevitable. The paywall for the New York Times is one of the first successful efforts to squeeze some money out of customers who had quickly grown accustomed to free content, but that paywall is porous. It's more like the gentle nudge of PBS than anything we've seen with newspapers before. And that's why it works. The paywall created by Fox and ABC shows that executives assume that, without access to So You Think You Can Dance, viewers will keep their television sets and the cable bills that go with them. What they forget, though, is that Fox is not the Times; there's better programming out there. And even when viewers are committed to Fox, it's easy to find an illegal work-around; nobody is BitTorrenting newspapers. Better to find a way to work with would-be viewers.



Image: FOX Broadcasting Company.

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