It's hard out there for a pimp, and by a pimp I mean a television content aggregator.
It used to be content was about the transmission method, and infrastructure was king. Hence the "cable" company. "Dish" television. The "video" [cassette] store. The internet is all about divorcing content from a particular infrastructure. This is a good thing. It's not so good, however, for infrastructure-centric companies. And the cracks are starting to show.
A couple of recent content producer/content aggregator conflicts have made it into the news. It is instructive to observe how a couple of specific content producers have dealt with being cut off from a significant segment of their audience as a result of negotiations failing with one of their distributors.
In this corner, negotiations fell through between Viacom and DirecTV, resulting in Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, and a whole bunch of other channels going black for DirecTV subscribers. The general opinion online was that while Viacom was at least as much to blame for the failure of negotiations, customers were generally venting their ire at DirectTV on the general philosophy that they were DirectTV customers, not Viacom customers, and DirectTV was no longer providing the channels that had been included when they had signed up.
Unwilling to let this unearned bit of goodwill go unpunished, Viacom recently pushed itself into the news by cutting off online access to popular products like The Daily Show. It's a move most observers are viewing as a bid to push jonesing DirectTV customers into hassling DirectTV directly... an opinion supported by the unskippable video Viacom has pasted over the web pages for its popular shows, decrying DirectTV for dropping the shows and exhorting customers to, well, hassle them directly. It's interesting politics in the television content world but it's hard to see it generating anything other than general ill will in the customer base.
Contrast AMC's recent conflict with Dish Network. AMC has engaged in a bit of direct-action solicitation itself, airing a commercial during Mad Men telling viewers to protest to DirectTV over a (according to DirectTV, similarly cost-driven) drop. It has also engaged in some extracurricular activity online - announcing a special live stream of the season premier of Breaking Bad. Now I'm not claiming AMC is some sort of paragon here. I have no idea if there is merit to AMC's claims that DirectTV's actions are actually motivated by a desire to gain leverage in a semi-related lawsuit AMC initiated in 2008. AMC is a multibillion dollar valued publicly traded company, hardly a scrappy indie in the content world (though they are about a tenth the size of Viacom). And the no-opt-out disclaimer on their "sign up to learn about alternatives to Dish Network" box on that website - namely "AMC Networks may use this info or share it with TV providers to contact you about TV services or promotions in your area" - is some bullshit.
Still, the difference between shutting off content for everyone to try to drive ill will toward your opponent versus increasing access to content to generate goodwill for yourself is not a subtle one. The fight over the money in the inevitable shift towards on-demand and online is going to continue and it is going to be ugly. But I'm cautiously optimistic that content producers who err on the side of increasing rather than restricting access are going to win in the end.
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