The Walt Disney Company has a complicated history with copyright. Disney has long taken inspiration for its movies from the public domain. Fairy tales, fables, Shakespeare, you name it, Disney has borrowed it. Disney has continued the age old practice of building on the work of others. There is no shame in this, it’s the natural progression of art, science, engineering, law, math, everything. That’s how society evolves.
Copyright, along with patent law, dates back to the founding documents of America (and the concepts predate immigration across the Atlantic) and is designed to serve as an incentive for creative works. The idea is that by issuing a limited monopoly, the state can encourage citizens to write, invent, paint, sing, and compose, recoup their investment and make some profit, and then gift their work to society. Copyright law is designed to encourage the greater good. Not be a barrier to protect the rights of artists against the public.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday published an article outlining an interview with ESPN President John Skipper discussing the cord-cutting revolution and ESPN’s reluctance to embrace internet content distribution unpaired from a cable or satellite (pay-TV) subscription.
“Though the company has internally considered a stand-alone broadband offering, “it’s not close yet.”
Mr. Skipper told the paper that a version of ESPN untethered from a cable subscription isn’t close, but in the age of Netflix, this is a surprise. Shouldn’t ESPN be close but not offering the product, perhaps, like HBO and HBO Go, trying to warm up the cable providers to the idea?
ESPN, like parent Disney, and recently, Disney property ABC, requires uses link their online or portable device with their traditional cable account. Signing in is a relatively painless process, but it means that for those who do not have some form of pay-TV, there is no online alternative.
For ESPN, a cable channel, this is unfortunate. With the success of MLB.tv, many sports fans would gladly free themselves of the channels they currently pay for and don’t watch to gain access to an online portal of ESPN content. Already, on the WatchESPN app, a greater amount of content is available – many college games for example – that don’t show up on the TV ESPN channels are available to stream over the internet either live or from an archive. Right now, ESPN wants to protect their current deals with the cable operators, not viewers, making payments.
It’s a similar strategy to that being taken by the NFL and Major League Baseball against Aereo: the threat of putting more content behind a paywall. Rather than broadcast games on free, over-the-air television, the leagues have indicated they would prefer to alienate some viewers and become cable-only rather than let the alternative antenna service provide customers with a feed of the game acquired in a, currently, legal manner.
Sure, live sports is an anchor that keeps people subscribing to cable tv. Right now, it’s compelling even if frustrating, but the same sports leagues that are retreating to cable don’t have much further to go before just selling directly to the consumer. Disney is in a unique position having so many iconic and powerful brands (Pixar, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) that it can leverage to move customers anywhere along the content spectrum. Netflix in 2016 will become a very nice home for many of their properties.
For the same hundred dollars a month minimum buy-in for a cable & internet package, consumers might start spending fifty dollars on internet and ten dollars per month on the three services they choose, perhaps even alternating when a new Game of Thrones (or whichever show is popular and offered in the right format) season debuts.
The cord-cutting revolution may have started before 2014, but the first big battles could well be fought this year as the hardware, software, and services are reaching past the domain of the technically inclined and arriving in living rooms in the form of a Chromecast, AppleTV, gaming console, and mobile devices. With a tap on a touchscreen, television content is at your literal fingertips, with barely a thought to the cable company.