ENHANCED EXPERIENCE Wanted: Cable for the Web Re-creating the cable ecosystem online offers clear benefits By William Mobley, President & CEO, FreeCast Abstract: Today’s entertainment business is built for cable, and it’s been made painfully clear that it can’t change overnight, nor should it have to. The problem isn’t the entire industry, it’s confined to the last mile: how consumers pay for, receive, and enjoy the content available to them. Rather than sending everyone involved, including the networks and studios who are firing on all cylinders and creating high quality content that consumers love, back to the drawing board, the innovation must occur at the distribution level, giving us something us something that’s just as easy for consumers and content creators alike to plug into, while addressing underlying causes of the pay-TV exodus. T A consumer complaint about cable (Comcast) is that it is too expensive, while Netflix is seen as affordable. he media industry is facing a dilemma unlike anything it’s ever seen before. The business model upon which cable TV is built is dying, under siege from Web-delivered alternatives. But paradoxically, that same business model is also the future of Web-video and the media industry itself. How can it be both on the way out and on the way in? Especially when cord-cutting is so rampant that it seems that everyone, consumers and content produc-ers alike, are trying to get away from dependence upon pay-TV? There are many reasons, but to sum them all up, whatever replaces today’s TV distribution model be familiar enough to both consumers and media industry lead-ers alike to facilitate widespread adoption. Give’em what they want Consumers are loving what they see on television. Even popular streaming services like Netflix and Hulu owe much of their popularity to content that originally came from cable and broadcast TV. One question gets at the heart of the problem: Why do consumers love Netflix and hate cable? The number one gripe with cable is that it’s too expensive, while Netflix is af-fordable for most. It’s not hard to see why the price of pay-TV gets so out of con-trol when customers are forced to pay for hundreds of channels when they only care about a few. M&EJOURNAL 50