TIA 2011: Verizon, TBS make the pitch for TV Everywhere

DALLAS — Bringing some entertainment flavor to TIA 2011, executives from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and Turner Broadcasting System Inc. shared the stage here to talk about how they’re working to deliver programming across as many distribution channels and device types as possible.
“I put content in places where it isn’t today and I put more content in places where it already is,” began Jeremy Legg, SVP of multi-platform distribution for Turner Broadcasting System Inc. “I’m one of the people that’s going to chew up a lot of bandwidth.”
Legg described the goal of TV Everywhere as one that will give customers access to live and on-demand content across all of their devices at no additional cost. “An important point here is we’re only asking you to pay once,” he added.
“At Time Warner Inc. (TWX) we don’t want to block devices. It’s one Internet,” Legg said. “It’s all the same place, it’s all banging on the same set of servers.”
The past couple years have been spent on getting the “technology plumbing” working, Legg said, but now there are plans to eventually merge advertising into an all-digital platform that will allow it to be moved into the same column with identical advertising running on TV as it does on other platforms.
Because of the technical know-how that’s being required of programmers and content providers, Legg said that TBS is becoming more of a software company.
Software development kits (SDKs), video codecs and the like are coming from all angles, including Verizon. Joseph Ambeault, director of entertainment services at Verizon Communications Inc., said his mission is to “break this technical co-dependency.”
Moreover, “our job is to drive discovery,” he said. “This entire infrastructure has been setup to deal with millions and millions of choices… If we’re not on the device, the consumer is going to be served by somebody else.”