Sports and Broadcast Network Programming Will Boost Cable iPad App Use, TWC Executive Says
Cable subscribers who own iPads will use cable-operator iPad apps more when there’s more programming available on them, Time Warner Cable Executive Vice President Kevin Leddy told C-SPAN’s The Communicators for a show set to have been telecast Saturday. Some 500,000 people have downloaded TWC’s iPad app since it was first introduced and a “high percentage” of iPad owners in TWC’s service area have the app, he said. The linear programming lineup is limited to 80 channels and still lacks local TV stations and much sports programming, he said. “As we add more sports and local broadcasters, we expect usage to go up quite a bit."
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TWC plans to make the app available on more devices including the iPhone, Samsung’s Galaxy tablets and Android phones, Leddy said. “We're also creating a video portal that is accessible through PCs.” The same technology to deliver TV programming to Samsung and Sony TV sets without a set-top was demonstrated in Chicago at the Cable Show, where Leddy was interviewed, he said. Discussions with TV makers and other CE manufacturers are progressing, but future deals will probably be reached piecemeal between certain manufacturers and distributors, he said. “We're both in very competitive industries, so trying to work out those partnerships in large forums is difficult,” Leddy said. “We're working directly with Sony and directly with Samsung, but I can’t imagine they would want to sit down together and work this out."
New applications for so-called smart TVs will proliferate just as they have on the iPad, Leddy said. “But not all of them will be available to all consumers in all parts of the country,” he said. “I think that will be relatively clear to consumers” just as it has been with the iPad, he said. Not all of the 500,000 TWC iPad app downloaders have been TWC customers, he said earlier in the interview. Some apps were downloaded by iPad owners that live outside TWC’s service area, he said.
TWC is also looking at adding integrated recommendation engines, similar to those found online at sites like Amazon.com, to its program guide, Leddy said. Such features could be enabled by new user interfaces that rely more on processing done at the TWC’s headends than on the set-top box, he said. “If we can start to access servers at our headends, then we can do much more intelligent navigation.” Any such recommendation engine would be offered as an opt-in to avoid privacy concerns, he said. “The cable industry is extremely careful about privacy.”
Leddy reiterated that TWC doesn’t have any plans to roll out consumption-based broadband billing “at this time.” The prospect exists to use that technology in the future to keep broadband prices under control, he said. “I think it would be great if we could lower prices, or at least not take prices up as fast for people who use a lot less.”