Could much of the hurt that currently afflicts the television industry have been avoided had the networks and MVPDs gone ahead with the MVPD-based TV Everywhere apps that were first proposed back in the early 2010s? 

These apps, if you remember, were going to be the industry’s answer to Netflix—apps that allowed you to watch your pay TV bundle from just about anywhere (hence the name) on every device you owned. 

It’s something I’ve been mulling over a lot as I watch the various players flail about. And the story here is how a whole lot of short-term thinking plus the massive level of mistrust between networks and MVPDs killed this potential solution in utero.

Allow me to explain.

The Early Days of Streaming

Close your eyes for a minute and let’s transport ourselves back to the early 2010s. Netflix has just made the move to streaming and it is as if the scales have fallen from consumers’ eyes. 

Watching TV on demand—when we want, how we want, on whatever device we want—is really pretty awesome and it really does make cable seem hopelessly backwards and distressingly old fashioned.

Now granted, many of the cable companies have rolled out some sort of homegrown set top box-based on-demand product, but they’re clunky and awkward and (largely by design) not easy to find.

This is when many people began urging the big cable companies to meet the Netflix challenge by rolling out “TV Everywhere” apps of the sort that would vastly improve the overall viewing experience.

For those who may have forgotten, there were three key elements to these proposed TV Everywhere apps:

• Full array of linear and on-demand content: Not only would you have access to the exact same bundle of broadcast and cable networks you had on your set top box, but once a show had aired live it would be available to watch on-demand. No more DVR-ing. (Or PVR-ing, for you Brits.)

• Available on any device: the idea was that you could have the app on every TV in your house (via a set top box or dongle) as well as every smartphone and tablet. (Hence the “Everywhere” part.) 

The key to this functionality was that the app would work identically on every device. This was a brilliant feature of the Netflix app—if you stopped watching a show on your TV, you could pick it up the next day on your iPad and continue watching right from where you left off.

• Available in and out of home: So long as you were a subscriber, you could use your TV Everywhere app, well, everywhere—on your commute, at a friend’s house, in a hotel room, even in the office. Remember that at the time, social video was just starting to come into its own, and so there were fewer overall phone-based video viewing options.

Everyone seemed to think TV Everywhere apps were a great idea. There was even a decent amount of heart for them at the MVPDs, many of whom were at least paying lip service to the notion of improving their customer service experience. And remember too that in the early 2010s, cable penetration in the U.S. was at around 90%. Compare that to smartphone penetration in 2023, which is “only” at around 80%.

While the MVPDs may have been on board, the networks were a different story.

Why TV Everywhere Failed

There are many reasons TV Everywhere (TVE) failed, most of which can be attributed to a lack of vision and a desire not to fix something that was not (at the time) broken.

• Rights Issues. The biggest TVE killer was that the networks simply did not want to give the MVPDs the rights to run their programming on TV Everywhere apps, thus rendering those apps dead in the water.

The networks’ concerns were five-fold.

1. Measurement: Nielsen did not measure on demand or non-set-top-box viewing and thus they had no way to measure what was watched on TVE apps. If the “everywhere” part of TV Everywhere took off, the fear was it would drastically impact the ratings of a show, thus reducing the amount advertisers would pay for an ad slot when the show aired live while also putting the network in a lesser position when it came time to renegotiate carriage and retrans fees.

2. Advertising: Because they could not measure TV Everywhere viewing, they also could not charge for it the way they charged for TV. Nor was there an easy way to serve it up, especially for on-demand/time-shifted viewing. Selling it was also much more difficult than traditional linear, as the on-demand part involved addressable targeting, something the network ad sales teams did not want to have to deal with.

3. Unbundling: The networks feared the MVPDs would demand they unbundle their networks and let viewers choose which ones they wanted for the TV Everywhere apps. This would hurt their business model and potentially deliver a big hit to their income if lots of people took them up on it. (Unbundling was a big deal back then, at least from a consumer rights perspective, as it served to drive up cable TV prices and create an unwanted glut of channels. Hence Rich Greenfield and his #GoodLuckBundle hashtag.)

4. Piracy: This was still a huge concern back the day, a holdover from the era when Napster disrupted the music industry. The networks feared that Bad Actors would use these TV Everywhere apps to pirate hit TV shows and movies onto DVDs, drastically cutting into profits, especially overseas.

5. Distribution: Thanks in no small part to the massive level of distrust between the networks and MVPDs, the networks decided they needed to follow the Netflix example and control their own distribution by eventually launching their own apps. So why undercut the apps they were about to launch by letting the MVPDs launch their own TVE apps?

There was another issue too, in that there was nothing to stop the MVPDs from trying to sell their TVE apps to a national audience and this made everyone more than a little nervous. 

The various MVPDs had reached a Cold War-like stalemate where every MVPD controlled a territory where it was either a monopoly or duopoly player; and they all stayed in their respective corners. So a scenario where they all went to war with each other over their TVE apps was not something anyone wanted to see happen.

What Happened Next

A few MVPDs eventually rolled out a reduced version of a TV Everywhere app. Only without the broadcast networks or popular cable networks, these apps weren’t very useful. Nor were they heavily promoted, and so after a year or two most sort of faded away.

Meanwhile, the networks all launched their own TV Everywhere apps, which were only available to people who already had a cable subscription. Worse still, on most of the apps, full seasons of their more popular shows were not available (why risk losing all that ad revenue!) and some series were not available at all.

While the apps hung around a while, the networks’ next step was launching their own full-fledged subscription streaming apps.

Envisioning An Alternate Scenario

Imagine, if you will, an alternate reality, one where everyone got out of each others’ ways and the MVPDs launched those ideal TV Everywhere apps back in 2011 and 2012, much in the way many of us had imagined.

In this best case scenario, the networks would still be dominant and the billions they made from carriage and retrans fees would still be rolling in, as would the billions available to talent from syndication and overseas rights. 

The ad business would have developed a plan to measure, target and plan against all those streaming on-demand views, keeping that revenue high as well, while allowing thousands more brands to begin running TV commercials (the real benefit of ad-supported streaming.)

And while the price of top tier bundles would remain stratospheric, there would be lower priced streaming-only bundles too, which would remain lower-priced since they could be sold on a national basis and would all compete with each other.

The second Golden Age of Television (which is generally thought to have started in the late 90s, long before streaming) would still be in full swing and the new on demand options would have convinced many of the networks to launch their own versions of premium cable, further expanding the pool of “lean in” TV content.

That’s the rosy picture.

The flip is that we would see much less innovation, that “free ad-supported” would mostly still mean “over-the-air,” and that streaming advertising would still be a giant muddle that everyone was trying to figure it out.

And every scenario in between.

This is, of course, just an exercise in speculation for a Sunday afternoon. It’s like trying to figure out what would have happened if the United States had never declared independence from Britain. Would we wind up like Canada? Or someplace completely different?

Still, it’s worth noting that a viable solution was once staring us in the face and we passed on it.

It wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s worth examining so it doesn’t happen again.