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On April 30 ABC, which is owned by Disney, became the third large broadcaster to make many of its programs available free on Hulu. Disney will also take a stake in the fast-growing online-video site.
Time Wamer does not want to row against this current. But neither does it want to be swept away. If the overriding fear a few years ago was that television might suffer the fate of the music industry.which failed to give consumers what they wanted and was ravaged by pirates, the worry now is that it will follow the newspaper industry, and give too much away, the idea that it should be free and have no strings attached at all sounds very progressive," says Jeff Bewkes, Time Wamer's boss. But once people are accustomed to having something free, it can be very difficult to persuade them to pay for it.
Any hitches to the TV Everywhere plan are likely to be less technological than commercial. Time Wamer is not the only company with a scheme to put cable content online. Comcast, America's biggest cable operator, is building its own system. It wants subscribers to be able to watch video on its website, Fancast. ESPN, a cable sports channel, already allows Intemet-service providers to stream some games. An obvious threat, although not a present one, would come if a big video-streaming website started selling subscriptions to television programs and other professionally produced
