Time Warner Joins Disney in Abuse of a Public Trust

HBO launched a broadband offering that defies the promise of internet TV. They’re greedy. I’m bored. 

NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht calls it baffling but, though the practices themselves seem to lack coherence, I’m not that surprised.

I feel like I’m repeating myself: ###old media is so resistant to the emerging paradigm of open television distribution that they’ll do almost anything to attempt to preserve the old model of control, including alienating and confusing potential subscribers and limiting potential market growth.  All this is done to develop bundled premium content in a manner that threatens the principle of Net Neutrality and, therefore, future innovation.  This on top of rumblings about usage-based pricing for bandwidth raises questions about how much control ISPs should have.

Disney did something very similar with ESPN 360

.  I think these media conglomerates are abusing a public trust — the digital spectrum — which belongs to all of us.

HBO Broadband is a new media property with convoluted practices that fight the grain of everything we’ve come to expect from new media, principally openness.  Why should the onus for subscription to HBO be on the ISP and not the individual consumer?

Do we want a society in which the provider of the connective technology determines what we can and cannot watch on TV?  Should ISP’s maintain the right to leverage their technology investments this way?