At the VideoSchmooze event in New York City Tuesday evening, Comcast's SVP of new media, Matt Strauss, said that the MSO will leave decisions about commercial placement in programming offered via On Demand Online, its implementation of the TV Everywhere distribution model, in the hands of programmers, according to a report by Todd Spangler in Multichannel News (note: the "TV Everywhere" model, which has long been championed by Time Warner and its chairman and CEO, Jeff Bewkes, seeks to make programming that pay-TV customers have already paid for through their cable, satellite or IPTV subscriptions available to those customers on multiple platforms, and thus aims to head off the threat posed to pay-TV services by the increasing availability of over-the-top programming--for more background, see the articles published on itvt.com, April 30th, May 14th, June 25th and July 15th). "I don't know what the right model ultimately is going to be," Strauss said. "Our job is to provide the infrastructure to allow the programmer to decide." Strauss also said that the MSO, which has been working with Nielsen to enable On Demand Online views to be part of Nielsen's C3 ratings (which are designed to take into account DVR viewing), will not "dictate that that's the right model, because ultimately [it is up to] the programmers to decide. I don't think it's going to be one-model-fits-all," he stated. In addition, Strauss said that Comcast will launch On Demand Online commercially (the service is currently in the midst of a 5000-customer trial) through its own broadband video portals, Comcast.net and Fancast, but that a second phase of the service's roll-out will enable programmers to deliver video content to authenticated Comcast subscribers through their own portals.
