I wrote about Time Warner Cable’s “TV Everywhere” service a month or so ago when it was first announced.   In a nutshell, “TV Everywhere” would allow you password-protected access to all your cable content on demand from any web browser, as long as you maintain a valid cable subscription for all your ‘lean-back’ (i.e. television) viewing needs.

In other words, internet TV everywhere - everywhere except the TV, that is.  

For the cable customer, the ability to see all content on demand from any web browser is a terrific value-add.  Clearly, though, it’s also an attempt by your cable provider to keep you from canceling your account and getting all your TV through your internet connection instead - and given the growth in premium content available on internet video sites such as Hulu and Netflix, this concept of ‘cutting the cord’  is becoming more attractive to the average cable customer (and more terrifying to the average cable provider) with every passing month.

Last week, TWC and Comcast announced the start of limited tests of the “TV Everywhere” service.  Aside from immediately impacting the business model of companies doing similar things  (such as Sling), the longer-term hope is that if cable companies give us full access to all our cable content on demand via a computer, that will satisfy our hunger for internet video at the television - and we’ll be happy to continue paying both cable and internet service fees.

I don’t think that’s going to work.

In fact, just the opposite: ironically, the better the “TV Everywhere” browser user experience is, the more the typical cable subscriber is going to want that same experience (i.e. internet video) from the couch (i.e. the television).

Is long-form professionally produced video over the internet going to hugely disruptive?  Yes - but one way or another, television hardware with native online video support is coming within the next few years - in other words, (internet) TV everywhere.