Roku's chief executive Anthony Wood was the keynote speaker at the Over-the-Top industry conference in Santa Clara, which started Tuesday. Wood had a great to deal to say about the integration of incumbent cable providers like Cox and Comcast and how those companies will likely be looking to launch their content on "over-the-top" set-top boxes sometime in 2012.
The term over-the-top set-top boxes is used to refer to third party services and devices that provide content to users outside the realm of their traditional set-top cable box. Roku, Boxee, Netflix, and Google TV all fall into this category. Wood feels that 2012 will be the year where cable companies start providing options to access their content via those services, perhaps without the user having a subscription to a cable package.
For quite some time users have been begging for a way to subscribe to specific channels without buying into a cable bundle. Channels like HBO and ESPN are at the top of that list. If cable providers could find a way to promote and sell their content via these over-the-top boxes it would remove some of the cost of subsidized hardware and allow users to avoid bundling in a ton of channels they don't watch.
Wood promised that Roku would do their part to make this happen by promoting content on their set-top boxes. This means adding specific shows and movies to their interface instead of only promoting channels on their homepage like they do currently. Roku also wants to update their recently announced mobile apps to include additional information like actor profiles and other information about the content they are watching.
Wood really believes the business model that cable providers operate under now, only providing streaming access to content if the user is a cable subscriber, will break this year. This would mean users could get access to certain content a la carte, without the need for a traditional cable box.
"I think that's going to happen this year," Wood said. "But there's going to be a lot of hesitancy about who will be the first company to go."
Wood doesn't see bundling going away and he also doesn't see the ability to just purchase a subscription to ESPN happening anytime soon. Wood said, "Bundling is intrinsic to the business, and I don't see it changing any time soon." He went on to say that he sees the bundles "fraying" and content providers are likely to start experimenting with alternate ways to sell users content.
I think things like ESPN and HBO would be really attractive to users as a la carte services. I would personally want access to those two channels if I totally cut the cable cord. Did any of you guys cut out cable all together? What specific channels would you want to see a la carte?
