King Canute was a very wise and successful ruler.  He was King Canute I of England, King Canute II of Norway and King Canute of Denmark.  His conquests and political skills were meaningful and had lasting impact.  Generally however, most people tend to remember him as the bloke who tried to hold back the tide.  The reality that history has sometimes distorted is that he did this to prove to his people that even a king’s power had limits, and there were certain things over which he could have no control.

The CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, could do well to look at Canute’s example to see where the limits of his powers are in reality.  The tide of viewers downloading television via the internet has already started to rise.  It has risen enough to get Mr Bewkes’ toes wet.  Faced with the choice of trying to block the rise of the tide or learning how to swim it seems that the Time Warner strategy is to block the rise.

Being caught by surprise cannot be an excuse.  Not only have they been watching this closely with through the lense of a video company, but they have also seen the tide rush over their sister company Warner Music. 

Challenges like the internet and the current recession tend to ask businesses hard and soul-searching questions about themselves.  My view is that both Time Warner and Warner Music exist to monetise the work of the artists they represent.  To do this, they provide content to consumers in the most profitable and user friendly way possible.  In the old days, with music I could buy the single, or the album.  Then industry invented the CD and I bought all those albums again for some reason that I have yet to quite fathom.  With films and TV, I could use the television set, and then the DVD as a method of viewing the content - happy to pay for a DVD of what I wanted to watch.

Both CDs and DVDs were pushed on consumers by their respective industries.  There was no massive consumer voice that said: “I want better sound or vision”.  Indeed the Betamax vs VHS and Cd-i vs CD-ROM prove the opposite. 

Consuming media via the internet, however, is a consumer choice.  We have shown via our own behaviour that we want our music and our video on-demand and accessible via the medium which we find most convenient.  This should have been pay-day for content distributors.  A new revenue stream that the consumers had invented! Why wouldn’t you leap at such a clear opportunity?  

What Time Warner has done is to say to customers: ”To get something that you want, you have to buy something you probably do not want.”  In Australia we have Third Line Forcing.  Legal firm Mallesons describe this as: “when a supplier places a condition on the supply of its goods or services that the customer must acquire goods or services of a particular type from a third person nominated by the supplier”.  The new idea from Time Warner as described to Ad Age is: “If you want to watch your favorite TV network or shows through broadband on any device — PCs or mobile — you can do it as long as you subscribe to any multichannel provider”.  Better legal minds than mine might like to add a comment as to whether there is an issue here.  From a consumer’s perspective, I would suggest that this approach is a case of Lesswhere than Everywhere.

Audiences clearly want to consume linear video content online and on mobiles.  We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, as once consumers get used to truely cross-platform content, linear content will seem as forced as watching TV in black and white.

Audiences have shown that the tide is turning and its rise is gathering momentum.  It will be a king tide that washes over television broadcasters and film companies as it did with the music industry, and it will be a wise media executive that uses King Canute as a role model to show how this tide simply cannot be stopped.