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Time Warner to allow viewers to StartOver
By Rachel Pleasant
Staff Writer
If you can’t stand to miss a single minute of your favorite TV show or sporting event, you may be interested to know about a new service Time Warner is testing in South Carolina.
Time Warner, with systems throughout the state, including Summerville, is currently testing a new technology called StartOver in employee homes in Columbia.
Time Warner will be testing StartOver throughout the state later this year and, by the beginning of 2006, plans to offer the service on a non-test basis to its digital cable subscribers in South Carolina and beyond. The service will be free and will not require any additional equipment.
StartOver allows TV viewers to restart a program within the “live exhibition window,” said Dan Santelle, vice president of sales and marketing for the South Carolina division.
“If a program is on between 8 and 9, you can restart it before 9,” Santelle said.
Programs can be restarted as many times as a viewer likes, but, Santelle said, viewers will not be able to restart every show on every channel.
“This is a subject of lots of discussion. There are lots of serious opinions about programming rights and the distribution of programming rights,” Santelle said.
Since broadcast television is supported by advertising and depends on ratings to sell advertising, technology such as StartOver is controversial, he said.
“A whole part of the programming community is anxious about consumers having that much control over what they watch. It’s unclear what it means to the advertising model,” he said.
But, Santelle added, television is changing, thanks in large part to digital recording services such as TiVo, and Time Warner is embracing that change.
TiVo, launched in 1997, offered the first commercially available digital video recorder. In its financial report for the second quarter of this year, TiVo reported a total of nearly 3.6 million subscriptions.
“Digital video recorders and TiVo are changing the complexion of linear television, and Time Warner as a cable company is trying to figure out a way to give consumers more control. It makes some programmers anxious because how are they going to secure audiences? Nobody knows what this really means,” Santelle said.
Because of the questions and concerns surrounding such technology as StartOver, some program providers may not permit Time Warner Cable to offer StartOver for certain shows or events.
On networks owned by Time Warner, including HBO and Cinemax, every program will be StartOver-enabled, he said.
Consumers will know which programs are StartOver-enabled because an icon will appear on the screen.
In a concession to the programming community, Santelle said, viewers will not be able to fast-forward through portions of a StartOver program. They will be able to stop and pause.
This isn’t the first time South Carolina has been a test site for a new service.
Time Warner also tested HBO On Demand in South Carolina as well as a service called Access Menu, a service that allows customers to tailor the news and information appearing on their screens to their individual interests.
A customer could, for instance, select specific stocks to appear on a scrolling ticker at the bottom of their screen.
South Carolina was also the first state to offer a caller identification system that displays information about incoming phone calls on a television screen.
“I think it’s a decent cross-section of the population,” Santelle said, explaining why South Carolina is so often a test area for new services.
“It’s not rural or urban, so the company gets a pretty good sense of how consumers will behave and how they’ll use a new service.”
Rachel Pleasant is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at rpleasant@charlestonbusiness.com.
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