Cable Company iPad Apps Are Killing It
Today's Time Warner Cable earnings call revealed that its iPad app was downloaded 360,000 times during its first month of availability. Cablevision revealed that it saw 50,000 downloads in the first five days of app availability, and when contacted by GigaOM …
Context & Ripple Effects
The cable industry's iPad push has gone from experiment to adoption story in under three months. Comcast flipped on Xfinity iPad streaming in February, Cablevision followed with the Optimum for iPad app streaming hundreds of channels plus VOD at the start of April, and Time Warner Cable joined in late March — immediately drawing a carriage fight with major media companies over beaming live TV to tablets, as covered in New Cable Fight at Hand.
Today's numbers put download counts behind the legal fight: Time Warner Cable reported on its earnings call that its iPad app hit 360,000 downloads in its first month, while Cablevision counted 50,000 in the first five days of availability. The tension is that TWC's growth comes while it has pulled a number of Viacom channels from the app and filed a request for declaratory judgment against Viacom on April 7 over whether in-home tablet streaming falls within existing carriage rights.
First-order effects
- Time Warner Cable now has a 360,000-user installed base on the iPad one month into launch, giving it leverage in its declaratory-judgment action against Viacom by demonstrating consumer demand for in-home tablet streaming under existing subscriptions.
- Cablevision's 50,000 downloads in five days validate its early-April launch strategy, putting pressure on Comcast and other cable operators whose apps are still limited to subsets of their lineups.
Second-order effects
- Content owners like Viacom face a choice between litigating carriage boundaries or negotiating new tablet-streaming terms, since every week an operator's app grows users makes removal of channels more costly for both sides.
- Rival operators without a live-TV iPad app — Cox among them per the competitive set — face subscriber expectations shifting toward multi-screen viewing as table stakes, forcing product-roadmap acceleration.
Third-order effects
- If courts side with operators that in-home iPad streaming is covered by existing carriage agreements, distribution rights get renegotiated around device categories rather than delivery technology, weakening programmers' ability to charge separately for each screen.
- Tablets become a second front in the broader re-bundling fight between cable distributors and networks, with the app — not the set-top box — emerging as the customer-facing interface operators control.
The trend: Cable operators are racing to turn live-TV iPad apps into default subscription features, dragging programmers and courts into renegotiating what existing carriage rights cover on new screens.