Time Warner Inc. chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes said he was “supportive” of Dish Networks’ planned over-the-top video offering, adding that limits imposed on the service by the satellite giant have alleviated any fears he may have had that it would disrupt the current distribution model.
Bewkes said the Dish service is targeted at young single people who live alone and will only allow them to access one video stream on one device.
“They limited the volume that would go through this over-the-top thing to 2 million subs with one distributor, 5 million overall,” Bewkes said at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference in New York, apologizing if his figures were wrong. “That’s a constructive way to make an offering to a given part of the market that does not undermine the other part of the market, which is the 90% of households with a number of people in them that want five TVs, TV plus Internet, etc. It seems like it’s a promising experiment in market segmentation.”
Dish Network spokesman Bob Toevs declined to comment on Bewkes’ remarks.
