Liberty Global did outline its Netflix peace terms
Not welcome: Liberty Global does not want Netflix in its homes...unless it is as a channel partner
Mike Fries, President and CEO at Liberty Global, made it clear last week that he expected his various cable operations to see off the threat of Netflix in his subscriber homes thanks to the better user experience you get with the Horizon platform. He was talking to the Bloomberg news channel from Davos in Switzerland and declared: “Nobody is going to get their OTT services from Netflix when we’re done.”
Liberty Global has previously outlined the conditions under which it could actually partner with Netflix, however. Speaking at the IHS Future of Digital Media Distribution conference in London last October, Bob Greene, Managing Director of Online Entertainment at Liberty Global International, stated: “Netflix is not an aggregator; it is a channel. We could work with Netflix and look at them as another channel, the same as HBO. We talk to everyone.
“The roadblock to that happening is the question of who owns the consumer and the integration of their content into this aggregator world. They want access to 20 million customers and that is real hard to do, so this [approach, i.e. being a channel partner] is how you get access. For a cable operator, they can be a competitor or you can embrace them. We could [embrace them] in a model that works for us and for them, where they get paid and we get paid.”
John Moulding joined Videonet as editor at the start of 2010, having spent over 10 years writing about digital TV and the various technologies that have simultaneously disrupted and enriched the television business. With Videonet he is focused on the unstoppable march towards multi-screen, connected and personalized television. John was launch editor at Cable & Satellite International (now CSI), where he spent six years, before helping launch New Video Technology, and helped develop the IPTV World Series (IPTV World Forum, etc.) conference programmes from 2006-07. At home, he takes a Sky triple-play bundle, watches around one-third of content time-shifted, but is generally still happy to turn on the TV and see what's on (he can also remember when TV shut down after lunch!).
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