ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 turns its attention to the ways in which content and intellectual property (IP) rights function as a core site of competition and co-dependence in the online TV industry. Arguing that content production and distribution need to be understood as intertwined, the chapter shows that the internet age upsets established industry practices for originating, licensing and delivering content. This challenge to TV industry norms comes to the fore in the battle over licensing practices between two different providers of online TV service: TV and online natives (see Chapter 3). TV natives tend to favour more established windowing practices that enable them to maximise the value of the content that they own on international markets through the sale of rights. Online natives tend to favour more exclusive licensing that restricts content to their own services. However, to understand the battleground of content and rights as a conflict between online and TV natives overlooks the significant dependencies between these two categories of online TV provider. In particular, online natives rely on TV natives for much of their content, while TV natives have generated valuable revenue from the sale of rights to online natives. At the heart of this interplay of competition and cooperation around rights, however, are different strategies through which user access to content is restricted. The chapter ends, therefore, by considering the ways in which the battlefield of content and rights might work to restrict access to content, despite the industry promise of ubiquitous access to television programming in the internet age.
