Time Warner's Chairman Jeff Bewkes has a plan for the future of television. He wants to see TV Everywhere, and he's having an easy time convincing the industry.

Image by © Time Warner 2009. via CrunchBase

In a recent Time Warner interview published on YouTube, Jeff Bewkes describes the need for a new way of looking at TV. The key assertions he makes paint a picture of a model of service that might just make his TV Everywhere easier than piracy, more accessible than Apple's iTunes Store and cheaper than what you currently pay for cable at home.

"Viewers want to watch on demand and they want to watch it on computers"

NBC and Fox launched Hulu.com in late 2007. An experiment in making television shows available online. In 2008 we saw Hulu's traffic rise to rival YouTube. The quality of content was the biggest issue for some, YouTube had delivered short-attention-span entertainment, but was starting to lack luster as more studios enforced their copyrights, removing volumes of traffic generating bootleg content. Youtube began tackling the issue of content curation head on, and added commercial content early this year.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As Hulu continued to grow, Disney joined the partnership in April of this year. There is absolutely no evidence of this, but it bears mentioning that some insiders believe the investment in Hulu was favored by Disney's majority shareholder Steve Jobs because Hulu's choice to remove it's library from Boxee.TV all but halted the wave of AppleTV/Boxee conversions happening at the time. AppleTV owners were "jailbreaking" their AppleTV set top boxes to install Boxee and watch Hulu on their big screens, when Hulu pulled it's content, the AppleTV was saved. The investment in Hulu extended Disney's reach and protects Apple's domain.

By the fall of 2009 the message was loud and clear. People want to watch TV on their computers and don't see much of a distinction between a set top "digital media receiver" and a computer connected to a screen.

"People love television and we should put television online"

Time Warner had many options. At the Atlantic's First Draft of History conference when asked if Time Warner would bid on NBC Jeff Bewkes said "There's no real need or benefit for us to take on the various aspects of NBC" he went on further to mention that big deals hardly ever work, and that Time Warner was focusing on it's core business of creating content. Time Warner is putting it's content online and it looks like Youtube is first in line.

"If you have a network at home, you should be able to watch the content you have paid for anywhere."

This is where the difficult road lies. Creating an authentication system that is able to tell any network who can see what content. This gargantuan task is being championed by Comcast.

With Comcast currently weighing the option of purchasing NBC they have a lot to gain on the antitrust side in stimulating some online services who independently distribute content, but use a universal authentication system provided by Comcast.

It's hard to tell what will happen next. If Time Warner and NBC's content find themselves freely available on Youtube, Hulu and a myriad of other sites supporting a single authentication format, where does that leave everyone else.

What About Hulu, Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, Amazon Live, and those pesky Pirates?

We'll hear from them in a few hours at the GigaOM NewTeeVee Conference in San Francisco where they, along with Time Warner and just about everyone but Apple have gathered to discuss TV Everywhere.

http://events.newteevee.com/live/09/

I believe the key seeing the path ahead clearly lies in knowing who creates the content and how it is licensed. TV Everywhere is certainly an interesting concept. Pay for cable and you can watch whatever is available on cable, anywhere you find it online. Log in once, pay once and view everywhere, that is of course, except on an iPhone an AppleTV or in iTunes.