Every cable provider today needs to consider carrying Over-the-Top (OTT) channels on their cable system. OTT programming is content that is available on the web and includes such things as Hulu and Netflix. There are a number of reasons to consider this:

• I have discussed the phenomenon of cord-cutters in other blog posts. The large organizations that track cable customers report that a lot of customers are dropping traditional cable. Nielson reported that at least one million people dropped traditional cable last year and that number is expected to increase. The cable industry appears to be at the same place that the telephone industry was ten years ago and everybody expects more and more people to drop cable TV every year much as has happened to land line telephones. To the extent that you can give customers easy access to OTT programming on your cable system you may convince some of them not to leave your system.
• There are a lot of customers buying OTT boxes, which are devices that let them watch OTT programming on their TVs and also on other devices using WiFi such as pads and smartphones. These are devices like Apple TV, Roku, Boxee and Playstation.  Once a customer has an alternative box in their home sitting next to your settop box they have mentally started the process of dropping you. If you can give customers easy access to the OTT programming they want you will have lowered their incentive to buy an alternate box.
• You can use OTT programming to develop new products. Nobody makes much money today with cable TV. You can create a new bundle of programming by combining OTT, the basic network channels and local programming that can be more profitable than the large packages you sell of many channels. I will discuss this more below.

There are a number of ways to get OTT programming onto your cable system. You can gather the OTT program sources yourself and put them onto open channels on your system. There are devices available that will let you create a channel out of web content. For instance, you can create a channel that would have buttons for the most popular web content.

But an easier way is to use somebody who has already done that aggregation. There are several vendors who have packaged OTT channels together to make a ‘channel line-up’. Probably the best of these right now is a company called AIOTV (All-in-One TV). This is available on the web to anybody, but they also have a version of their programming that is designed to be used as a web channel.

AIOTV will supply the feed to you for free to get onto your cable system. They sell nationwide advertising and they insert ads at the beginning of each show that a customer watches. If you put them onto your cable system they will send you a small revenue sharing check each month for carrying their ads. It’s not a lot, and the revenue is not the primary reason to do this, but it’s still nice to get a check.

The other nice feature of AIOTV is that their platform gives you an easy way to create additional web channels of your own. There innumerable ways for you to use this capability and you could add additional web content to your line-up that is not already on AIOTV. However, the best use of this capability is to use it to create local programming. You can use AIOTV or other platforms to create a channel for every school, church, non-profit or other entity in your area. The programming would be up to the entities who have channels and they can use it to put items of interest to your community onto your cable system. For example, this is the easiest and lowest cost way to get things like little league games and high-school sports onto your network.

With AIOTV or some similar provider you can create some sense out of local programming. The platform gives you a way to create a traditional looking channel line-up so that people can find the local channels they want. Each local channel supplier also has the ability to operate their channel so that it is continuous feed or on-demand.

Local programming is a way to get and keep customers on your cable network. Other communities that broadcast a lot of local content say that this becomes one of the more popular things on their network. People want to watch local sports and graduation ceremonies and other local events. Most cable systems today carry local city-council meetings, but there is a lot more events of local interest in every community.

Finally, you can use OTT and local programming to create a new product. For example, every cable provider has a basic product that consists of the broadcast networks such as ABC and NBC along with a few other channels. You can create a pretty robust package that includes your basic line-up, OTT programming and local programming. Priced at something like $20 per month this would be the most profitable product on your cable system. Today most companies are lucky if they break even with the larger cable packages after paying for all of the programming.

This kind of line-up offers customers a ton of programming including web access to many of the most popular shows they watched on traditional cable. I have anecdotally spoken to several people who have dropped traditional cable for a Roku or Apple TV box and they say that they don’t feel like they have suffered any big drop-off in options. If you can add live network TV and local programming to this mix you have a robust line-up that many of your customers are going to see as an attractive alternative.

I think that cable systems are on the verge of pricing a lot of customers out of being able to afford their services. Expanded basic packages are now $60 to $70 per month in most markets and continue to increase in price every year. So consider a preemptive strike and give your customers a pre-packaged lower cost alternative rather than waiting on them to go find this on their own.