With over 300M consumer accounts and adding 5M new accounts EACH DAY, Facebook will likely reach the 1 BILLION in 2010. It is therefore safe to assume that the vast majority of Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, and Dish subscribers will have a Facebook account.
Without any doubt, Facebook has now become the "identity gatekeeper" of the web. Facebook is the defacto openID provider.
As such, there ought to be an easy way to leverage Facebook to solve TV Everywhere's authentication challenge.
Imagine if we could link our cable / satellite accounts to our Facebook accounts. A couple clicks using Facebook Connect on the cable provider's web site is all it would take. Once a link is established between DirecTV and Facebook, for example, DirecTV could provide Facebook with that user's content access rights (such as: user has rights to HBO content but not Showtime).
Here's a back-of-the-napkin use case of how it might play out:
- Let's say I am a basic Comcast cable subscriber and have a Facebook account.
- I sign into Comcast.net with my Comcast-assigned username and password. I am prompted to click on a FB Connect link and then the "Authorize" button. Comcast sends my cable TV account info to Facebook, which Facebook stores as part of my Facebook profile.
- I then go to Yahoo and select the latest Simpsons episode to watch. Yahoo's TV Everywhere "enabled" video player (see explanation below) prompts me to sign in via Facebook Connect. I click "approve" and Facebook sends the video player my Comcast profile, which tells the video player what I'm eligible to watch. The player stores my cable profile info via a cookie and begins streaming the episode. When I try to watch a HBO content, the video player knows to block the stream.
- The above example could take place on ANY website that uses a TV Everywhere "enabled" video player. This could simply be a "chromeless" Flash-based player with Facebook Connect implemented and logic to interpret content provisioning based on cable account profiles.
- Using Facebook Connect for authentication, any site would be able to present TV Everywhere content and (almost) every cable subscriber would be able to participate after only a few "I Authorize" clicks.
OK, I know the above may be overly simplified, but hopefully you get the gist.
The big question here is whether the MSO's would be willing to share any customer account information with Facebook. To make TV Everywhere work easily for consumers, I believe they will need to share.
