FreeCast Inc, Rabbit TV's operating company, has offered to pay $5 monthly per-subscriber retransmission fee paid by cable companies in the No 1 market, New York City, across all 210 DMA markets nationwide. The company also said that it's prepared to provide an agnostic platform for the networks to distribute their content, which will also in theory bring more revenue to their existing ad-supported video-on-demand (VOD) libraries and pay per view selections.
The company's announcement comes after a recent Supreme Court ruling on Aereo's cloud-based television service, which inadvertently opened new doors for Web-based television services by comparing Aereo to a cable system. This new interpretation led Aereo to seek compulsory licences to become a local cable provider, and despite their subscriber base of less than 100,000, CBS's president Les Moonves publicly expressed his willingness to enter talks.
"TV subscriptions declined for the first time ever in 2013, yet in contrast the number of consumers watching video on streaming devices continued to grow by leaps and bounds, 36.5% overall," said Rabbit TV CEO William Mobley. "Meanwhile, the production of television sets is projected somewhere around 220 million in 2014, while mobile device production is expected to reach nearly ten billion. This trend toward 'TV everywhere' is being driven by wireless consumer devices, and not locally restrictive infrastructures."
Rabbit TV's service already aggregates and links thousands of freely available titles and sells its users a la carte live programming packages like MLB.TV, NBA League Pass and others, along with pay-per-view movies. The company asserts that premium channels like HBO, ESPN and the four major networks are the next most important puzzle pieces for creating a true online TV experience for billions of device-enabled consumers.
