Time Warner Cable has launched Start Over in its New York City market of Staten Island. Start Over allows customers to restart a program in progress without the need for an in-home DVR. The service is available on both standard and high definition channels. The service is offered free of charge to digital cable subscribers and is currently available on 40 channels.

Time Warner Cable is upping the ante on its Start Over technology, by extending it to HD channels. Start Over allows subscribers to come into a program after it has already started, and start it over from the beginning. Start Over was pioneered by Time Warner Cable, and many of their cable company brethren including Comcast and Brighthouse have embraced the technology for their own networks. Start Over will initially launch in Time Warner’s South Carolina markets.

Bright House Networks announced the launch of a large Start Over deployment for its Tampa, FL market. Start Over, developed by Time Warner Cable, allows subscribers to start a program from the beginning if they start watching it after its already started. The technology allows subscribers to “start over” during a window of time equal to 2 ½ times the length of the targeted program. Bright House joins Time Warner and Comcast who have also launched Start Over deployments, although this is the largest to date. Bright House will offer the service free of charge to its digital cable subscribers.

Comcast will license Time Warner Cable’s “Start Over” technology, which allows subscribers to start a program over from the beginning within 30 minutes of the program’s start time. Time Warner has launched the service in multiple markets already. Comcast says testing will begin around mid year with commercial deployments taking place early in 2009. Start Over borrows digital video recorder (DVR) functionality and builds a specific product around it.

There are reports surfacing that the consortium of large MSOs that make up Pivot Wireless have begun strategizing their next move. That move probably does not involve Sprint, which recently announced they were halting Pivot deployments. This has to be considered a real blow to the likes of Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, and Advance/Newhouse, the Pivot consortium members. The AP is reporting that the consortium has assembled a group of wireless business strategists to map out their wireless future, and they may decide to go it alone.

This has to be considered a serious competitive fumble for cable. The Pivot consortium realized long ago that a wireless component is necessary to effectively battle their telco competitors. Pivot, if not the answer, was at least seen as stemming the tide until such time that a longer term solution was unveiled. Sprint was seen as a good partner – Sprint already provides the lion’s share of VoIP expertise for cable landline telephony. No one could have predicted the troubles Sprint now faces and their obvious distractions are impacting both the Pivot and Xohm projects. Every day that the cable industry misses in getting their wireless act together is a day that the telecom industry grows their wireless lead. Cable is not without options. They are sitting on a boat load of spectrum themselves, acquired in the last AWS spectrum auction. The upcoming 700 Mhz auction also offers a window of opportunity. Or they may decide to just go ahead and buy Sprint. Neither of those options can be done quickly and therefore continues to put the cable industry at a disadvantage. Look for the telecom industry to continue to seize on their wireless advantage.

Recent news does not bode well for the wireless joint venture between Sprint and several cable MSOs, branded as Pivot Wireless. Sprint announced during their quarterly analyst call that they are freezing the rollout of Pivot to any further markets due to “provisioning complexities.” In other words, they can’t get it to work, at least not without too much trouble. Both Sprint and its cable partners have publicly said they are disappointed with Pivot’s performance so far. Is this recent news a precursor to scrapping the joint venture?

Interim Sprint CEO Paul Saleh announced on their earnings call, “As our focus is on simplifying the business and particularly focusing on the customer experience, we have made a decision not to expand that service in other markets or other stores.” Pivot is currently offered in 33 markets, with Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, and Advance/Newhouse as its cable MSO partners. The news may be more troubling for the cable MSO partners than for Sprint (although Sprint has no shortage of troubles right now). Wireless is increasingly becoming an important addition to the triple play bundle. As telecom carriers continue their ramp up of triple play solutions, they are exploring ways to leverage their wireless lead. Both Verizon and AT&T are marketing bundles that tie wireless, wireline, and video together. Many analysts suspect that mobile wireless will be the wild card in the competitive battle between cable and telecom. The Pivot Wireless concept bridged the wireless gap for Cablecos, at least temporarily. It’s long been rumored that Pivot was not perceived by Cablecos as their long term wireless solution, but it did get them in the business much more quickly than if they built something from scratch. It appears that strategy may now be in jeopardy.

Time Warner Cable Business Class launched a NetVideo product, branded BusinessLink.tv targeting business customers with a 10 channel video line-up. The ten channels are delivered to a customer’s enterprise LAN via a cable modem. The ten channels include NY1 News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, CNBC World, Bloomberg TV, Fox News, Fox Business News, and The Weather Channel. The initial deployment will be in the New York City market.

Time Warner Cable announced the launch of VOD in some of its smaller markets including Clarksburg, WV; Dothan, AL; Fort Benning, GA; and Terre Haute, IN. Time Warner will be using a new Tandberg VOD solution which is aimed at markets needing 2000 VOD streams or less. The new Tandberg system allows the local distribution of VOD content married with a centralized management function. Time Warner will manage all of these small market VOD deployments from Colorado.

The expansion of VOD into smaller markets is inevitable. VOD offers a competitive advantage for terrestrial based operators like Time Warner and others over DBS. The challenge has been scaling VOD platforms down to serve the thousands of smaller markets across the country. Independent cable operators represented by the NCTC and small IPTV operators are hungry for applications like VOD Solutions like this one from Tandberg and similar solutions from C-Cor and Comcast Media Center should garner much interest from the thousands of small independent cable and telco video operators across the U.S., all of whom are looking for ways to remain competitive.

Time Warner will offer a free DVR ‘like’ service in select markets. The service is branded as Look Back, and allows subscribers to watch television shows that they have missed on any given day, as long as they watch them before midnight. The DVR function is fairly limited. It doesn’t allow for fast forwarding for example, preventing subscribers from ad skipping. Look Back joins Time Warner’s other DVR ‘light’ service, Start Over. Start Over allows subscribers to go back to the beginning of a TV show if they have missed up to the first 30 minutes of the program. Time Warner is spending considerable time and effort with these trials to develop a long term DVR strategy.

DVR presents interesting challenges for cable operators. While it provides a great value add service to subscribers, it also alienates advertisers, an important revenue stream and business partner to multichannel video service providers. Finding the right balance between meeting subscriber demands and keeping advertisers happy is the desired goal. Time Warner’s experiments are providing them valuable data. Data they may someday be able to use as a competitive advantage.

Time Warner COO Jeff Bewkes addressed the CTAM Summit audience yesterday and let it be known that he thinks the future of the subscription television model is VOD. Bewkes sees VOD as meeting consumers demand for content on their terms as well as a counter to the proliferation of DVRs. In his analogy, consumers wouldn’t need a DVR if all of their desired content was available in an on demand fashion. Bewkes also addressed the issue of advertising, which presents a problem for the video industry as a whole in an on demand world. Targeted advertising is the answer he believes. “It can be targeted. It knows you want fishing gear, etc.,” Bewkes said.

Conceptually, his points make sense. It doesn’t hurt that VOD offers cable MSOs (and IPTV players) competitive advantage over DBS providers – at least for the time being. Operationally, moving everything to VOD presents huge challenges. The server storage and bandwidth demands would increase significantly. But early indications suggest that VOD may well indeed become the norm for video consumption. Perhaps the future includes a hybrid of VOD and DVR, taking the best from both worlds. VOD provides the vast library of content and DVR provides the search/navigation functions and ability to record live events for future playback. Whatever the case, video service providers will be challenged to find the right mix to meet consumer demand, while steadily offering value add services to differentiate themselves from competitors.