Like visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, the chiefs of the Hollywood studios and their bosses at the major media conglomerates want to extend the profits that they make on premium programs. That involves, they reason, allowing the consumer to play movies and TV shows on an astonishing array of devices from PCs to TVs to cell phones, to table computers.

The concerns about content distribution and a change in the way that consumers consume media has made for odd alliances among technology and media companies. According to The New York Times, “Consumers, the industry believes, could balk at buying digital movies and TV shows until they can bring their collections with them wherever they go — by and large the same freedom people have with DVDs.”A group of studios and firms including Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) have formed the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem to address a need to give consumers maximum flexibility for watching the video products that they pay for.

Consumers already can use cable VOD and DVDs to watch movies and TV shows. DVDs can now play on PCs and televisions. Several companies such as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and NetFlix (NASDAQ:NFLX) offer services that allow subscribers to stream movies over the internet to PCs and television sets.

The last frontier for the creators of premium video content is the portable device, particularly smartphones, the new tablet TVs, and netbooks. Broadcasters are using this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to demonstrate how they can send news, entertainment, and local station content to small handhelds. The Open Mobile Video Coalition, which is made up mostly of local TV station executives, is at work to advance the technology and wireless broadband spectrum that will be necessary to make viewing television on handsets possible.

All of these initiatives neglect a careful look at what the consumer will and will not do with premium video content. It is one thing to expect that people will subscribe to VOD delivered to the TVs and PCs which have relatively large screens. It is another to assume that substantial numbers of people will watch movies and television shows on 2 inch by 2 inch smartphone screens which are only easily seen in the proper lighting. Most of what local TV shows and national news operations offer is now available at websites like CNN.com which are set up for easy mobile use. subscribers services that want to offer streaming TV will need to contend with the fact that much of what they have to offer already exists.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) initiative to get people to watch movies on the iPhone has been largely unsuccessful, especially when compared to its huge sales of songs and albums. Watching a movie on a tiny screen does not seem to have much charm.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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