Developed by WPP, the world’s largest advertising firm, TCP hopes to create a sort of cable TV style bundle of content that a user pays for on a recurring basis, as a subscription, just like they pay for a cable bundle, and watch what they want.
Rather than doling out $10 a month to the Wall Street Journal, as an example, users will be able to pay a single fee to TCP to gain access to a network of sites. Revenue will be shared among this network depending on usage.
“Our ambition is to create a network whereby we have a number of publishers agreeing to a common platform, so we could roll this out on a broader scale,” says general manager David Restrepo. “From a consumer perspective, you won’t need dozens of accounts at different places.
In principle, it has a chance of working. In its early days, cable TV service was a true "access" service, allowing people to watch TV who otherwise would not have been able to view it. But most of cable TV's success came when it became an "add choice" value proposition, bringing consumers channels and programming they could not see on the broadcast channels.
That same model should make sense in the online print content space as well, to the extent it succeeds in presenting a "more choice" value proposition.
The analogy in the music business is the trend to buy songs rather than collections of songs known as CDs or albums. The TCP model implies that many users want to read "stories," not magazines or newspapers.
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