Time Warner Lawsuit Halted

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You remember when we were tracking all the interesting goings-on surrounding the Time Warner Cable app for iPad? How networks got involved and said that they didn’t license content to the iPad, but only to Time Warner Cable’s cable feed? And then Time Warner came back saying, what’s the difference? It’s all the same concept anyway! Well, the two sides have halted their lawsuit, temporarily, and gone to do more negotiating to get a reasonable settlement together.

As of June 17th, according to court filings, the lawsuit is at what’s called “standstill agreement”, meaning no one’s suing anyone right now, because the two companies are looking to talk things out a little more and see if they can figure out how to get Viacom’s channels–like popular Comedy Central and MTV, among others–onto the Time Warner iPad app.

The issue boils down to one of rights. Most cable companies arrange their agreements to let people watch television in their own homes, not on mobile devices. But as mobile devices become more prevalent, people start wanting to take their content with them. They reason that they pay for it, whose business is it where they want to see it? And the cable companies, naturally, agree, and want to give their customers what they (the customers) want. However, the people who own the content may have other ideas about how to get their content on the web (which is why places like Hulu and Crackle exist, at least in part), and so they don’t want the cable companies making the decision for them.

You would think that’s what they should have done in the first place, negotiated instead of tying up court time, but if they got to the right conclusion anyway, well, we can forgive them for taking their time about it.

So do you guys think we’ll be seeing more cable company apps with cable content on them? Or will we see more content move to places like Hulu and Crackle? The comments section is waiting for your opinion on this one, so head on down and let us know what you think.