The rhetoric from the opponents of TV Everywhere has gotten downright bazaar.  Melvin Ammori and Free Press have decided to go on an all out assault on the TV Everywhere.  TV Everywhere is a new Internet Video on Demand service that Cable companies (and maybe other Multichannel Video Program Distributors) are looking to GIVE AWAY AT NO EXTRA CHARGE to their existing TV subscribers, and groups like Free Press are fuming over this and they want government to investigate these companies for “collusion” and put a stop to this.

What I find really ironic is that these “pro consumer” groups want to stop the vast majority of consumers from getting a great new service that doesn’t cost them any more than what they pay today.  But where is this alleged “collusion”?  Ammori makes the following accusation which seems to be baseless.

Marvin Ammori: “TV Everywhere also appears to set a term in the negotiations between distributors and programmers — requiring, for one thing, that programmers keep content off the Internet unless a viewer subscribes also to cable TV”

Ammori makes these accusations without any supporting evidence, but it’s not even believable to begin with.  Just because a few cable companies implement TV Everywhere, are we to believe that the cable companies are going to demand that Jon Stewart yank his Daily Show program off of his website or have that kind of clout?  Are cable companies going to demand that content providers yank their programing off of competing services like Hulu, Google YouTube, Netflix, or Apple’s rumored subscription TV service?  I highly doubt it.  So with the entry of TV Everywhere, we’re simply getting MORE competition and not an elimination of competition as Free Press and their lawyer Marvin Ammori suggests.

Mike Turk has a detailed writeup here.