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Video on the Net
From Dennis Morton, VP of Product Commercialization at Global Crossing:
I received a mail from Jeff Pulver, as did all others on the VON mailing list on a new Video on the Net event, and I found some of his thoughts very interesting. He believes that there needs to be a major content owner willing to take a risk by leaving the model or distribution chain currently being used to go to an internet model before a real change can occur. That may be true, but there has to be more to it than that. So, I thought I’d pose a few questions to the blogosphere.
Q1. Do we really think that just getting content to the internet will cause people to watch it there? For example, people watch American Idol and many other reality TV shows as a family or group of friends on their TV sets. Should service providers or content providers be working with manufacturers of TV’s and set top boxes to enable Internet access (where the Internet just becomes just another channel) on that device, and should the content become available on such a device before or after making it available prime time for laptops, PDA’s, cell phones ,etc.?
Q2. Perhaps a viable business model that could work is having content shown at the same time via TV and the internet and then you would have the best of both worlds. Or it could end up being another us against them business situation fighting for customer/market share?
I'm not sure how successful itunes has been with selling TV shows after it they have aired but that revenue sharing model seems to be something the media types are open to.
Thanks for the email Dennis. I'm going to post a few of my own thoughts and then open it up to our readers to post their own thoughts.
To your question about Internet-enabling set top boxes and TV's, this is most likely where the IPTV set top boxes are going. Although the current thinking is that IPTV will be a walled-garden where your IPTV provider provides all the programming, these devices will have all the technology they need to access the Internet. In a duplicative market, where the supply chain for IPTV matches that of the existing TV media, this is where it ends. But in a disruptive environment, these closed IPTV networks get opened up so that content can be delivered from anywhere. At that point, any and all of the business models that you refer to may be valid, and content owners can choose which model is best for them.
I am glad that someone is spearheading the charge for change in the media industry. All of the IPTV conferences that I have attended have mostly skirted around the subject of complete upheaval of the supply chain, at least officially.
Jeff is right. It will take at least one, more likely a couple of big players to develop a supply and distribution model that enables them to cut some steps out of the existing chain, while enabling them to make more money. Hopefully we can get the big media companies to realize that TV is going the same way as the music industry, and fighting/resisting change is only going to get them so far.