[opendtv] Re: News: The death of Cable TV

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 15:47:14 -0500

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

> I seriously doubt that they MVPDs will be able to get in the middle
> of Internet portal transactions. That's one of the major reasons the
> congloms are moving to build these portals. The MVPDs will simply
> become big pipes and compete to provide ISP service.

That's the common wisdom, anyway. I'm saying, I don't buy it. Not entirely. 
Even the FCC allows that "big pipe" to prioritize traffic, if the "big pipe" 
wants to introduce innovative services. It's fairly obvious to me that the old 
notion of the neutral ISP is going to merge with the old notion of the walled 
garden MVPD, unless the FCC gets busy writing new rules to prevent this, and 
getting them approved by Congress. The conglom portals will just be another 
layer of middlemen. Convince me that these ISPs will not see that they can 
extract greater revenues if they differentiate their service offerings.

> And it will not cost the MVPDs much to upgrade their systems to
> carry this traffic, as most of the infrastructure is already there.
> They have a huge chunk of bandwidth that can easily be dedicated to
> switched digital services - the existing analog tiers.

I disagree here, but this is tangential. Most of the Internet TV traffic will 
probably be on demand. For that, the MVPD/ISP will have to deploy many new 
servers throughout their network, to support a wholesale migration from their 
current in-system broadcast scheme (I'm talking transfer protocol, Craig). The 
analog bandwidth is great, but by itself it doesn't translate to providing all 
this new on-demand service for wide bandwidth content. In case you haven't 
noticed, whenever there's any event that creates massive Internet demand, 
Internet service goes down the toilet.

But ultimately, who cares what the new investment has to be? The fact remains, 
the ISPs become the umbillical just as much as the MVPDs have been.

> Sorry Bert, but there is no way a broadcast service can compete with
> an over-the-top service that offers tons of programming on demand.
> Broadcast's future is in delivering real time and cached services to
> devices that move.

You missed my point, and you also overstated the case for broadcasting.

My point was exactly as I phrased it. Which is, OTA broadcasting remains a 
unique distribution model, unwalled, multiple providers coexisting. The 
Internet schemes, wired or wireless, will instead be the walled gardens, when 
the ISPs start to maximize their revenues.

As to distributing live "broadcast" content to mobile devices, in principle, 
wireless ISPs can do that too. It is less efficient to do this than to use true 
broadcast, and it will be another walled garden thanks to the ISP involvement, 
but the functions of mobility and live streams can be met.

Bert
 
 
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