After three days of talks, chats, drinks and dinners at Jeff Pulver's Video On The Net and VON conferences I've learned as much as I have in years of reading excellent blogs like Paidcontent, Lostremote and Gigaom, and attending lots of lesser conferences. I'm still digesting it all - it's far too much - and expect to post my thoughts as it all settles in the weeks ahead.
First off, some thoughts on net neutrality and live TV:
Multicast is the white elephant in the room of the net-neutrality debate. The debate is currently focused on treating all packets equally and commoditizing quality-of-service, because these ideas are relevant to the VoIP industry. But, as everyone seems to agree, the big game is television. There multicast is crucial, as it is the only mechanism that can allow anyone to broadcast live to millions of living rooms. (Peer-to-peer streaming may change that, but it's still nascent).
Making multicast a commodity is an entirely different proposition to net-neutrality in the more limited sense of non-discrimination and quality-of-service. Unlike the other two, multicast has neven been sold as a service in the open internet.
Live TV will always be in demand: genres such as sports and breaking news will always command a mass audience.
For as long as the means of distributing live TV remain limited, their operators will play a key role, because live TV is the promotional vehicle par excellence. The more audiences fragment into zillions of on-demand options, the more priceless those few moments of massively shared viewership will become: lots of eyeballs looking at the same thing at the same time, in the same mood.
If all of this is right, then linear, live TV channels will one day only carry live formats and promotions of on-demand, recorded content (and live content will itself also play this role). Recorded content will be available to anyone who wants it, whenever and wherever, and on this carriers will be disintermediated. But, as I've always argued, the key is how desires are formed; and linear TV will continue to play a key role in this for a long time.
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