If I was a senior executive at one of the existing major CDNs, I’d be getting worried. Lawsuits notwithstanding, it seems that some of the really big telco players are about to enter the market and seriously undercut existing pricing.

On the back of Level3’s much vaunted plans, AT&T has now decided to announce that it is joining the fray. Expect this autumn and winter to see some serious price reductions in the market as the big boys buys into the market.

But is it as easy as that ? Well, not really. Level3 and AT&T may own some backbone and may be able to ameliorate their vast capexes, but the art of getting video to end users is not a simple one, and it is plagued with legal and technical complexities. The larger companies also have no economy of scale at the bottom end of the market, so are unlikely to compete for any client spending under $100k pa on bandwidth (and this may be far higher). What this means is that the market for the large bandwidth users will become cheaper, just as they are facing action from ISPs demanding payment for last mile delivery.

Fundamentally the costs in the internet TV game are about to be shuffled.

Read the original here:
Do The CDN Shuffle

I was a product of the old ITV system in the eighties when they produced the majority of their own programming, but now watching the UK’s ITV’s drive to buy independents to shore up its strategy of 75% of content produced internally seems very strange to me. The great media brands of our era – Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace don’t do content. They do platforms. They let their customers/users do content. Of course, it’s important that these customers are able to make money from their platform, and the matching of content generators with advertising models has been the media theme of our time.

ITV are persisting with an old mind set in a new world and, apart from laudable initiatives such as ITV Local, seem lost. To be fair, many other broadcasters seem to be in the same boat.

The real value of offline broadcasters is that they can use their traditional audience base to leverage new audiences, but in a world that is ever fragmenting such audiences are quickly going to disappear. ITV.com is doing a decent job at presenting its video content online, but the Friends Reunited purchase was the right idea badly executed and showed an utter inability to leverage between old and new media.

The old adage is that ‘content is king’, but we live in a service age where trading derivatives is far more lucrative than manufacturing anything. Owning the marketplace is far more lucrative than producing the goods, as Google has shown.

Television has had a swagger and arrogance about it going back to the fifties, but it’s time to realise that it has lost its crown before it looses its head.

Here is the original:
Content Is The Serf

My jaw hit the floor at the price being paid by Cablevision for the Sundance Channel, the docs, short movies and music channel rolled out from the Sundance Film Festival. It’s good news for major shareholder Robert Redford, and there seems to be some technical reasons for the sale as Cablevision swaps out of a position in another of the channel’s ultimate owners, GE.

Still, half a billion! For a niche TV channel. No wonder everyone’s trying to jump onto this Internet TV

Cablevision’s as disfunctional as ever. Chuck Nolan’s sprawling empire which has seemed to crawl from crisis to crisis and managed to make the near simultaneous announcement of the acquisition of old fashioned dead tree newspaper Newsday for $650m.

Of late, Cablevision has been doing rather well, with a 11.3% increase in sales to almost $6.5 billion in 2007. With free cash flow of this would seem to be a great position to be in and buying strong media brands a sensible move until you realise that all of that free cashflow little more than services debts of $11.6 billion.

Now, I’m a great fan of the venerable Cablevision founder, who has been involved in a long running internecine battle with son Jim, and have also spent a lot of time down at Penn Plaza trying to get the company to recognise the value of Internet TV, where the penny certainly hadn’t dropped the last time I walked out of the Rainbow offices in despair.

The good news to aspiring Internet TV moguls is that strong brands with dedicated audiences still have exalted values in traditional media land; the bad news is that traditional media companies seem to be utterly, utterly confused about their future strategies if these moves and other reports are to be believed.

Excerpted from:
Dazed and Confused

In a good move for smaller sports, the US Olympic Committee is set to launch a cable TV channel – but only after this summer’s Beijing games. But even with the falling cost of a cable presence, surely an online channel like the internet only Paralympics Channel would make more sense and emable them to get off the ground quicker ? However, to the leading sponsors that USOC can boast perhaps the profile of traditional TV is important.

View post:
Olympic TV for US

Creating a truly global sports proposition is incredibly tough.

There are only a handful, and none of the US majors qualify since they are all, fundamentally, parochial. Let’s try and list them:

Soccer/football, esp the Premiership in the UK and the Champions League, along with the World Cup
The Olympics
PGA
Tennis Masters
F1
The odd boxing bout

And then you run into a wall.

There are some very interesting franchises – snooker is big in the UK and the Far East, but not really anywhere else; rugby has a diverse, but limited following; volleyball is big in the Mediterranean countries and extreme sports have their niche.

Cricket is a parochial anachronism. Played largely in former British colonies, like most sports, it is an acquired obsession. I remember taking an American flatmate to watch Kent play. At the end of the second day he asked ‘who won ?’ and then begged me not to bring him back for the following three days to find the answer.

So, the success of the Indian Premier League cricket, featuring the very recently developed 20 over version of that game is quite an achievement in such a short period of time, and is also a taste of what is to come from India, China and the Middle East as they begin to invest in and develop global sports properties with almost limitless funds.

What is disappointing is that they are working like any major sports franchise, and the internet is nowhere near central to their TV strategy. US sports may be unpopular elsewhere in the world, but there’s lots that sports organisations around the world could learn from looking at the likes of the MLB.

See the original post here:
Leg Before Wicket