I was reading an article where the Boxee CEO said content would eventually be al a Carte. Why does he, like so many other internet people think content producers are stupid ? Has he, along with so many others pushing internet video not noticed what is happening to the revenues of the content and distribution industries ? Ad Revenues are falling. Quickly. DVD sales are slowing. The per subscriber fees they are getting paid are going up. Not only are they going up, they are consistent.
Now I dont know about you, but for HDNet and my other content companies, we tend to be very nice to those of our customers who pay us every month. Commentary from cable networks and their content producers are saying the same thing. They can’t afford to upset the people who pay the bills.
Which is exactly why, as I have said before, Jeff Bewkes, of Time Warner’s model of TV Everywhere is the EXACT RIGHT MODEL for content creators, cable networks, and video subscription providers like your local cable, telco or satellite provider.
The vast majority of broadband internet users already subscribe to a video service, so for most people they would not even notice a change. So it would make absolutely zero sense for legit content providers to compete with the most consistent and largest source of revenue they have. In fact, because the TV Everywhere approach will most likely not only increase the value of cable, telco video and sat video subscriptions, but also increase the value of broadband and mobile internet subscriptions (because of the content and the fact the video can be hosted intra- network and deliver far better quality), TV Everywhere should be a no brainer
As much as over the top providers or interfaces like Boxee would like to think that LEADING content providers will slice and dice content to make their business models work. They won’t. They arent’t that stupid.
Updated : One of the commentators made a point that I’m mad at myself for not making. The gist of which is simple, why is your internet access not a la carte ?
I only go to maybe 10 sites regularly. I get RSS feeds for another 50. Why should I have to pay for the resources required to provide access to the other 10zillion sites that consume resources ? Why shouldn’t I only pay for the 10 I go to ? I never go to sites like Revision 3, why should I contribute to the infrastructure required to support it. If they want to reach me, let them spend some marketing money and convince me to pay for their content.
If I want blogmaverick to be more popular, then I need to market it so that people will pay for it, right ? If blogmaverick is any good, I should be able to get an ISP to pay me a nickel per month and charge their subscribers that want this site 8c per month, right ? Why should people who dont come here contribute to the cost of enabling readers to come to this site ?
Why should I pay for my ISP to provide bandwidth for P2P downloaders ? I only want to pay for the bandwidth I consume, not a bit more. 99pct of the sites i use are text based information sites. Why should I pay for the bandwidth I might consume ? I only use the internet 8 hours or so a day, why should i pay for the other 16 hours in a day ?
Worse yet, because of the P2P bandwidth consumers, not only do i subsidize their habits, but they slow me down. So I’m paying to enable those that distribute content via p2p to do it for free(big companies like NBC Universal as an example), and Im paying for those who download the content via P2P to do it by consuming a disproportionate amount of resources that I pay for. AND they slow down my internet connection when they are on my network segment. At least my tv picture quality is never impacted by who is using it or how much they pay.
If al a Carte is the way of the future, then it should apply to the internet as well, right ?No one wants to pay the cost of the websites they don’t use, or the bandwidth they dont consume, right ? Bring on Al a carte internet. Make those who want 1mm websites available pay for it !