“The Internet’s for old people”
The above statement was said by Mark Cuban at the CTAM (Cable Television Association for Marketing) Summit. Multichannel News reports he also declared, “The Internet’s dead. It’s over” and states that the only “new application” to emerge is YouTube.
Now, I realize that Mark was in a room full of cable industry execs and it would seem a likely place for him (or anyone) to announce that the Internet is dead and cable supreme, but what was he thinking?
There are dozens of new services using peer-to-peer technologies — like Joost, Grid Networks and Vuze to name just three. Pre-Internet, these services would not have been allowed to exist in a cable environment unless:
- the peer points existed on closed cable-owned and operated boxes
- used software owned and installed by the cable company
- only transfered media content that the cable company allowed subscribers to see (i.e. was compensated by media owners to deliver to subscribers)
There are dozens of new services that enable interactivity in the television-like world of broadband video distribution, for example:
- viddler (timeline tags — your own personal MST3K)
- brightcove (create a “channel”, monetize the channel and analyze statistics)
- Digg Video (influence the video zeitgeist)
- podcasting (be the tv)
Cable has done a really poor job of growing beyond their passive media delivery roots (of replicating the original passive over-the-air public broadcast in a private wire-bound spectrum).
It’s not coincidental that the number of “Interactive Television” startups exploded simultaneously to the acceptance and popularization of IP, the Internet and WWW as a communications and interactive media. The cable industry facilitated the creation of ITV Hype 2.0 (in the early 90s, ITV Hype 1.0 didn’t go so well) because if they didn’t they would have lost even more ad dollars and eyeballs to the Internet.
We’ve seen ten years since the mainstreaming of the Internet (and ITV Hype 2.0) and the open Internet is well into “Web 2.0″ while cable is still struggling with delivering the promise of “Interactivity 1.0″ (beyond pointing and clicking a remote to select a PPV on-demand movie — yay interactive tv!).
On the other hand, if Multichannel News misquoted Mark and his statement was restricted to the distribution and use of passive high definition television — he is correct, the Internet doesn’t enable the sustained distribution of 19.2mbps MPEG2 transport streams to the home in 99.99% of the world’s cities.
But the number and quality of pixels displayed on a television set does not equate to the sum total of the visual media experience. At the 1999 National Association of Broadcasters show, my team proved the acceptable visual media experience is flexible and will adapt to low quality if the subject matter is exclusive, informative and/or compelling.
The Internet allows for a much wider variety of exclusive, informative and compelling media. The Internet delivers this media to an ever increasing number of devices and network architectures.
Cable offers… Pay Per View… to your television.