Media: A week in context
This week, NetFlix and Apple launched online film distribution services and Time Warner Cable reluctantly announced their metered Internet trial. In context, this was a turning point in the evolution of home entertainment.
The future of film and television is definitely going to rely upon the world of IP networks. Between the NetFlix and Apple services, consumers will begin to relate to films and other visual media online, just as consumers learned to relate to television through a box of buttons when cable services began to dot communities.
Speaking of cable, Time Warner has set itself up to be the first sacrificial lamb of the MSO infrastructure evolution in response to the growing amount of bandwidth used by its subscribers. In my previous post on the Time Warner experiment I suggested that TW customers should bail on their broadband provider. In the near-term, I still suggest they find more lubricated pastures (I.e. unmetered, unlimited service).
As media products evolve to an online state, the infrastructure that delivers media must also evolve or become inoperable or obsolete. Cable companies really operate two competing video infrastructures:
- The original RF-based television feed of 24/7 content pushed into the homes over 300+ simultaneous channels, and;
- A newer IP-based “Broadband Internet” connection facilitating the pull of attention-derived content into the home.
The old television feed infrastructure is not optimized for the realities of an “A La Carte” attention-derived media. It’s interesting to note that even with 300+ channels of content available the average american television viewer rarely strayed outside of their five favorite television channels to view programming.
1990’s Cable Spectrum
Clearly, cable as a business and an incumbent infrastructure is no longer efficient or relevant and must eventually be sacrificed as consumers adapt to Internet-based media delivery.
The cable evolution has been helped along by federal mandates declaring the end to analog-based television signals. Cable operators have been repurposing their Analog spectrum into their digital tiers
2000’s Cable Spectrum
In the next decade, Cable operators will need to abandon their philosophy of spectrum slice segmentation that dates back to the early RF days of television and open their entire operation to packet-based organization.
2010’s Cable Spectrum
Cable has a phenomenal amount of bandwidth capacity deployed, the challenge for them is adopting a consumer-friendly business model and organizing and optimizing the capacity going forward.
Cable will eventually adopt “metering” industry-wide, but as they open their entire networks to IP, one will hope that they will learn how to productize “unlimited” and “capped” services once again.
(As a comparison, here is the typical incumbent telephone carrier network spectrum allocation:
1990’s Telephone Spectrum
Unlike the fiber coax hybrid-based cable networks, telephone companies rely upon a mesh+star configuration of fiber and twisted copper. The available spectrum of twisted copper is far lower than coax, influenced by the frequency footprint of the legacy service of the telephone company, voice communication — exponentially narrower when compared to video. This is why telephone companies are the champions of fiber to the curb [fttc] and fiber to the home [ftth] initiatives.)