The Rise of Broadband Video and the Future of Digital Media

Co-Sponsored by the Cable Center, The Communications Technology Professionals, and Federal Communications Bar Association

In the spring of 2009, Netflix announced it was ready to provide customers the option of signing up for a standalone streaming offering, highlighting the changing nature of the video landscape. As Business Week recently put it, “operators like Comcast and DirecTV are facing accelerating competition from a host of upstarts eager to deliver movies and TV programming on demand.” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO and Founder, has suggested that streaming video offerings will become dominant at some point, once “the streaming will be good enough that an appreciable number of people will find streaming is all they need.” While the method of distribution is undoubtedly cheaper and quicker, there are still questions about whether the licensing terms for Internet-based distribution will facilitate this business model. Moreover, with respect to the major TV networks, they are asking themselves “whether free is a sustainable model” and whether they can avoid the fate of the newspapers (see here and here). Finally, from the perspective of network providers, the rising popularity of video over the Internet is creating a huge upsurge in the demand for bandwidth, creating both new opportunities and challenges.

The new emerging broadband-based video model calls into question a number of technological, economic, and policy premises of the current multi-channel video programming environment. A critical question for established players–both the content developers and the distributors–is whether they embrace this emerging business model or fight it. Recognizing how the Internet undermined the market position of the recording industry and the newspaper industry, many established firms are looking to embrace these changes, in some cases funding or buying upstarts like ZillionTV, and in other cases, developing their own on-demand libraries (as Comcast is in the process of doing). In so doing, they are pushing technological development in this area to provide, as ZillionTV CEO put it, “unlimited video-on-demand, perfectly personalized to the consumer taste, and with advertisers able to push ads precisely to align with that taste.”

In the face of such a changing environment, some critics of the cable companies are claiming that they are poised to use their control over broadband platforms–and the increasing bandwidth caps–to place “over the top” video offerings at an unfair disadvantage by “throttling” their services. Others suggest that the cable networks are the ones resisting the new environment, pointing out that networks such as ESPN and HBO have moved much more slowly than their broadcast brethren to move their shows online. Indeed, this resistance is understandable as it is far from clear “how much will consumers value the ability to watch Sportscenter or Larry King Live online, and will the amount they might pay, if anything, be enough to compensate the programmers for any potential loss in revenue from their existing pay TV customers.”

This conference will examine the emerging video marketplace, discussing the opportunities for disruptive innovation, the nature of the changing business models, and the public policy responses. In so doing, we will bring together a range of academics, policymakers, and business persons.