DISQUS

Paul Fisher · 2 years ago

Interesting post Nic. Wanted to develop one of your points:

" difficult to see a single service provider striking enough deals to make much of that long tail of content available"

I agree. And if this is the case, then it follows that consumers will need to go to source (i.e. a website) to watch various pieces of TV / Video. In practice this will mean many sources. And here is the problem. I don't think consumers will want to keep going to lots of different sources. Instead they will aggregate. And if they aggregate then they will need an interface to aggregate (which is why I think Netvibes and Pageflakes are not only cool but also only the tip of the iceberg of what aggregators can become).

Behind this, is in my view, a more interesting debate: who is doing the aggregating? For example, right now, millions of people trust the editorial choices that Channel 4 makes. (Channel 4 is simply an aggregator which makes choices about what certain demographics want to watch). Except Channel 4 are lucky because they also get to sell ad inventory.

My questions are these:

Q1. Rather than trusting my aggregation to Channel 4, what if I “outsourced” this and simply used the aggregation choices of my pals, or community? Who is creating this infrastructure on the web? YouTube? (sort of). Joost? (half way there within a semi closed environment.) There’s lots of white space….

Q2. YouTube is a crude aggregator and is completely failing to get advertising to fund content: just last Friday Viacom axed all of their content on YouTube saying Google was failing to “extend.. fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create (content).” Channel 4 sell the ad-inventory because they “commission” the shows. I.e they pay the content creators. Could this happen online? If so wouldn’t be back to the old “closed system”?

nic · 2 years ago

Thanks Paul, great comment.

I had assumed up to now that the aggregators for broadband TV will be vertically focused. Netvibes et al will have to expand their functionality significantly to get there.

To your questions - fully open aggregators - TIOTI is the most prominent in the UK.

Re models - I am expecting a range of ad funded, subscription and pay per view options. How rights get protected through all of this is a difficult and unanswered question.