Net TV poised to make the switch ( The Age / Graeme Philipson)
From the article: “When TV stations start to broadcast over the internet there will be no need for pay TV. Pay TV succeeds because it uses a proprietary broadcast network, based on satellite or cable, as its transmission medium. It controls who can receive the signal by controlling the technology.
When any TV station can broadcast over the internet and anybody with a high enough bandwidth Internet connection can receive it, pay TV will cease to exist. Like the BBC black box, it is an interim technology. I give it 10 years, which means Foxtel might become profitable at about the same time its technology becomes redundant.”
There are some limited forms of internet tv around currently but the quality is too low for regular consumers to bother with. The rollout of ADSL2+ and other high bandwidth tail connections will encourage people to experiment more with streaming video, which should in turn drive further developments in that area. As the article hints at, pay tv only works because the provider has exclusive access to the delivery medium. Once high quality content is available over the internet the pay tv operator’s current infrastructure advantage will turn into a liability.