Web Video Might Prove 'Content is King'
mediacentral.com
In the race for dominance of the emerging digital television marketplace, the winner may be neither broadcast nor cable but the Web. That's because, while TV broadcasters and cable operators have been laying out strategies for the digital TV spectrum, the Web has begun integrating, however clumsily, video and audio into its bandwidth.
But, as pointed out by Pete Mountanos, a leading digital TV developer who serves as director of Microsoft's Digital Television Partners Program, motivating the Web effort is, as always, content. And content, he said from a panel on digital TV in New York last week, used to be cable TV's position.
Yet cable seems to have abandoned its position, Mountanos continued, in the battle with broadcasters over the issue of resolution. Specifically, most broadcasters appear to favor using their new digital spectrum to televise beautiful high-definition TV pictures rather than breaking it up to multicast multiple channels, each with a compressed signal. Cable TV, by comparison, appears to have opted for a compromise that will give it more channels than broadcast, but at a somewhat lower resolution. As indicated by Discovery Communications' chairman John Hendricks, who in a separate panel last week said Discovery plans to have enough channels active to account for a 10% share of market, cable's strategy will be to surround and conquer.
According to Mountanos, however, Web television users who currently access video over the Web do so not because of speed or clarity or quantity but because those video apps offer content that can't be found anywhere else. So let the battle between cable and broadcast over resolution be big, the digital developer said, and let it be long. But history will ultimately show, he predicted, just what it has always shown: Consumers, when given the choice between content and resolution, go with content every time. |
