We dropped the ball again – Internet TV is dead

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171038593210.htm

I was wondering why TV shows and whole channels were quickly disappearing from Hulu, why network websites were forcing me to watch shows soon after airtime as the number of episodes online dropped from all to one season to 7 to 3.

I had been waiting with glee to see Internet TV take off, reach the tipping point where online advertising provided the same amount of revenue, and then more revenue, than the cable company middlemen brought in, so that we could cut them out and hit the golden age of ala carte TV shows.

I was so frustrated when we lost the battle with the music companies, and then the movie companies. And let me be clear here about what I mean by the battle. The battle, the war, is to destroy the big media companies that have had a chokehold on what we watch and listen to for decades, and how much it costs. The internet was supposed to be the great leveler, the free shortcut that would allow content producers to save billions, passing the savings on to us, and give us back the right to choose what we like and don’t like, finally providing content producers a way to let the art get judged on it’s own merits, not on the looks of the artist or how much creative control they would sign away.

So don’t think we won either of those battles. The music and movie industries may have had some shocks, some lost business. The model may have shifted slightly. But the big 5 or so companies in charge of everything are right where they were, with all the money still flowing through their hands, and all the decisions still coming from the suits and bean counters. They bungled it for sure, fumbled the ball, but it doesn’t matter, because they picked it right back up and carried on to a touchdown.

And now we hear that the TV game is lost as well. The big cable companies have arrived at a workable model to keep control. I was hoping to see them become “dumb pipes”, just providers of internet bandwidth, with content creators free to be judged on their merits, with billions and billions of middleman cost dollars taken right out of the model such that internet advertising would more than cover the bill. But no. They fought back with bandwidth caps, hobbling Internet TV before it had a chance to fight. Network neutrality was also a gambit in this chess game. And the plan outlined in the article linked above is the KO punch, using their heavyweight muscle to force the key content channels to take their content offline and put it behind the cable paywall.

Oh I’m just sick about this.

Thanks Dwight Silverman http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/houstonchronicle/techblog/~3/s-_O3WnHeJ8/linkpost_3122010_1.html for finding this.