Thursday, October 12, 2006
Cable May Trump TiVo
The company says that DVR subscription services will jump by more than 1000 percent during the next five years with much of the recorded programs stored on network servers, not home DVR boxes.
It is much cheaper to store programs centrally because network storage is much cheaper, and companies don't have to send technicians to repair DVRs if the hard drives crash. Also, the boxes can be less-complicated "thin-client" machines where most of the intelligence is on the network.
But media companies could stop this from happening by demanding higher royalty payments, according to ABI Research. CBS, etc. might demand payment for each time a show is watched, not just for the original airing.
It is inconsistent to demand that cable companies pay more depending on where a digital copy is stored. What needs to happen is for advertisers, cable companies and the media companies to figure out a better method of tracking when shows and their ads are viewed and for sharing the revenue.
Creating a comprehensive ad-supported video-on-demand archive of shows is a tremendous opportunity, not a threat. All sides must sit down and decide the new technologies that can extract the maximum ad revenue, and how to slice up the pie.
Posted By John Gartner at 11:48 AM
Permanent Link: Cable May Trump TiVo
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