The U.S. cable industry has nothing to fear from anybody. Its plant is inherently broadband and interactive — no need for the exhorbitantly expensive upgrades that the inherently narrowband telcos must implement.
Cable systems can roll out any combination of new services in a heartbeat, crushing competition in the process. Satellite competitors don’t have a terrestrial network capable of offering voice and high-speed data.
VOD will trump anything the Internet can offer in terms of on-demand video programming. The government can’t justify a la carte or net neutrality or uneven franchising obligations.
If you attended the National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention last week, and didn’t know anything else about the broader communications marketplace, you’d believe all this. Apparently, cable operators do believe all of this.
While the NCTA show is usually a venue for cheerleading, this year’s show took on a weird vibe with all of the smiley prognostications and denial of problems. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. Mediaweek’s Anthony Crupi has this article about how ABC’s announcement that it will stream programming on the web undercut the happy-happy talk at the show. (Crupi picked up on the weird vibe too — he called it “schizoid.”)
Reuters ran a piece from the Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein (odd that I couldn’t find it on the Hollywood Reporter’s web site) that talked about how cable seemed to “soft-pedal” its problems at the show.
One high-profile educational session moderator at the show muttered to me that “these guys won’t ever say anything is wrong.” Another moderator at the NCTA show, Gary Arlen, commented to me on the difference between USTelecom’s trade shows and the NCTA show, noting that the telcos have a track record of inviting cable operators to speak, injecting a dose of reality, perhaps, into the proceedings.
I’m not sure, however, if cable is off-base in being so optimistic. Operators may be right about everything. It is true that everyone wants a slice of cable’s pie, testament to the industry’s power, and that cable’s architecture is very hard to beat. But there’s no denying that it’s just plain weird how cock-eyed confident the industry seems to be in the face of so many competitors gunning for it.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:31 AM|Comments(1)
They currently win the pipeline wars by riding the wave of to-the-user bandwidth that killed broadcast TV. They deserved to win, because they made the most of copper and were forced by: more channels, on demand/pay, and cable modems to spend their time working within these restrictions and upgrade tons of networking hardware that could be a lock into copper that kills them many years from now. I have no clue if their NOC to Edge equipment can go beyond what it already does, I'd guess no from what the phone co's did with their copper limitations and the eventual switch to fiber.
Comcast in this area has (or had) something weird going on trying to reconcile two different billing systems; they still have spotty playback on demand in bunches, and of course cable suffers the usual time/user swings. Adding VOIP to complete the Service Trifecta might be too much for what they have.
About the only thing that can replace cable/copper is of course fiber to the home, and the end user can't be asked to pay for T-x/OC-x hardware/service at todays rates for continued copper reliance. How to implement the last 100 feet, the cool robots crawling through your sewer pipe? (see link above for story/pics/videos) Non-intrusive, no major construction and a pretty painless upgrade path/cost will hopefully change my "user experience" of large transfers on the net from 3.5" floppy to gigabit network. - HEX
Posted by: Jonah HEX at April 17, 2006 2:25 PM
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