(Las Vegas, NV) A panel of telco, cable, VoIP and regulatory speakers could reach little agreement on how IP-enabled services should be regulated, but the telco and cable executives on the panel wouldn’t rule out that their industries might want to “port-block” IP services someday.
Rick Cimerman, Director of Telecom Policy at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said that he could foresee cable operators wanting to block services from riding over their broadband networks if those services “imposed an additional cost” on the networks.
“We end up investing a lot behind the [DSL] connection and a lot of that investment goes to enable BitTorrent or peer to peer file sharing. Someday we might get to the point where we want to block a port,” Jonathan Banks, BellSouth Vice President of Federal, Executive and Regulatory Affairs said.
The prospect that VoIP networks could be blocked from cable or telco broadband systems worries Pulver.com’s General Counsel Jonathan Askin. “What we’ve seen is a remarkable encroachment by the regulatory authorities on IP services. On the flip side, we’ve seen the removal of access regulations on carriers that might serve as gatekeepers.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:27 PM | Print | Comments (0)
(Las Vegas, NV) Cox Communications CEO Jim Robbins gave a keynote speech here at the U.S. Telecom conference. And the cable CEO didn’t mince words. He told the telephone industry audience that he doesn’t like the telcos’ public policy tactics.
“We’ll all benefit, but don’t try to tilt the field through the regulatory process,” Robbins told the telco execs. “I admire your deep pockets and leagues of lobbyists, but I don’t agree with your stance.”
In particular, Robbins is steamed at the telcos’ successful pursuit of state-wide franchising in Texas. “Recently, we’ve also seen Texas pass a blatantly discriminatory piece of legislation that guts much of the local franchising process for video providers — except if you’re a cable company, you’re stuck with the old rules and regulatory burdens.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:15 PM | Print | Comments (1)
OK, Mitch and I have been slow to blog over the past four days because we’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new report that seemed impossible to finish because there is just too much material to cover.
The report is “Television 2.0: A Comprehensive Analysis of Emerging IP-Based Video Services” and it’s a whopper — over 140 pages that describe the new era of IP-based video delivery. (You can download a Table of Contents here.)
The big question is what is Television 2.0? Unlike Tim O’Reilly’s masterpiece definition of Web 2.0, our definition is relatively short.
What is Television 2.0? It is video transmitted over new and more flexible platforms than the traditional, linear one-to-many model dominated by, first, over-the-air TV broadcasters and then later cable and satellite multichannel providers. Television 2.0 is also a new mode of interacting with, personalizing and modifying video content in a way not possible cable, broadcast, satellite, VCR or DVD.
But Television 2.0 is also about a new revolution in video programming creation and production. The advent of inexpensive consumer electronics capable of generating, recording, storing and transmitting content, has broken through a century-old barrier to video content creation erected by the high-cost of making video programming. And the rise of the Internet, and other platforms based on Internet protocol technical standards, has posed competitive challenges for the well-capitalized and concentrated entertainment and information corporations that traditionally controlled the distribution of video entertainment, news and sports.
All of these developments, moreover, have occurred in an astonishingly short time period. From 1995 to 2005, the percent of U.S. homes subscribing to any form of any Internet access rose from 9% to 68%. On a worldwide basis, Internet access climbed from only .4% to 14.9% of all residences over the same time period.
More importantly, it is the rise of broadband Internet access that enables the creation of new video services for the Internet, mobile platforms and other IP (Internet protocol)-based delivery mechanisms. Without broadband, the high bandwidth-intensive video streaming, sharing and downloading that constitutes a large part of Television 2.0 is virtually impossible.
Broadband Internet access, which was virtually nonexistent a decade ago, will by yearend reach more than 40% of all U.S. households and more than half of all U.S. Internet users. Although comparable data are not available on a global basis, broadband penetration has soared around the world, with countries such as Korea counting a year-end 2004 broadband penetration rate of 24%, based on the number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants. Among developed nations as a whole, per capita broadband penetration at year-end 2004 was slightly more than 10%.
In ten years, if not sooner, virtually all U.S. households will be broadband capable, and with that ubiquity, a universal foundation for the creation of Television 2.0 services and applications will be in place.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:18 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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