Jeff Jarvis on Cable
As I’ve mentioned before, I am skeptical of “the Internet has changed everything!” analyses. It’s great for the imagination, but it has a tendency not to provide much useful guidance. I bring that up because of an exchange I saw between Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen on Twitter the other day. Andrew Keen had asked what cable companies should be doing and Jeff Jarvis offered these ideas:
- Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen turn the relationship 180˚, become a platform for customers’ desires: store, view, make, share stuff via us. Freedom v restriction
- Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen encourage internet TV so as to break channels’ expensive hold on my neck….
- Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen break bundling & pass the losses onto networks so as to, again, break their expensive hold on me in favor of open content
Yes, and imagine if everything were free and we all had a pony. Meanwhile, in reality, as Mark Cuban explained, “There is not a single CDN that can deliver 2 or more video streams concurrently to more than 1mm simultaneous viewers. Not one. Anywhere. There are probably 3, maybe 4, that on a perfect day might be able to deliver a single video stream to 500k simultaneous viewers. … Video distribution of any scale places you at the mercy of just a very few CDNs…”
So, Jarvis thinks…
- …cable providers should abandon the very effective, dedicated video delivery networks in favor of Internet TV?
- …cable providers should abandon premium content in exchange for user-generated content?
That makes no sense. Why would cable or content companies want to abandon a successful (and extremely popular) product so they can reproduce the Internet? The Internet already exists. It’s called the Internet.
If content providers want to distribute across the Internet…they can do that. If consumers would prefer to watch user generated content….they can do that. The fact that they still choose cable services suggests, perhaps, there’s real value to what cable provides. As Todd Spangler has pointed out, “cable TV is astoundingly popular with consumers. It’s an economic success story. People love pay television. People complain about cable bills, but nobody likes paying their mortgage either.”
This is not an either/or choice. We can have both the open Internet and premium services. A world with only one of those options would be a much drearier place.
Have you consulted with any CDNs before concluding they can’t handle streaming of this magnitude? I bet Akamai might disagree.
Highwinds too. See the Obama inauguration.
“There is not a single CDN that can deliver 2 or more video streams concurrently to more than 1mm simultaneous viewers. Not one. Anywhere.”
You’re mistaken… It’s called cable.
What is cable except a CDN? It’s a railroad that only allows their own trains to run on it now… The problem is perception. As a fan of the free market all we have to do is perceive them as they are… A walled garden of isolationist business perspective.
Free the markets and ask the CDN named cable to allow any train on their tracks.
As you say, it’s not an either/or… There will still be room for the premium trains to run on their own tracks… but there’s plenty of room for others there too.
Was a single CDN delivering two or more streams of the inauguration to millions? Maybe, but I thought I recalled there were a lot of different distributors for that. And as I recall, there were a significant number of problems with it, too.
I recall the problem was that CDN only *paid* for n streams, not that the CDNs had any issues with their infrastructure. What facts did you base your article on that there are no CDNs capable of handling millions of streaming users?
I was citing Mark Cuban. I would be happy to hear specific data. But read the context of Cuban’s post for details. It was not about delivering a single stream of content, but delivering multiple channels/streams….comparable to what cable services can do.
Mark Cuban doesn’t have any hands-on experience with CDNs.
Guys,
Check out P2P CDNs like Octoshape. They’d make hosting multiple 1M+ viewer streams no problem, and manageable on server-side resources.
I think this arguing about CDNs is a little beside the point. There probably isn’t a business model for a completely a la carte video universe.
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