Here comes the OTT streaming of the big TV groups
It is now certain: the distribution model of media content will be on-demand streaming over the top. For those allergic to klingon, it means: consumption of content transmitted through the web at the request of the paying user. We can make such a peremptory assertion because a important fact: i have arrived major US television groups with a'prime offer for streaming TV programs.
Meanwhile it has come to maturity also another process which, perhaps, underlies this decision: the most important cable operators who bring the television signal to 100 million Americans have become the themselves who serve the broadband connection needed to connect to the Internet to get a decent streaming service. Some of these, like Comcast, they are also gods media groups with direct interests in the television content production and distribution industry. Cable and fast Internet they are becoming aonly inseparable thing. At the infrastructural level, convergence is already there. A convergence that robs many people of sleep even in the Obama administration. But that's another topic and we have to get back to ours, lo streaming tv.
Here comes HBO a la carte
Time Warner he announced with great fanfare that he will make it available also ai not subscribed to the channel (and here's the thing!), the best of HBO that will become attainable twigs websites through a service stream a the map. HBO is the flagship of the New York group, responsible for a third of its profits and a veritable money machine. A decision like this had never been seen before: on the web so far there was the end of the rubbish. HBO was immediately joined by another US TV senator, the network CBS which transmits many sporting eventsi, the content that creates the most business on pay TV.
Without exaggeration… it is a Copernican revolution as all observers of the media industry have not failed to point out. There TV and the media queen, the one that has best defended itself from the corrosive action of the Internet, the one that still makes real money and has the best executives in the industry. The best and also the loudest. Jeff Bewkes, head of Time Warner, compared Netflix, the bridgehead of the OTT, to the Albanian army that wants to conquer the world, echoing Stalin's famous joke addressed to the allies who in Yalta asked for a role for the Vatican: "How many divisions does the Pope have". Zero. How much content does OTT have? Zero! Both Stalin and Bewkes, as excellent materialists, dismissed the value of the spiritual power or that virtual of contemporary society.
They will have little content OTT (but it's not like that either), but they are eating piece by piece the cake of the Pay TV, a half-trillion dollar pie. It was also these ravenous bites that prompted television groups to expand their prime offer to web streaming. Which means getting in direct competition with OTT, like Netflix and Amazon, which are gods frenemy. Yes, they are competitors, but also i better and more creditworthy customers of traditional TV that sells them i distribution rights need retransmission on the web of their products.
The OTTs took the descent of TV's large mammals into their reservation philosophically: "It will help us to improve the serviceHe said Reed Hastings, boss of Netflix. A nice understanding, but also a way of letting people know who's really in charge in that reserve. Hastings, and not only him, knows it won't be easy for i TV groups fill up il technological gap and also cultural which distances traditional media groups from companies born and raised on the Internet like Netflix. Every time the first ones tried to position themselves on the web it was a disaster and when they succeeded, as in the case of Hulu, came one step away from destroying everything. These groups have learned something but as a whole they are distant from the culture that the network requires, as even the octogenarian knows well Murdoch who has already been burned several times.
Is unbundling TV coming?
With the streaming via web embraced by large TV groups is coming also theunbundling, the unpacking. The opposite of him, the bundling, is the sun in the pay-TV galaxy. The pay-TV business model is built on package deals like a tree in the ground. Many see the bundling as a abuse towards i consumers. The senator John McCain, a former presidential candidate for the GOP, even filed a bill to get it out of the way.
There's no need, the same TV groups that invented it and up to now defended it with cold weapons will do it. In the movie My friends the concept of bundling is well explained in the scene in which Melandri (Gastone Moschin) goes to the house of Sassaroli (Adolfo Celi) to tell him that he will take his wife. Yes, says Sassaroli, but you also get the dog, an enormous Saint Bernard who has to go to his business at five in the morning every day.
So far i consumers is they desired see the programs HBO o showtime (most popular channels in USA) had to purchase a subscription from $100 a month which included others 200 channels that they didn't even know existed and that they would never see appear on their screen. I myself who am subscribed to Sky and I spend a few hours on television, of the 180 channels of my subscription, ne use continuously three: o four, Cinema 1 and 1+, Cult, Classic, Atlantic and Sky TG 24 which has introduced a new non-parceled TV information standard.
This is bundling. Something primitive. Unbundling, on the other hand, is with its separate offering of individual channels and even individual programs à la carte it's the XNUMXst century. This is the direction the whole television industry is going in. Hurray!
Streaming on the web and unbundling are marching together and in a short time the entire television offer will be permeated by these two models.
Towards a hybrid model
Even if the two trends will merge, the music , TV are moving in diverging directions. The music longed passing from the dominant model à la carte (iTunes), declining, to an all-inclusive subscription model (Spotify), growing. The TV, on the other hand, is starting on a reverse path, from the all-in-one model (cable TV) to the multiple choice model where you pay for what you actually consume. All consumers who feel trapped in bundling and especially the younger audience which stays away from expensive Pay TV models.
In the long run we will have a hybrid model as is generally the case in all consumer-oriented ecosystems. In fact we will return to newspaper distribution model in the heyday of the media. THE strong consumers and those with greater financial resources will buy thesubscription to access content without limits and consume it even partially; the more occasional consumers: budget minded, they will buy on the fly the content to enjoy it quickly by choosing it from an immense offer made up of the catalogs of content producers. Finally there will be, as was the case for newspapers, alimited area and limited to free access which will serve to find new customers and to reach an erratic public in places of mobility or meeting places.
Towards the monopsony
Paul Krugman, at the Nobel prize for economics, wrote a article on the NYTimes very critical of Amazon and the potential monopsony of the network. Peter Thiel echoed him by stating that monopolies are the inevitable product of the web and there is little you can do about it and it is also of little use to try to limit or regulate them, because they are transient.
Here is yet another paradox of the new economy, which is the factory of paradoxes. Just the distribution model of newspapers torn to pieces Internet, has been resurrected, like Lazarus, to become a candidate for the dominant distribution model of digital content.
Not just for TV and music. Movies, books and even video games will be brought to consumers in the same way ie through a model consumer hybrid operated by few gigantic multi-pipe hubs and multi-model, powered by tech and come on big data, which for all intents and purposes will be totally consumer-oriented distribution monopolies controlled through social media, not through government regulation. This with all due respect Paul Krugman who wrote an article, Amazon's Monopsony Is Not OK, against this type of evolution by requesting the intervention of the antitrust. Are consumers really sure they want it?
