AS THE LONE MEDIA outlet providing daily reports from both the BDU/specialty hearings in Gatineau and the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, we’ve noticed a crossover issue or two.
Take Tuesday, for example. In Gatineau, Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau made his company’s case for dramatically decreased regulation in broadcasting and cable, presenting a great big book of some 400 regulations governing the sector.
He told the Commission what many other distributors have said – that the Internet is changing everything and it’s time to dump most of the existing rules.
“Within a few years, the Internet may be the principal distributor of television programs around the world and without any regulation,” he said.
While it’s true the unrestrained, unregulated growth of the Internet has changed and continues to change a great many things about media and television distribution, Péladeau’s quote can’t go unchallenged. It`s a nice sound bite which makes the Quebecor CEO sound like a cool futurist because of the comment’s alarmist nature, and yeah, he may be right, but it’s just nowhere near that simple.
And to be honest, few of the U.S. executives we’ve been listening to here at NAB believe that the public Internet will ever be able to support millions of streams of high definition television, for example.
Yes, there sure is a lot of video out in the “big cloud” we all call the Internet. Surfers can download movies and TV shows and so on and so on, technically “going around” the system (while paying their ISP growing dollars). That’s a still-emerging part of the entertainment pie. No question. It’s still a puny, infinitesimal part of the pie, though. A crumb, really. The really big money is still in broadcasting and distribution.
But another piece of the Internet equation, which adds far more complexity to Péladeau’s assertion, is that carriers – cable and telco and wireless alike – are increasingly using Internet Protocol to deliver content to their viewers. And as that grows, carriers can add a whole host of new applications to enhance the consumer experience.
In a session yesterday on IPTV here at NAB, Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice-president of Microsoft TV, said he couldn’t envision a time when the Internet would replace TV broadcasting as the primary source where people consume premium video programming: “It’s just the opposite… A combination of broadband and software will give the television industry another opportunity to significantly expand,” he said.
Plus, consumers need the help of aggregators like cable companies and programmers or broadcasters to help navigate or make some sense of all that is available for viewing.
Dan York, executive vice-president of programming for AT&T – which is rapidly growing its IPTV service, called U-verse, across the U.S. – outlined a few of the service’s applications. For example, customers can take their PC experience and with “a click of their mouse” port it over to their TV screens, so that their TV experience can be overlaid with personalized information from the web like sports scores or news updates, or what have you, explained York.
And that overlay, or that banner, could contain ad messages from companies or branding from AT&T. So one wonders about what the broadcasters think of their signal being viewed through such a prism, but it illustrates one of the myriad opportunities presented by IP technology.
One wonders if the CRTC is thinking about this difference, too. Can our new policies accommodate all of what IP has to offer? Will it differentiate between the zany “everything-goes” public internet and what carriers and broadcasters can offer using IP-based applications? Can new policies be flexible enough to adapt to applications and new technology that haven’t yet been dreamed up?
And taking some of the steam out of Peladeau’s comments – when a company like AT&T is spending billions rebuilding its network so that it will be able to offer IPTV to 20 million U.S. homes by 2010, making it “the largest IPTV buildout in the world,” said York, it’s hard to envision that the public Internet will replace broadcasters and cable companies.
And in the not-too-distant-future, Peladeau’s own Videotron will be able to use IP to offer a whole range of new IP-based services, along the same lines as AT&T, on the Videotron cable plant. Will our new regs contemplate those types of things? Time will tell.
