A communications technician once told me that "life is bursty." He was talking about life in the control room, where long hours of quiet, with all of the boards green, can suddenly turn into minutes of controlled panic as the red lights start flashing.
"Bursty," as you probably know, is a term for communications traffic that unexpectedly lurches from low data rates to high data rates. It is hard to deal with because it presents two unpleasant alternatives: sizing the circuit to handle the maximum requirement, which leaves a lot of expensive capacity idle, or settling for less capacity and knowing that service will slow to a crawl during periods of peak demand. The latest shared-bandwidth and bandwidth-on-demand solutions are specifically designed to deal with bursty traffic.
But beyond all this jargon, life really is bursty. Whether it is your personal life or working life, stuff has a way of "coming out of nowhere" to surprise you. In most cases, it doesn’t really come out of nowhere. You just don’t see it coming. It is the health problem you have been living with for years without knowing it. It is the economic turmoil of the Great Recession, which is the result of years of living beyond our collective means and allowing fundamental oversight of business to lapse. But when it hits you, all you can do is shake your head and dazedly ask if anybody got the number of that truck.
Television broadcasting is a case in point. For decades, it was the electronic medium. So much did it dominate life in industrialized nations that the socialist Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) invented a term, "social capital," to describe the aspect of American life that was being eroded by too many hours spent in front of the glowing box. Fast forward to today, and we see a business grappling with an unbelievable burst of change. After the recorded music industry showed what could happen to media companies that ignored the Internet, networks have lost no time in moving their shows onto the Web, whether on their own sites or aggregators like Hulu. One exasperated network executive said to me recently, "Can anybody explain why it’s a good idea to give our content away for free on the Web?" Well, sure, I can. They already give it away "free" on-air, with advertisers paying the fare. Internet TV is also advertiser supported, though the small audiences involved mean that content owners are currently trading digital pennies for analog dollars, as the saying goes. It remains to be seen what kind of advertising rates they can command when the online audience reaches levels comparable to DTH and cable channel audiences.
But things are only beginning to get interesting. ABI Research recently forecast that there would be 20 million "Internet-enabled" televisions in homes around the world by 2012. That is, televisions plugged into broadband and able to receive so called "over the top" Internet-based services from YouTube to Weather.com. Sets-in-homes, of course, do not translate into viewer experiences. Most consumers with HDTVs in their homes are not watching HDTV – they are just seeing SDTV on a bigger screen. So it may be years before there are enough homes with robust broadband and enough digitally sophisticated viewers to make a further big dent in viewership of traditional television. But when it does happen, I bet you it will leave us shaking our heads and asking dazedly about that truck.
Broadcasting, of course, continues to be the anchor application for the world’s satellite networks. It has given the business a great ride over the past few years, as compression has lowered costs and encouraged growth in channels, while HDTV has driven up bandwidth requirements. But if there were ever a time to work hard on finding and growing new niches and innovative applications in the business, this is it.
At the 2009 NAB Show, I spoke with an engineering consultant for a European standards body about mobile TV. He asked me another of those "can you explain?" questions but it was one for which I had no quick-and-easy answer.
"Why does anybody think," he asked, "that they can build a business delivering TV programs to a mobile device? Any 3G phone today – and all 4G phones tomorrow - with a decent browser can access video content from the Web. Why would a user stay inside the walled garden of some content provider when they have the entire Internet to choose from?"
That’s the question confronting satellite’s anchor tenants as they contemplate a world of Internet-enabled TVs. Their ability to find an answer will do much to determine the long-term health of the business.
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Robert Bell is Executive Director of the World Teleport Association, which represents the world’s most innovative teleport operators, carriers and technology providers in 20 nations. He can be reached at rbell@worldteleport.org
