IPTV Issues
Will it be easy for the telecom companies to acquire, license and distribute existing commercial video content?
Can the Telco’s with little or no experience with the licensing of video content, hope to become smart players of this emerging industry?
For now this remains an open question:
"It won't be easy. Already, the entertainment industry is entwined in a web of complicated and often exclusive licensing deals, and getting the right content will be a challenge for the telcos."
This is what Bob Greene, senior vice president of advanced services for Starz Entertainment Group LLC told his audience a few days ago, at the 13th annual Symposium, “Next Generation Media Networks".
"Movies are typically licensed on an exclusive basis for about eight or nine years, says, after which licensing is finally opened up to general broadcast rights." Greene also said that breaking into these exclusive relationships is the biggest barrier to those who want to start delivering video content over IP. (Source: Lightreading IPTV vs. Me Too TV )
Reed Hasting, founder and CEO of Netflix, adds that "the industry had reached a crucial juncture", and where what we are left with it's a choice between an open and highly diversified grassroots Internet-based TV panorama vs. a highly-commercial, secure and controlled multiplicity of private networks modeled after traditional cable and satellite TV operations governed by major world telcos.
Unfortunately what telcos are doing, is dumping large amounts of money into creating IP-based versions of existing cable and satellite offerings, without any understanding of what the new emerging paradigm of Internet of Video, has really to offer.
A great model for marketing video and television-type content through secure and protected IP telecom networks could be modeled after what successfully done by NTT DoCoMo in Japan, where the telecom giant takes a cut of the overall sales and subscriptions revenues in exchange for providing new content providers with tools and services to market their content on their distribution network.