Broadcast contains two kinds of content — things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won’t die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.
Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban’s blog. Cuban post focused on technology — he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn’t being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.
The video market has been migrating to “personal schedule” for decades. But there are two things that kept “event” and “program” content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create “pseudo-events” — broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.
Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce’s post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce’s article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.
The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast — whether over-the-air, or on cable — gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.