The great debate surrounding the viability of premium Video on Demand (VoD) content continues. At this point, it seems we should move beyond the enabling regulations and technical obstacles surrounding premium VoD and instead concern ourselves with market dynamics – who might be the big winners and losers. Despite some changing dynamics in content licensing and security, technology is not the long pole in the tent any more, but rather licensing terms and subscriber adoption – at least for early adopters. And we are clearly still in the experimental phase of verifying if a home theater movie experience in a similar release window as theatrical release provides a viable business upside.

The distinction between multi-screen TV and TV will eventually disappear as all video services inherently incorporate any device where we want to consume content. The challenge is to make multi-screen services more scalable, which requires advances in headends, networks, content rights and revenue protection.

I was going to start with the same sentence as last time when returning from the IPTV World Forum in London: “sitting at a cafe in Heathrow airport sipping a cup of very good coffee…” But since the IBC 2010 was in Amsterdam, I had to say goodbye to The Netherlands by indulging in a [...]

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Some operators have created the consumer expectation of free content and now they are having a hard time putting the “genie back in the bottle” when it comes to charging a fee for that content. It really puts into question the first mover advantage efforts by OTT providers to offer free content, as it appears they have potentially cannibalized their own long-term revenue streams. The question is if they can successfully extract money from existing and/or new viewers.