What Comcast doesn't realize is that such vertical empire-building as it's contemplating is last century's business model, and now obsolete in the era of near-ubiquitous and competitive Broadband Internet Access, especially with Broadband Wireless Internet Access to play the combative "spoiler" to cable/DSL oligopoly.
As we saw with the most interesting devices at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the new transport mode for supplying content to all sorts of interesting new devices is now TCP/IP... which means it can come from the Internet... as in anywhere on the planet... from any individual source on the planet. If you want to watch the Rug Braiding Channel, you can as soon as someone supplies it. If you want to watch your grandchild's high school soccer game you can - realtime or recorded, as soon as someone chooses to supply it. There's no longer a question of if they'll be able to supply it; that question's answered.
So how does Comcast compete with that? Ultimately, it cannot - the "open access" portion of its distribution network will be used by customers to bypass the much more profitable offerings it's trying to push. The choice is stark - create an Isenberg "Best Network / Stupid Network", or try to "fence off" content being delivered by Internet, at which point competition kicks in.
Make no mistake, there will be (and already is) competition for cable and DSL from Wireless; there are a number of very credible, well-funded such efforts now underway, only some of which I mention in this weblog, and even more than I'm at liberty to discuss in the pages of FOCUS On Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
Steve Stroh
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