Cable Showing Their Cards
For all our talk in CMS.610 about the power of Hollywood and the content owners and the power of corporate America and their ad dollars, my humble opinion is that no 800-pound gorilla is as big as your friendly neighborhood cable company. Take a look at the subscriber counts for the top cable companies - the top 6 are scary big. (BTW - You may want to bookmark that NTCA site, I find it to be a pretty good source of facts and figures on the TV industry.)
Comcast had $20B in revenue and $1b in profit (in a industry with huge CapEx expenditures don't let the profit margin fool you, their balance she shows they "keep" much of their money through fixed assets). From the MSO's point of view, they own the customers. So it follows that alternative technologies are trying to STEAL customers. With such deep pockets, they can buy some pretty nice security systems.
Which brings me to the reason for this post, a nice little article in the Journal yesterday describes what cable companies are doing to enable DIY TV. People are posting local football games or pictures of their holiday lights. This is powerful stuff because it is accessible to more people than have broadband and it is localized so more easily searchable. I do not think that Cable can compete with the Internet, but it may be able to forestall innovations by providing poor alternatives to the masses for a long time. 800-lb gorillas do not fade away. Haven't you seen Kong yet?
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