Mark Cuban Laughs at Internet Video > Mark is Right ....Sort Of

Mark is Right ....Sort Of

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"How much of the TV you watch is truly ;live
Don't look at me funny, its a serious question. What fraction of the TV you watch is only a few seconds old, straight from some camera to your TV without editing?

"Let's break it down:
- Is anything on Must-See-TV live? No
- How about Saturday morning cartoons? No
- Leno?, Letterman? Nope
- The Sopranos, Everybody Loves Raymond, Soaps, Opera Winfrey? Nada

How about the national news? If youre on the east coast, maybe its live, not on the west coast though. If youre watching a 24 hour news channel, the *vast* majority of play time is pre-recorded segments. How about 24? That clock doesn't make it so

Now isn't the holy trinity of media distribution - broadcast, cable, satellite - perfectly designed and suited for live distribution of Television? Of course it is.

So why isn&'t most of TV live? Here are a couple reasons:

- Editing makes TV better.
- For 95%+ of the TV people watch, live doesn't matter, NOBODY CARES

Even the notion of linear programming seems to be dwindling in every direction I look. Comcast and their MSO brethren have launched and are aggressively expanding their on-demand offerings. 99% of what is distributed on the Net is non-live content (the 1% is made up of the few radio stations that still do live streams online - the most popular radio services are simply playing pre-recorded songs in a pre-set playlist).

So, why the heck is everybody knocking down my door about live P2P streaming? Usually they’re frenetic, intense and on a mission, like Indiana Jones about to get the holy graille or something. Cheap, live, high-performance video distribution online. Previously, only in the sci-fi books. Does it make me feel kind of special to be the guy, behind the guy, behind the guy, that can make their dreams come true? Of course it does, and I bask in their praise every chance I get.

But then reality sets in:
How much of Headline News is Live? I’m going to guess less than 10%
How much of ESPN is Live? Less than 50% for sure.

Now dont get me wrong, if you're going to want live, it&'s going to be in one of 3 categories: sports, news, events (like concerts). But even in these categories, sports is the only one where a majority of its viewed content is Live. Long-term customers probably range only at 15-20 max. My point isn’t that Live doesn't exist or that there’s no business there, but it's not even in the same order of magnitude as the big business of pre-recorded content delivery.

So how come all the hub-ub, the frothy mouths, and the Venture Capitalists circling around like vultures?

The REAL reason for this recent move toward live online P2P is licensing.

Content owners are scared of losing ad revenues in an on-demand world (Tivo on the Net is worse than the Second Coming for these guys) especially one that’s online. Cable companies are scared that the pipes they built to double up for Internet access will be used to get around their $80/month/subscriber cash cow. Content companies are scared that their cable deals will get screwed if they try to ;go around; the cable companies by doing on-demand on the Net.

Bottom line is that for the next couple years, on-demand, ad-supported TV licensing for the Net is a non-starter.

And so with all those 100 million people on the Net but no way to get them on-demand programming online, some brilliant guy trying to make his numbers came up with a genius holding pattern:

Why don&t we take pre-recorded TV content, and broadcast it Live over the Internet?

Dont even get me started on the technical lameness of the proposition, but this is the world we live in for a couple years, until online, on-demand licensing makes the world better for consumers everywhere.

In the meantime, ll bask in the temporal sunny rays of the Live P2P streaming spotlight.

- chief swoosher "

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