After a lot of personal Research amongst my peers and the general public as well as reading many TV Reports, Newsletters and Blogs it is apparent that we have a difference of opinion in the Broadband world or perhaps just a blind refusal to accept fact.  Internet availability, stability and connectivity is not as wonderful as the purveyors of OTT services would have us believe.    Reports show that even the UK, which is supposed to be a highly connected country, there is still 30% of the population that are not connected.   A much larger percentage are badly served in terms of MB/s.    If you read the Blogs there is a huge percentage that spend far too much time battling their ISPs for a decent stable connection just for Internet and Email access.   Connecting the TV is going to be a major challenge due to household infrastructure.  There are major efforts to have the connectivity of TV’s made simple but that generally requires the purchase of Powerline Adapters for Ethernet or the running of Category 5 Coaxial Cable around the house.  Wifi is coming too but it is more expense to the consumer and often proprietary to the CE manufacter.   When things fail who do you call – yet another part of the unmanged infrastructure the TV is betting its future upon.

So we see a mad rush to extend TV services onto a medium that was not designed to handle it.  Furthermore we hear constantly about “Metering” which is again nothing new.  Many years ago I worked for AT&T Europe installing ISPs around the EMEA region.  I worked in France and was one of the 1st Wanadoo ISP clients.  I paid a bill related to my time “on-line” as it was an active modem connection that understood how long you were connected and of course you paid according to the length of time that you were actually connected to the Service Provider.  So now we see that is potentially the way to go in the monetizing of Video Download and to potentially stop or at least deter the pirating of movies in a P2P world.

If the technology hype was turned into reality hype we would probably have a dreadful situation in Europe.  Millions of people would suddenly be unemployed as their would be no work for them.  The EBU Technical department would do what?  If HDTV is completed and Interactivity is Completed, So is MetaData and all the things that make up modern Digital TVworld we would have a lot of people twiddling thumbs in the building in Grand Saconnex as there would be nothing to “invent”.  Ah! I forgot there is 3DTV of course something we all need and want I hear you cry!  The reality is that we see the re-hashing of old ideas with new rhetoric resulting in the  combining of old technologies with new (actually old) in an attempt to try to invent things that apparently have not already been done – My argument is that they have and they have failed on the Internet and they will fail again unless the real root of the matter is addressed – Infrastructure and Business Models are what will fix TV  in the OTT world not making old dogs do new tricks – sorry old tricks because we have done it all before – just in a different way-The technology offers the same functioning mousetrap but the Business Model is really where the focus should be.