It’ll be a long time before broadcasters can have a diminished role in getting the content to the end users because the learning curve of learning how to play both roles of production and distribution effectively might be too steep for most production companies.

Guess you’re completely right there.

It’ll be a long time before broadcasters can have a diminished role in getting the content to the end users because the learning curve of learning how to play both roles of production and distribution effectively might be too steep for most production companies. It seems more beneficial to allow production companies to do what they do best, which is creating content, and let broadcasters do what they do best, which is distributing. This is not to say that distribution channels will not change; it will, but the companies already focused on distribution will be the ones to make sure they change with the times so that their models will continue to be beneficial to them. This is what Comcast did with the broadband business.

The portal would have Voice, Video, Audio, News (personalized RSS feeds), Applications (Google Writely, Spreadsheet, Calendar, etc….) and the end user would be able to be very mobile. The portal can be skinned anyway the consumer wanted unlike Globe7 (primitive model).

Bottom line is the personalization of the content can be done by the user, the distribution channels simply embeds advertising into the stream as well as the content (movie, tv show etc.). It is still an advertising driven model.

We still need them because the risk capital often lies in the broadcaster. The production company wouldn’t even start producing without a broadcaster.

But I am not saying much about how, if or when this is going to change.

I think there are several interesting changes going on that might indicate a possible shift. The risk capital that the networks use are mostly capital that comes from the advertisers.

Right now the advertisers are also starting to experiment with new models. A lot of the risk capital that was needed to produce the popular series called “24″ comes directly from one of the advertisers, Ford.

What happens if an advertiser decides to finance a full production for Touchstone?

Something that you can see some kind of very early sign of in the popular series of short films from BMVFilms.com

High quality content financed and distributed entirely by the advertiser…

As for the digital terrestial broadcasting that is a question of reaching everybody or not. According to the research that has been done in Norway a digital terestial network is the cheapest and most reliable way to reach everybody in the country. I know that not all agree on that and I don’t work with those questions so I can’t really give a good answer or well researched opinion.

The scenario I describe here is still a bit into the future for major broadcast events. Distributing huge sports events or stuff like Eurosong to hundreds of millions of people in realtime simultaniously is still difficult trough the internet.

With new technology we can start to use the internet more like a reliable broadcast platform, but right now it is usually one-to-one communication. Not at all suitable for big live events in high definition…

Do you think the broadcasters are aware of this? Why do you think they try to push digital terrestrial broadcasting as hard as they do?