[NU Sports] TV and sports

[Jeff Beamsley]

Mike,

I agree that the stakes are huge.  That's not what I meant.

I meant the carping about pricing and how the cable companies go about their
business is really missing the point.

There is a sea change coming and we have to pay attention to how that rolls
out to make sure that we don't allow all of the things that we don't like in
the cable/phone space to end up being replicated in the high-speed version of
the Internet that's coming.

Jeff


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Nolan [mailto:nolan at romaine.tssi.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 11:50 AM
To: Jeff Beamsley
Cc: nwu-sports at tssi.com
Subject: Re: [NU Sports] TV and sports

> I think that this is much ado about nothing.

Oh I disagree here, there are BILLIONS of dollars at stake here!

The current issue is over who gets their pipline into your house.  Many if
not most people have 3 different wires coming into their house now:  
electricity, phone and cable.  

As I understand it, all three are (or will be) capable of supporting gigabit
over copper.  (Fiber to the house is IMHO not likely to be a major player
because of the infrastructure costs to string it, and gigabit speeds over
copper isn't likely to be the high end of that protocol either.  When they
figure out how to do terabit over copper, who needs fiber?)

The initial battle will be over who gets control of that pipeline and the
extent to which it is shared.  (I have both DSL and cable internet, for
example, because I need higher availability than either the phone company or
the cable company can individually delver.)

How will this affect sports viewers?  Hard to say, but in the long run I
doubt we'll see any savings, even with ala carte pricing, because the REAL
money is in the information content, not in the delivery of it.
And as ESPN has already demonstrated, they can pretty much ask whatever they
want, there are enough people out there who'll pay it.
--
Mike Nolan