Video In Broadband Driver's Seat

How big is Internet video to the future of broadband? Well, if the PBS's experience is any indication, "sick nasty" big.
According to Angela Morgenstern, managing director of PBS Online and formerly with MTV, their online audience wants "everything ever made," and they want it in high definition, full screen and top quality, and they have little patience for delay. That was her message in an FCC workshop Thursday on how online video is shaping, and may shape, the deployment and adoption of broadband, all part of a series of workshops to help FCC staffers draft a national broadband plan. PBS earlier this year began making full-length videos of its programs available online, and while the industry average for online video viewing has been three or four minutes -- YouTube still dominates with 40-45% of video viewing -- Morgenstern said PBS surfers have been tuning in much longer than expected: 20 minutes. She also talked about the double primetime effect, where the site is now seeing a viewing peak at 10 p.m. along with the traditional daytime peak. "Sick nasty," she pointed out, is a good thing. But while the rise in online viewing was generally seen as helping drive adoption and supplementing public interest programming on other media (or compensating for its lack by the reckoning of some), some of those efforts were not without their critics. Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn, for example, took aim at the cable/telco online play, TV Everywhere, or ESPN360, saying the content was being put behind a pay wall because Disney charges operators a per-sub fee for the content, and because TV Everywhere is bundled with other services. She took the opportunity to push for Carterfone-like regulations from devices on cable nets, openness conditions and a host of other conditions, including program access enforcement for the Internet.