Have you heard or read about ivi? To give you the 20-second tour, ivi is a start-up that uses terms like “disruptive” to describe a business model of charging $4.99 a month to stream a package of a couple dozen live over-the-air broadcast signals to subscriber PCs—or whatever Internet devices they choose.
Why any person would be willing to pay 5 bucks a month for live broadcast content that can, ostensibly, be received free over the air is beyond me. It sounds like the model cable outgrew decades ago, when community antenna television (CATV, as you’ll occasionally hear at a trade show panel session) stood for picking up and retransmitting the local TV stations so that people got clear pictures. It also sounds like it might be a flash-in-the-pan for consumers who will sooner than later get access to mobile digital TV which, like its over-the-air relative will be free.
The broadcasters, bless their ancient hearts, see ivi as disruptive and the head-turning spawn of Satan, spewing statements from the NAB referencing piracy and claiming “it is blatantly illegal to steal broadcasters’ copyrighted works and signals.” ivi, shrouded in the cloak of innocence, responds that it’s a cable operator and has paid untold fees for the transmission rights.
Excuse me if I see this as a hissing match between a Pterodactyl and a Velociraptor—and yes I’m deliberately using dinosaur allusions here. It’s been more than 30 years since cable, via HBO and later MTV and ESPN and TBS and all those other initials that signified some new narrow form of broadcasting, abandoned the idea of a business case built on broadcast and started developing their own wares. Developing and controlling your own content has, it should be noted, been a pretty successful thing for cable.
When all is said and done, ivi will languish on the vine. Until ivi has a complete content package (ahem… get in line behind Google, Apple and a mass of others), ivi is just a very small piece of a very fragmented puzzle. Hardly disruptive.
