Is "Access" Where Most of the Revenue Is?

Fretting over whether people will pay for content is based on a mistaken assumption: that people have ever paid for content in the past, says Forrester Research VP. "They actually haven't," he says.

 Instead, people have paid for access to content.  You have to think about this some. People buy newspapers, so isn't that a content purchase? Well, he argues, not really. The cost of the newspaper purchase never covers the full cost of the content, which is mostly paid for by advertising.

One had to think about a "newspaper" as a distribution channel and a content aggregator, not an actual "content product" in that sense.

So what about cable TV? McQuivey argues even monthly video subscriptions are about "access" to content, not direct content purchasing. "Pay per view," where a show or movie is bought a la carte, on the other hand, is a content purchase.  Subscriptions to linear channels are a form of access, he argues.

If one looks at matters that way, "access" constitutes 77 percent of what the average household spends for "content" each month is spent on content access, not content itself.

Some will argue with the notion that a cable, telco video or satellite video connection is "access" rather than content. On the other hand, having linear video streaming in the background, even when one is not watching, is somewhat akin to voice "dial tone" or broadband Internet access. It's there, one can use it when one wants, but it is not a discrete "content"purchase.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to classify cable TV as "access" rather than content. People pay for their voice services using a flat-fee subscription, as they pay for linear video. Some of us might not think a different payment method, or retail pricing plan, changes the nature of the product.

But it is an interesting way of looking at the relative value of various revenue streams. Back in the early days of the tramnsition from dial-up to broadband, I gave a speech to a group of ISPs very concerned about the difficulty of the business model.

At that time, most of the actual revenue was earned by providing access. There was some amount of value-added service and products.  For better or worse, I said then, "access" was where most of the money was, despite the difficulty of the business case.

The business ecosystem was simpler then. Google had not grown to its current state, for example.  Looked at broadly, it may no  longer be true that most of the money is in access.

Australian ISPs will Have to Filter Web Content

Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says Australisan Internet Service Providers will be required to provide filtering of pornography and violent Web sites as the default option for schools and consumers. Senator Conroy says anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.

ISP Subscriber Growth Favors Tier One Providers

Not that anybody should be surprised by the latest ISP subscriber figures, but large tier one telco and cable providers are racking up more market share while independent mass market providers are losing share. The one countervailing trend is that providers focused on the small and mid-sized business, such as Covad, continue to grow.

For those of you familiar with the SME space, it is, always has been and always will be a fertile segment for independent providers of all sorts. The latest ISP figures only confirm that observation, again.

Disruption? Maybe Not.

Lots of companies and lots of people have been at the "telecom disruption" game for quite some time, beginning way back with the Carterfone decision and MCI's assault on the long distance calling market. We have had Internet service providers, competitive local exchange carriers, hosted service providers, application providers, instant messaging providers, portals, VoIP providers, cable companies, satellite providers and others attacking one part or another of the global telecom value chain.

Through it all, global communications service revenue has kept climbing. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any year when that didn't happen. Perhaps the issue is not disruption at all, but rather transformation. There will be new spaces created, and a rearrangement of older spaces. But nothing has stopped global revenue from climbing, year after year.

Of course, all the analysts could be wrong. Some cataclysm could yet await. But it sure doesn't appear to be something you would build your company on.