Not Good Enough, Netherlands Regulators Say

The largest Dutch cable operator Ziggo has said it now reaches one million digital homes and is claiming to be the number one digital provider in the country. The figures means around 30% of all 3.3 million homes served is now digital.

Not good enough, Netherlands regulators believe. Coming: new rules giving alternate video providers access rights to cable plant. One wonders: will anybody want to do so?

Consumer Satellite Broadband to Overtake Commercial Revenue

Northern Sky Research Now Projects that HughesNet and WildBlue each will have about 50 percent share of the consumer satellite broadband market by the end of 2008.

In fact, aggregate industry revenue from consumer broadband will surpass commercial revenues by about 2013.

YouTube: Complete Dominance of UGC

TubeMogul allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites.

So in a recent survey of over 200,000 clips and traffic over a 90 day period, YouTube blew every body else away.

The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092) than on the next eight video sites combined (2,092).

In principle such dominance should translate into meaningful positioning as an ad medium at some point, with one important caveat. Most user generated content is hard, if not impossible, to monetize in that way. Google executives themselves seem to think something on the order of four percent of YouTube's inventory is the primary inventory against which to sell advertising.

Good content is hard to create on a sustained basis.

Wireless Milestone in 2009

Some mile markers are more important than others. One big change in 2009 is that, for the first time, U.S. customers will spend more money on wireless services than on wired services, according to forecasts from the Telecommunications Industry Association.

What's in an 8 Gbyte iPhone?

Not many iPhone owners will dissect it with the specific intent of determining all the components and estimating the manufacturing cost. But that's what iSuppli Corp. does, and did.

iSuppli estimates the 8 Gbyte version's component and manufacturing costs are $174.33, exclusive of other costs such as software development, shipping and distribution, packaging and miscellaneous accessories included with each phone.

At $174.33, the cost of the new iPhone is markedly less than the $227 that iSuppli estimated for the first-generation, 8Gbyte 2G iPhone in June 2007.

“iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price—which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now—while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors," says Andrew Rassweiler, principal analyst at iSuppli.

Beyond the $174.33 bill of materials and manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G, Apple is spending an estimated $50 on intellectual property royalties for each unit shipped. With the 8Gbyte version retail-priced at $199, and the estimated $300 subsidy paid by AT&T to Apple for each unit, Apple is selling the product at a price of $499, and spending $224.33 to produce each one. This gives Apple a BOM, manufacturing and royalty margin of 55 percent for each 8Gbyte iPhone 3G unit sold.

Netherlands to Mandate Cable Network Access

At some point, as cable operators become more substantial providers of voice and data services, they will find they start to come under the regulatory frameworks long established for other telecom providers. Cable operators in The Netherlands appear to be at the front of that trend.

The Netherlands regulatory authority OPTA is proposing mandatory access rules for cable operators very similar to rules governing wholesale access that apply to KPN, for example, but in the video services area.

OPTA says the emergence of terrestrial digital TV, satellite and IPTV platforms have failed to bring about a greater choice for buyers of multichannel video. OPTA says the option of imposing a freeze on prices is not a sustainable solution that would lead to greater competition.

So now it wants to create a wholesale access regime for video services. The actual text is not yet available, so it is difficult to assess the extent of the rules. It does seem reasonable that what OPTA is after is something more than the ability to resell the existing cable services. More likely, the rules will allow competing video packagers access through the local cable network for alternate providers offering differentiated fare.

Why Open is Good for Mobile Service Providers

Recent efforts by Apple and Google to reshape the wireless industry ultimately will help mobile operators and handset vendors, In-Stat argues. The reason is simple: in a business environment where partners and third-party developers now are essential for rapid development of new applications, the more-open and standardized frameworks will allow for faster rates of innovation, even if carriers find the change a bit unsettling.

The current telco-centered approach to developing Internet mobile applications has created an ecosystem for application developers that is complex, fragmented, difficult to enter, and offers a high risk of failure, the high-tech market research firm says.

Look for early examples in the location-aware advertising area, especially as revenue sharing models come into play.