As Streaming Grows, Will Physical Media Be Important, or Not?

"Ultimately, it will be impossible for physical disc kiosks to compete with the in-home or in-store download-to-rent business model,” says Keith Nissen of In-Stat.

Broadly stated, it is hard to argue with the general thrust of the prediction.

In-Stat notes that the home-video market will shrink $4.6 billion from 2009 to 2014, which is consistent with other estimates of the revenue providers will make renting and selling DVDs, with the most-significant changes coming from DVD sales.

Meanwhile, revenue from broadband streaming and downloading is projected to climb by $4 billion over that same period.

One suspects most observers would be comfortable with changes of about that magnitude.

But it also is possible that the changes will be more complex than a simple substitution of streaming for DVD rental, for example. One might argue that Netflix is cannibalizing DVD sales; that Netflix is competing with HBO, Showtime and Starz; that gaming and web-based entertainment is competing with DVD rentals and sales or that users are shifting discretionary entertainment spending to devices, and away from movie rentals.

All of those trends likely are contributing. One might further hypothesize that Netflix and kiosk-based rental services such as Redbox also have changed consumer expectations about the value and price of a movie event, compared to buying or renting a DVD from a retail outlet.

"One dollar for one night" might simply have replaced "five dollars for one week" as the standard of value. To be sure, $6 for a pay-per-view viewing also seems to be a more-accepted part of the market.

Still, to a greater extent that we might believe, changes in consumer expectations about the "proper" price to view a movie in a catalog have changed. The important shift might be less a matter of technology or even convenience and more a matter of changing evaluations of "value."

With the caveat that the big change seems to be less appetite for "owning" movies, there probably is quite a lot more scope for distributing new releases and recent releases in a variety of formats, and physical media could well a role, and a substantial role, for quite some time.

That would especially be true if studios reevaluate the deals they are willing to entertain, with direct impact on the retail prices possible using any distribution format.

The installed base of devices able to easily display content on standard TV screens; possible emergence of new physical media methods and broadband pricing policies also will play important and key roles.

The easy call is "streaming wins." The harder call is determining where streaming wins, and where physical media still competes. Price always matters in the consumer market, and we are far from having exhausted all the ways value and price can be matched in the movie market.

Streaming As Kiosk Killer? Not So Fast | paidContent

Is IP Telephony Mostly About Non-Voice Apps?

One might wonder whether applications other than voice now are driving IP telephony interest by business customers, and whether integrating various communication modes across mobile and fixed networks might be the most-important unified communications feature.

Nearly 40 percent of companies surveyed Frost & Sullivan report they already have deployed IP telephony. Of those that have, instant messaging and videoconferencing get the highest usage scores, with just over 50 percent of companies saying employees use each of those features.

Approximately 50 percent of respondents use mobile extensions. Of those, 70 percent use them extensively across company, and use of mobile extensions are expected to grow over the next 12 months.

About 30 percent of 200 companies surveyed by Frost & Sullivan say they have already deployed unified communications; 28% are in process; four percent are planning or evaluating; and 18 percent have no plans to adopt, says Melanie Turek, Frost and Sullivan industry director.

Roughly 60 percent of respondents say audio, video, web and telepresence conferencing are "very" important to the organization.

Also, Two thirds of companies say they use social media "extensively" for business purposes. Traditionally, social media are not UC or IP telephony core features, and the significant use of such tools illustrates how the enterprise communications function has changed over the last decade.

read more here

Social Software for Meetings: Wellknown.as

Event social networking is one of those ideas that makes intuitive sense, as people go to events and meetings to meet people and learn things. I think many of us have not used such platforms so much in the past because of the overhead of notifying people that a tool is available, and then getting the issue of access (client distribution or just access) on mobile devices, with all that implies for ease of use.

Wellknown.as seems to be offering an application that answers the ease of use, notification and client issues. It works on iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerry. That would seem to cover the vast majority of users who go to the meetings I find I'm at. It is integrated with Eventbrite, so if you are using Eventbrite for ticketing it is pretty easy to set up.

People might prefer Twitter or other tools, of course. From an attendee standpoint, what's your preferred social mode?

4G Has Been a Technical Issue; Now it Becomes a Business Issue

Telco Opportunities in Cloud Computing

How Telcos Can Live with Google

Content, Distributor Relationships to Change in 2011

In the long debate over whether content, distribution or something else is "king" of the video ecosystem, it has remained clear that relative revenue shares within the ecosystem have been changing.

Those relationships will get another test in 2011 as Netflix and a few media companies renegotiate their carriage agreements. Netflix has to renegotiate its agreements with and Starz, which allows Netflix access to Sony and Disney movies.

The original deal from 2008, in which Netflix paid an estimated $25 million annually, is seen by some in the content business as a mistake, given the discrepancy between what cable, telco and satellite companies pay Starz for carriage rights. That means Netflix content acquisition costs are set to rise.

Over the long term, Netflix viability as a provider of streaming content will be shaped by those costs.

Time Warner Takes a Shot at Netflix - NYTimes.com