Friday, August 16, 2013

The Beginning of the End




Cable and satellite TV providers are a bunch of dinosaurs. They've been ploddingly engorging themselves on the cash of their customers, oblivious to the giant, flaming meteor hurtling through space. That meteor is called Internet television...a concept pioneered by one of my former clients, Netflix.

Yesterday, the earth shifted on it's axis, making that meteor a whole lot closer than it ever has been before. Viacom inked a deal with Sony that will make popular channels like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central available for streaming on the PS4. Subscribers to Sony's unnamed service will have on-demand access to all of those channel's broadcast libraries.

Viacom's channels have only been available to cable and satellite users...they are the first to make them available on the Internet. Watch the other big players make a rush to get on board...Disney, Time Warner, etc. Pay television (cable and satellite) has shown "negative customer growth" for the first two quarters in 2013. Put in plain English, for the first time in history, pay TV is losing customers. That has never, ever happened before. I call it the writing on the wall.

On-demand, Internet television just got a whole lot closer yesterday. It is the truly the beginning of the end. And a note for all of my dinosaur friends out there...you can't hide from a meteor. But at least you'll have a future in fossils.