Net Neutrality is defined in Wikipedia by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu: "Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."
The focus of the hearing was on cable operator Comcast’s Internet filtering activities. Comcast had stalled uploads from peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as BitTorrent.
Comcast admitted to causing delays for BitTorrent across its networks. Comcast uses packet shaping, which is a way to manage traffic across its network. Comcast says that BitTorrent causes congestion on their network, and that is the reason they are filtering the traffic.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-for profit company that guards digital rights, said that Comcast behavior is discriminatory because the technique only focuses on file-sharing applications.
“The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Comcast’s,” said Representative Edward Markey at the hearing, who introduced a bill on net neutrality. Comcast is part of at least two consumer lawsuits over its filtering activities.
David Cohen, a Comcast vice president who spoke during the hearing, re-iterated that the company does not block traffic, but merely manages it.
"All of this is designed to have a minimal amount of impact on our users," he said. "To be absolutely clear, we do not block any websites or any protocols, including P2P.
MSNBC.com recently launched a newly designed page. They followed ABC.com and CBS.com. However, their results are much better than for other networks. In January they hit traffic record of 94 million UV’s, and served over 32 million streams in a week of February 9th. If you do the math, MSNBC earned around $800k from one week of video streaming, and around $2.3M for UV’s to their webpage. If you add the math, it amounts to around $5M for a month. I’ve assumed that they get $25 for 1000 UV’s or streams.
NAA published a press release calling 2007 a “banner year” for newspaper sites. WSJ blogger Carl Bailik called up Nielsen-Netratings to see if newspapers really had increased their audience share over the last year. He found out that the audience grew by 38%, but the online revenue told a different story. In 2007, newspapers grew by 26.9, reports Borrell Research, but in 2006, they grew by 44.1%. This drop means that newspapers and other traditional media companies do not quite understand how to monetize growing audience.
In addition, lots of newspapers and TV stations tell their stockholders that even though they are losing print/on-air subscribers they are gaining online users. The news that online revenue was down, while online users grew proves that it a myth that online users have equal value to a user of print or broadcast.
CNN is launching a standalone user-generated website, akin to YouTube. The look and feel of the website, as well as sharing capability will be similar to YouTube In August 2006, CNN launched an iReport initiative, and received close to 10,000 news-related photos and videos, Mediaweek reports. CNN used the UGV to cover last April's shooting on Virginia Tech campus. The site will be market regulated, with community of user deciding what is news. Last month CNN paid $750,000 to acquire the domain.
TVB predicts that 2008 promises to be a lucrative year for TV, with Total Spot TV revenue up by 9% -10% in comparison with 2007 revenues. Local Spot revenue will be up by 5% - 6%, and National Spot will be up by 14% -16%. TVB projected that in 2008 market would be shaped by political cycle. Local TV stations will be the winners, per Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment firm that analyzed media companies. Local TV will win because campaign strategists want to target their political ads to congressional districts. The precision to go down to district level can only be achieved with Local TV stations, per journalism.org.
Traditional news industry has been surrounded by the haze of doom and gloom. The newspaper circulation continues a decade long slide, television networks are struggling to retain the viewers; terrestrial radio now competes with satellite and internet streaming radio. Traditional news industry is wrestling with an enigma of what they should do to stay viable to consumers and profitable in the marketplace, but advertising dollars are quickly escaping.
But even while competitive forces from new media, DVRs, VOD, and YouTube continue to decrease the appeal of newspapers, radio and TV as an advertising medium, the traditional broadcast industry is still reaching over 90% of the American public.
The reach of traditional media hints that traditional players aren’t going away. However, to thrive in the years ahead all companies will need to pursue new on-air, print, and online strategies. This blog focuses on what traditional companies are doing to stay competitive in the online world of media consumption.
Question: With much confusion in the media industry, the question remains, where is the traditional industry going and what will happen in the future?
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