Webcasting is Too Costly to Offer for Free

Columbia University Professor of Economics & Finance Eli Noam writes at FT.com:

“For electronic media, transmission technology is destiny: it defines cost, content and business models. The costs of TV distribution over the internet are more than 40 times greater than the distribution cost of a cable TV channel. This is because the individualisation of the internet requires significantly larger transmission resources than simultaneous broadcast-style transmission. Hence internet TV can function economically only as a premium medium.”

Noam, who’s also director of his university’s Institute for Tele-Information, thinks the following are the most likely streaming video applications:

1. Video on demand (VOD) delivery of films, at the very top of the distribution chain, right after movie theatre distribution and maybe even ahead.
2.Thin and specialised audiences that would not be served by synchronous TV.
3.Office viewing.
4. Interactive and multimedia applications that use the medium in ways that cannot be done over regular, one-way TV.

We believe that Noam is right. And, because Webcasting is limited neither by distance nor by national borders, his FT article also predicts American cultural hegemony over these four applications worldwide.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.