I heard Brent speak - he talked about any country they look at needing to have three things:
1: Demand 2: Good data limits or unlimited data 3: Local content rights.
We've got 1 sewn up. He told me that's not always the case - quite often they find a market is well served by multiple providers already and the only way in is via a price war which they're not keen on. No problem with that here.
Number 2 is trickier but as you say, local CDN distributing content locally makes sense. Incidentally, the speech was sponsored by Kordia which owns Orcon which owns a vastly under-used CDN platform.
However he did say on one slide that the average US Netflix customer will be downloading 1TB/month next year. Local transit costs are cheaper than international but short of basing it at a peering exchange there's still going to be a cost (anyone know what we're talking about there money wise?).
Number 3 is clearly the sticking point - Sky TV has a lot of TV rights, most of the sport and now has a deal with TVNZ. It also has no need to offer video on demand as the govt won't look at regulating the industry at all and sees no problem there. It also has a long term lease on rights on the satellite so again, no need to look at the UFB as delivery model any time soon.
I wouldn't rule out local pressure on Netflix to come over however. I don't mean from users, I mean from the telcos who are desperate to be able to offer video on demand and can't get anything up and running legally.
Sky is in a monopoly position. They have an opportunity to pay over the odds for content just to bankrupt any competitor.
Same concept as Google bidding on the 4g spectrum in the US a couple of years ago.
I think this is the dominant issue, as the bandwidth issue is relatively disappearing (granted not fast enough for most of us).
It will be interesting to see if the comcom get involved (there have been rumors they might). I can only see them being concerned with sports, this is the biggest issue for regulators overseas, and Sky seems to be staving off concerns by using delayed broadcasts on Prime.
I would love for our sports organizations to run their own online broadcasts, ala MLB and NBA. Presumably the costs of this are dropping (consumerisation of technology etc).
I would imagine they'll do something similar here eventually. Probably not that quickly though, as there isn't as much competitive pressure here for them to do so?
jonherries: I would love for our sports organizations to run their own online broadcasts, ala MLB and NBA. Presumably the costs of this are dropping (consumerisation of technology etc).
Maybe I am being too hopeful.
Jon
while it might be cheaper to DIY online broadcasts, the sports organisations would end up missing out on revenue paid for the TV rights... so why would they want to run it themselves. MLB and NBA are big enough to be able to run their own games and sell advertising spots which would bring in a decent return.
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