Democracy in Media Alex Rowland has an interesting post out on the difficulty that DirecTV may face going forward as they try to compete with their closed network distribution. Murdoch plans on delivering 20 million PVRs to DirecTV customers but the storage available for VOD may only be enough to cover the hits. And Alex is right, the hits are not enough. As people continue to taste rich and diverse content and niche content continues it’s collective growth DirecTV may not be in the best position going forward.
As Alex puts it, “Satellite has been kicking cable’s ass over the last decade. But that process is going to start going the other way. Unless satellite makes the enormous investment into turning their birds into fat pipe IP delivery stations, their attractiveness as a deliver platform for content is going to start fading fast. We’ve seen the heyday of satellite and that heyday was yesterday.”