With all this viewership moving from TVs and set tops to the Internet, it makes no sense that TimeWarner, Comcast, Adelphia, etc. etc. continue to be ok with start ups partnering with studios to go around their business. Worse, the users are sucking up bandwidth via their cable and fiber connections mostly pulling content from CDNs like Limelight, Akamai, ArcoStream, Edgecast, etc. etc.
If the cable companies just purchased the CDNs they would have a much more defensible part of the digital media chain. Heck, they should even buy some of the p2p networks and/or sling media. If they had the pipes plus the delivery outposts, they could make some really smokin services.
Instead of doing that they fight the p2p users and let folks like Move Networks, Joost and YouTube steal their users and their licensed content. As it stands now the cable companies are just the cheap source of video content we can all encode and move around the Interwebs. (and not watch commercials…)
C’mon man!
A lot of the CDNs private peer with the cable companies already so bandwidth isn’t a big issue.