To those attending the Telecommunication Conference 2011; The Convergence of Telecom, TV and Entertainment on Friday 11 November 2011 at Hilton Park Hotel in Nicosia: I’m afraid the organizers required I spend a weekend away from my family to meet their budget needs.  I’m a strong supporter of small businesses, as that’s where disruptive innovations come from, so I was happy to support this conference, but not to the point of taking yet another weekend away from my family to meet their budget needs for the want of a few hundred Euro.

I was going to cover:

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of Over The Top Services: Quantifying the Threats and Opportunities

“The internet’s gone video!” is the cry from the Bay Area, as customers increasingly view video services from providers and devices other than their broadcaster and PayTV provider. Over 30% of US population is now using Netflix; in the UK BBC iPlayer is approaching a similar market penetration. Video dominates the traffic transported over the internet and operators’ networks; it’s over 50% of traffic on some networks. Unfortunately for most operators this traffic is viewed as a cost not as revenue. And that’s not the worst of it; video traffic is expected to grow 7 fold globally by 2015.

Network operators are taking a number of approaches to this problem, launching their own over the top services such as Telecom Italia’s CuboVision; offering multi-screen TV or TV Everywhere; introducing rate and data caps; arguing with the regulators over what net neutrality means, trying to get the OTT service providers to pay for delivering their content, etc. But we’re missing an important actor in this drama, the hand of the content owners that enable Netflix and Hulu to disrupt the market with favorable content distribution rights.