Of hares, tortoises and convergence

It was an interesting article written by Alex Cameron "IPTV/VoD The Hare & The Tortoise", one his statements being a bit parochial - "The average consumer is way ahead of any industry professional out there today." It is agreeable that there is a significant group of consumers that are way ahead of the industry professionals - basically the technophiles - but the fact that most people have an iPod, doesn't mean that the average consumer could have developed it nor is skilled at doing more than playing their songs in sequence (some "average" users I've found can't do more than upload songs and play them in sequence).

In the convergent word, the questions are out, and have been out for quite a few years now - is the long tail going to be 'the next big thing' ? depends on who is the "Apple" that designs it and makes it go to the masses easily.
Is user generated content the next big thing ? depends on the YouTube that makes it appealing - and when Enteprise 2.0 finds out that a lot of their personnel spend their time downloading free parodial clips from the net and blocks the content to save in its operational costs, see how much of the YouTube model really works out of the boring office hours !
Is the problem the middleman ? I doubt it is ... one middleman in audio yesterday (Sony/EMI/etc) was replaced by another one (iTunes & Apple), why ? because the "middle man" intelligence to get the content (not only mainstream, think about long tail and targetted advertising)
Is the problem the network ? Not necessary - it depends on who is delivering the technology, a satellite for broadcast with wireline/wireless for VoD works OK, but so does Fiber as the bandwidth increases significantly from the ADSL/ADSL2+/CMTS world ... both solutions would work in the long term. Are they economically viable ? Well ... let's go back and see how much had to be written off by the NTL enterprise ... digging is not cheap, digging doesn't give you instant access to a significant amount of the population to make the ROI visibile in a reasonable time ... with a Satellite-wireless/wireline combo you can appeal to a mass market faster (with the obvious initial cost) with simple packages, from 'entry' SD to 'full' HD/VOD/Internet ... the obvious disadvantage ? well, satellites are single points of failure, you need to launch more than one and it will cost you more money.

So are all the questions answered ? Not really, the market can easily shift and competing (and economically viable) options can co-exist?

For the moral of this story, read "The Doe and the Lion".