Google + Cable TV

Imminent death of the Internet predicted:

Cable operators are set to return to capital investments of a modest 10 to 12 percent of revenues, but they can be forced to spend much more due to outside pressures from increased Internet consumption and from rival telecoms operators that upgrade their broadband Internet packages to fiber optic super speeds.

"Then, the world becomes cloudy," Manby said.

Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV, By Lucas van Grinsven, European Telecoms Correspondent, Reuters, Wed Feb 7, 2007 6:56PM EST

Manby is "Charles Manby, Goldman Sachs' global co-head for the telecoms, media and technology industries." The article remarks that Google thinks the Internet at large doesn't scale for putting mainstream TV on it, and google offers to provide search capabilities for cable TV instead.

While that's a good idea, it seems to me to be a stopgap. Given that BitTorrent accounts for most of the traffic on the Internet already (by some measures), and that not all that is copies of TV and movies, I wonder if the peer to peer participatory nature of much of this traffic is being missed.

Even if we really are talking broadcast TV as the big bandwidth hog, I note that in Japan cable is not really competitive anymore for high speed broadband, because it's not as fast as 50Mbps aDSL or 100Mbps FTTH. So google + cable TV seems more like a stopgap than a solution. What we have here is a failure of imagination and audacity.

-jsq