A top executive at movie streamer VUDU spent much of his TelcoTV show speech today pitching his services to telcos, but also addressed the emergence of usage caps, bandwidth metering and the likelihood of pay-extra Internet tiers.
Edward Lichty, VUDU’s executive vice president of strategy and corporate development, didn’t address these issues head-on, but neither did he avoid or downplay issues associated with telcos offering its pay-movie streaming/download service.
“It creates problems for those delivering the content,” Lichty said in his presentation. He added that VUDU’s rent/download-to-own movie destination only represents 10 percent of its Internet bandwidth use. That was likely in light of ongoing bandwidth metering trials by telcos and cablecos and monthly usage caps.
Add in technologies and products that portend to let ISPs provide pay-extra tiers for their access services, and it would seem a perfect storm is awaiting video streamers, be they broadcast network sites or pure-play destinations such as VUDU.
VUDU claimed it has planned ahead and doesn’t plan to get blown away.
Lichty said his company has created a “proprietary, managed P2P solution that is closed and extremely secure, with smartcard security.” He didn’t elaborate further on the system or approach.
“It’s very expensive to deliver services,” Lichty told telcos. “You have to find a way to deal with the costs. Encoding is not going to get you there.”
He also predicted a sunset in five or so years for DVDs, claiming Web content and video-on-demand services “are becoming the TV of the Internet generation.”
