On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 06:21:46 PM Owen DeLong wrote:
Yes and no…
The barrier to Netflix becoming a consumer ISP is very high… Very very high. It costs a lot of money to deploy all that last mile infrastructure, assuming you can get permits, acquire rights-of-way, etc. to even do it.
Note I said "...certain major...". For sure, not all content owners have the might or time to become ISP's (whether for themselves or for their customers). But definitely, "certain major" ones do... and we are already seeing bits of that, here and there in the world... I can't predict the future, but if "certain major" content owners/networks find the barriers to entry surmountable, consolidation could close the loop (certainly, if money, skill and effort wasn't my problem, this would be one of my strategies). And if the industry were go this way, I wouldn't expect to see it coming. It would start small. Very small. No big bang announcement or launch... Mark.