The apparent race to develop ways of bringing home television via the high-speed Internet has a powerful ally in the nation’s capital: Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell.
"Almost every major phone company I'm aware of has an initiative underway to begin to try to plug the hole with partnerships with satellite-delivered video but what they're really working on is broadband-delivered IP television," Powell told reporters September 15. “That's a major component that's moving fast.”
And, Powell added that it isn’t clear which if any regulatory obligations would apply to television via the Internet.
Powell wasn’t exactly talking without knowledge. SBC Communications is reportedly trying to ward off rising competition from cable TV providers offering bundled packages that include high-speed Internet and telephone services, while Verizon Communications has appointed a new chief of entertainment content and marketing, Terry Danson, whose resume includes stints at Insight TV, MTV, and ABC.
Verizon’s senior vice president of broadband solutions Marilyn O’Connell said in a statement that Danson’s experience with those three operations would round out Verizon’s ability to compete in the broadband market.
Powell himself spoke approvingly of digital television recorder maker TiVo’s recent deal with Internet DVD rental service Netflix to bring movies home by way of broadband lines.
A previous FCC chairman, Reed Mundt, all but predicted that Internet television delivery would not necessarily be very far off, even though at the time he was still cautious enough about its actual prospects.
“The Internet could change virtually all assumptions about communication. Billing is for the most part indifferent to time and distance. And within only a couple of years there is a likelihood that Internet telephony, Internet radio, and Internet television will all be starting to take off,” Mundt said in a 1996 speech to the Washington Research Group’s then-third annual telecommunications workshop.
And while he said that, at that time and in that place, the Internet could be either “the much-celebrated Information Superhighway [or]… it might end up as the CB radio of the 1990s,” Mundt also said that if the Net succeeded in reaching its potential, it would reshape the commercial landscape – including that occupied by television.
