This recent articleby Catherine New, posted on the Columbia Business School homepage, brought up some interesting insights as to the future of content on the internet.
Catherine details the growing possibility that online content providers will begin charging for their services. While many of these sites, such as Hulu.com, offer ad-supported content, where viewers must sit through various video advertisements around the featured content including prerolls and overlays, a new subscription model may be emerging. Because there are so many other sites where content can be accessed for free, like youtube.com, New wonders what "necessary value" these sites could offer in order to convince web surfers to pay for content that they are traditionally used to accessing for free.
This is related to the same issue that I previously posted about on the music industry - how can you convince people to pay for things that they feel that they should receive for free? The "necessary value" might be faster upload speeds, no advertisements, or higher quality content (at least when it comes to video). But is this something that customers are willing to pay for? And if so, how much?
I am skeptical that a paid content site will be able to gain traction - at least not yet. While the amount of content accessed via the web is large and growing fast, the broadband infrastructure needed support to support high quality video, which is much larger in size than the cheap-looking, compressed content on sites like youtube, is not yet in place. Secondly, users may want to "own" the content that they pay for much like paying for a DVD. Until internet video is on equal ground with cable TV, I doubt whether such a model will be successful.
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