TV broadcasters should favour, not fear the NBN

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 18 October 2009 08:27

Opinion and Analysis

Free to air broadcasters are concerned that delivery of video over the Internet via the NBN threatens their industry, but, according to Alcatel-Lucent, the NBN could have video capabilities beyond Internet TV and the broadcasters need to understand and embrace this potential.

Fifteen years ago MIT Futurist Nicholas Negroponte famously made the prediction that has come to bear his name, the Negroponte Switch. Wikipedia states it thus: "As more mobile devices need connections to the data network, and bandwidths required and deliverable in wired or fibre-optic systems grow, it becomes steadily less sensible to use wireless broadcast as a way of communicating with static installations. At some point the switch takes place, as the limited radio bandwidth is reallocated to data service to mobile equipment, and television and other media move to cable."

The massive growth in mobile data traffic (Cisco says the volume in 2013 will be 66 times greater than it was in 2008) is starting to put huge demands on spectrum, much of which is presently used for television broadcasting, and were it all allocated to mobile communications, would make the Negroponte switch largely complete.

Alcatel-Lucent's director, marketing - Asia Pacific, Geof Heydon, has a vision of this for Australia. "My 50 year out story is that we need an NBN and we don't need any other form of information delivery any more [to fixed locations]...The whole notion is that the NBN is the national information infrastructure and can one day replace very other version of national information infrastructure - and we have several of them. That to me is a much more exciting story than it just being faster Internet where people can argue that you don't need faster Internet anywhere."

Exciting it may be, but that vision is years from realisation, Heydon's more immediate concern is that the NBN presents a great opportunity to deliver free-to-air and pay TV in a way that is, from the users perspective, pretty much identical to the way they receive those services today: They'll plug their TV or set-top box into a co-ax socket on the wall that will be connected to the NBN's optical network termination unit instead of an antenna on the roof or an HFC cable.

But, he says, it's an opportunity that the broadcasters haven't grasped. "I think they perceive that the NBN translates into TV on the Internet, which is the natural enemy of the broadcaster."

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