Will broadband kill broadcasting by 2020?

At Merging Media 2012 in Vancouver, our panel moderator Ana Serrano from the Canadian Film Centre challenged a group of us to speculate on what the media and entertainment landscape will look like in 2020. While the best answer may be “who knows,” it can’t hurt to speculate. The landscape is almost certain to be radically different and all of us should be constantly rethinking our strategies if we want to be a part of that future. The following are some rough notes on my vision of 2020. Hopefully these views will not offend anyone. Any sour tone was due to an upset stomach caused either by the flu or thinking too hard about what the future holds.

1. Broadband will become, not simply the primary, but increasingly the only important distribution system for the consumption of content. Broadband will be portable with Wi-Fi allowing greater convergence and capacity management between wireless and fiber networks.
2. Audience engagement will be the only measure of success. While that is kind of obvious, it has not always been the case both in markets influenced by public policy and in markets where share is everything. The key word here is “engagement” representing the idea that the interactive nature of broadband networks allows audiences to participate and play a greater part in influencing creative choices. (Note the emphasis on the word audience as opposed to consumer).
3. Broadband will kill the broadcasting system as we know it. From the perspective of broadcasting the “threat” of over-the-top is very real. Broadband operates under very different rules than broadcasting yet increasingly the high value content delivered is becoming the same. And, broadband already has the capacity to deliver a whole lot more. When everything is over-the-top (OTT) the concept ceases to have any meaning.
4. Broadcasting over-the-air will disappear first, because the value of repurposing broadcast spectrum for mobile broadband applications will simply be too high to not repurpose. The billion dollar question to begin to address againis whether some of the monies derived from spectrum auctions should be use to drive the digital economy in the broadband adoption and digital production space. (Note all production will be digital and creative will include increasingly larger investments in software research and development).
5. The future for licensed broadcasters and cable distributors is bleak at best. The concept of a broadcast license will have no value online as OTT, Smart TVs and an open internet will have bypassed the protected system for content. While aggregation and curation, the role of the broadcaster and cable distributor today, will continue to be important Apple, Google and Amazon will be the dominant brands, not Bell Media or Shaw. That is because there are no restrictions of any import on such brands operating as aggregators online. Pundits in 2020 will debate the merits of the tsunami theory for broadcasting which posits that  such a massive wave is a threat even before it hits land and destroys everything in its path.
6. The Vertical Integration model being pursued today will collapse and carriers will retreat to running broadband networks and offering managed data services at much high rates of return than content can offer. Mergers and acquisitions in the carriage space will follow with carriers that don’t own wireless networks looking like easy prey. Parties like CMPA will advocate a public benefits model for these mergers 🙂
7. Physical media from books, newspapers, and DVDs will disappear, except for collectors, and the concept of ownership of content will be radically altered. Increasingly consumers will rent or lease their libraries rather than own them. Whether stealing your library is a form of ownership will remain a debatable point.
8. The CMF will not exist in 2020 perhaps killed by BDUs looking to cut costs as consumers cut the cord. Many incentive plans will be threatened in the intervening years as global economies implode.  However, the global significance and value of the content industry (magazines, books, newspapers, magazines, shows and films in the same format) will be critical in terms of jobs and export opportunities. Therefore,royalties on IP and balance of trade and industrial incentives like tax credits, SR and ED rules and grants will be used to stimulate indigenous production. The focus, however, will be industrial not cultural and markets will be global.
9.  The CBC as a public broadcaster will be dead but the CBC brand and public service mandate will survive in a broadband world and its mandate to promote Canadian voices will be enhanced. A broadband mandate will finally unshackle the Corporation from the costs of operating 20^th century transmission networks
10.  Success in the marketplace for content producers will be linked to their ability to control and exploit rights. In a broadband world the power to exploit such rights by creators will increase relative to the ability creators have in engaging audiences in the development of products. The bigger the online community you can deliver upfront, the greater the opportunity to exploit your rights.