Cable industry leaders aired their grievances at the recent Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' Emerging Technologies conference (or the SCTE ET, for short). Much of the talk reportedly rehashed ongoing concerns of telcos winning the triple-play war by using IPTV to lure existing cable customers away. However, many speakers argued that telcos are no longer their biggest threat--it's now video over IP enablers Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Apple. The good people behind the SCTE ET even treated attendees to a "chilling" and "humorous" video that depicted Google taking over the entire media business in the years ahead.
Cable MSOs are used to competing with the likes of DirecTV and EchoStar, but the SCTE ET saw the cable industry's first public displays of openly "fretting" about new lines of competition. In fact, the writer of the Cable Digital News article linked to below seems to have gone out of his way for fear-mongering word choices, among them: "worry," "fret," "concern," "threaten," "battle," "hurt," and, yes, even "kill" is in there. The story ends with some comfort: "We're definitely not toast."
For more on the cable industry's latest fears:
- check out this article from Cable Digital News