Ike Elliott in his blog Telecosm wrote a post on whether or not content is the key for networks. Content: King or Not was posted on February 11th. I actually began to write this post shortly thereafter but am only completing it now. Not sure why. In any case, I encourage you to read the post and to subscribe to his blog.
Ike started this post with a Benjamin Franklin quote: “There is nothing so horrible in nature as to see a beautiful theory murdered by an ugly gang of facts.” Apropos is this quote to the topic, as most pundits are convinced value lies in content.
“Why are cable companies gonna win against telcos?” is the age-old question. (Okay, since CATV only been around for a couple decades, age-old might be an exaggeration.)
“Because the cable companies have content,” is the pundit’s answer. Content is the key. Networks are just a commodity.
Ike references Andrew Odlyzko’s paper “Content is Not King” and re-prints a few quotes that typify the pundit’s thoughts on the importance of content.
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Leo Hindery, who led Global Crossing for a time, described his strategy as: “…to turn this global Internet-based network into a mature content distributor. … ‘I don’t want to be anyone’s dumb pipes,’ says Hindery. ‘If all you do is racks and servers, that’s dumb. What we’re doing is melding the network and the content.’
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Norio Ohga, once CEO and chairman of Sony, said that ‘[w]ithout content, the network is nothing.
- Juan Villalonga, former chairman of the Spanish communications carrier Telefónica, said that: ‘[t]he key … is content. Without it, … phone companies risk becoming simple commodity pipelines.’
Is Content the King of the Network? To provide my answer, I need to travel back to my days at Ameritech, the baby bell of the Midwest.
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I love the Ben Franklin quote!
You gatta have both.
If you don’t have content, who would use your network? If your network doesn’t let you at the content, what use is the content?
There is a trick though. If a network lets you get at content in a way that is better for you, you’re more likely to use it.
I like one of the motto’s for the P2P-Next project (http://www.p2p-next.org/) in Europe: “Content is king, but distribution is King-Kong”