As I’ve mentioned before, I am skeptical of “the Internet has changed everything!” analyses.  It’s great for the imagination, but it has a tendency not to provide much useful guidance.  I bring that up because of an exchange I saw between Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen on Twitter the other day.  Andrew Keen had asked what cable companies should be doing and Jeff Jarvis offered these ideas:

Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen turn the relationship 180˚, become a platform for customers’ desires: store, view, make, share stuff via us. Freedom v restriction

Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen encourage internet TV so as to break channels’ expensive hold on my neck….

Jeff Jarvis: @ajkeen break bundling & pass the losses onto networks so as to, again, break their expensive hold on me in favor of open content

Yes, and imagine if everything were free and we all had a pony.  Meanwhile, in reality, as Mark Cuban explained, “There is not a single CDN that can deliver 2 or more  video streams concurrently to more than 1mm simultaneous viewers.  Not one. Anywhere. There are probably 3, maybe 4, that on a perfect day might be able to deliver a single video stream to 500k simultaneous viewers. … Video distribution of any scale places you  at the mercy of just a very few CDNs…”

So, Jarvis thinks…

…cable providers should abandon the very effective, dedicated video delivery networks in favor of Internet TV?

…cable providers should abandon premium content in exchange for user-generated content?

That makes no sense.  Why would cable or content companies want to abandon a successful (and extremely popular) product so they can reproduce the Internet?  The Internet already exists.  It’s called the Internet.

If content providers want to distribute across the Internet…they can do that.  If consumers would prefer to watch user generated content….they can do that.  The fact that they still choose cable services suggests, perhaps, there’s real value to what cable provides.  As Todd Spangler has pointed out, “cable TV is astoundingly popular with consumers. It’s an economic success story. People love pay television. People complain about cable bills, but nobody likes paying their mortgage either.”

This is not an either/or choice.  We can have both the open Internet and premium services.  A world with only one of those options would be a much drearier place.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]