Excerpted with permission from Mark Cuban's "Blog Maverick" weblog:
I personally can’t think of anything stupider for the big broadcast networks to do than give their shows to Google for free. Why? Because they are finally getting BILLIONS of dollars in retransmission fees from their distributors.
This is new money. It is found money. It is money they are fighting for. Just ask Fox (NWS) and Cablevision (CVC) what they think of each other this week.
The idea that they would take and fight for money from their distributors, who generally are the same ISPs that Google TV delivers content over, and then offer the exact same shows for free through Google TV, or any aggregator that expects that content for free is probably one of the dumbest concepts ever.
Now if Google (GOOG) were to go to those networks and offer them money per month for every buyer of a Google enabled device or TV, that would be different. Then they would be a TV provider competing with the rest and they should take their money. Think Google will ever do that ? I don’t.
So giving the same content they not only charge their distributors for, but also charge their local affiliates for to Google for nothing or for a share of revenue? STUPID.
If Google sticks to their guns of not paying up front for content like Netflix (NFLX) does, they will have handed Netflix the entire streaming universe on a platter.
Did anyone else see the report that Netflix streaming consumes 20pct of download throughput during weekday primetime hours?
If this is true, it's one more reason to think that Netflix has won the streaming wars and those broadcast networks would be moronic to give their content online away for free...First of all, do you know the difference
