Technology has always driven massive changes in the business of television. The movement from the Broadcast era to the Pay TV era was powered by the new technologies of cable and satellite. And the engine of the next major shift — from cable to OTT (over the top) — is powered by broadband video technology.
For the first ten years of the consumer web — circa 1994 to 2004 — internet video quality was laughable. Those of us who predicted that the Net would disrupt television were laughed at. How could a video the size of a postage stamp compete with ESPN? We queued up tiny videos to buffer on our desktops and waited, and waited for a 15-frame-per-second video that usually sputtered and died. As recently as 2006, video made up just 12% of internet traffic.