Bob Frankston on connectivity:

"The broadcast, cable, cellular and telephone industries are now all the same. They are all moving towards using the same Internet protocols the rest of us use. The differentiations are accidental and temporary. The only differences are in how they connect to their customer. For wired connections it doesn't really matter if they use fiber or copper. You can get the same servers on either though, for now, copper is not normally used for television though that was the original purpose of DSL. Cellular companies do deploy towers but they are connected using the same wired infrastructure. The TV broadcast industry is becoming irrelevant because their one-way delivery system cannot provide effective connectivity.
The commoditization of the transport is making it increasingly difficult to make money just because you own the pipe. The cable industries have a long history of owning the content and demanding a share in companies whose signals they deign to carry. As gatekeepers they have the ability to command a high fee for passage. The problem is that the scarcity is going away and with the shift to narrowcasting (as in Video on Demand) there is no scarcity."

B