Editor's Letter: Oprah, CDNs and Data Priests
Editors are naturally disposed to the truism that content is king – or queen or president.
Those notions came to mind after listening to an episode of the CableFAX Show posted on our Cable360.net Web site in January. Colleagues Seth Arenstein and Michael Grebb were discussing the deal struck between Discovery Networks CEO David Zaslav and talk show host Oprah Winfrey to replace Discovery Health Channel with a new network named the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN.
"It’s the Oprah-fication of cable television," said Access Intelligence Cable Group Editorial Director Arenstein. "It’s the Oprah-fication of the world," Mike Grebb, CableFAX Daily executive editor countered.
Grebb went on to say that he fully expects to wake up one day and find the presidency dissolved, with Oprah Winfrey running the show and all Americans required to read a certain book each month.
While Grebb anticipates a change in the U.S. political regime, it remains for me to acknowledge that Communications Technology has succumbed to the influence of the Oprah multimedia phenomenon.
What we mean, technically speaking, is out attention to an application brokered by content distribution network (CDN) provider Limelight Networks, an example of the kind of video over the Internet, if not IPTV per se, that is reshaping consumer behavior and media distribution.
On the technology side, whether the cable industry’s high-speed data priests ordain and bless a CMTS bypass approach to video over the DOCSIS network is a matter that appears to be on the docket for the second half of 2008. The proposal has its opponents.
Meanwhile, we take the occasion to bow to rulers of content, both here and in the inaugural issue of CT’s IT Executive.
In those pages, we interview not only leading IT executives on the MSO side, but also several CIOs who play crucial jack-of-all-trade roles for leading network programmers. Had time permitted, we would have interviewed more.
Jonathan Tombes
Editor
[email protected]
