Videos from the Web 2.0 Summit 09 (Day1)

At the center of both the destruction and creation of new business models is the World Wide Web. At the Web 2.0 Summit, held in San Francisco October 20-22, some of the leading companies share their views on business models and what is next on the horizon. The Summit is arranged by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, and moderated by John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly.

Videos from Day 2

Videos from Day 3

Opening Welcome Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing)


A Conversation with Brian Roberts Brian Roberts (Comcast Corporation), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing)


HOB: Economy + Internet Trends Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley)

HOB: A Call to Arms for Technological Literacy Steve Schneider (WestEd)

Presentation (ppt): A Call to Arms for Technological Literacy

HOB: Do the Economics of Bandwidth Scale? Kevin Johnson (Juniper Networks)

Presentation (pptx): Do the Economics of Bandwidth Scale

HOB: The Case for Antitrust Carl Shapiro (U.S. Department of Justice)


HOB: An Open Platform For Payment Scott Thompson (PayPal, Inc.)

Presentation (ppt): An Open Platform For Payment

HOB: Casually Serving 130 Million with Games Mark Pincus (Zynga)

Presentation (ppt): Casually Serving 130 Million with Games

HOB: A Conversational Approach to Search Mark Drummond (Wowd, Inc.)

Presentation (pdf): A Conversational Approach to Search

A Conversation with Evan Williams (Twitter, Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing)


A Conversation with Jeff Immelt (GE)

Relating videos:

• Videos from the Web 2.0 Summit 09 (Day2)
• Videos from the Web 2.0 Summit 09 (Day3)
• Videos from New Business Models For News Summit 2008
• IMVU, Tripit, Photobucket, Commission Junction, and ShoeMoney Media in a very interesting panel about online Revenue Models
• Ning, Pandora, YouSendit, Pinger & Ngcomo in an extensive panel discussion about different Business Models
• Zong, Super Rewards, PayPal and GMG Entertainment in an interesting panel on Monetization Infrastructure for Social Games
• The Future of Content & Telecoms: Flat Rate Content Bundles and Social Media (Gerd Leonhard @ eComm 2009)
• TimesOpen: Tim O'Reilly Keynote Video

THE WILD AND WOOLLY WORLD OF CABLE, SATELLITE AND BROADBAND MARKETING

Increasing competition among cable, satellite, and broadband suppliers, combined with slower growth in consumer uptake because the industries have reached maturity, is leading to aggressive marketing efforts to wrestle market share from other companies.

If the leading companies followed classic marketing strategies, they would be offering consumers better arrays of networks and services, better customer service, and/or better prices in efforts to attract more customers.

Instead, many of the largest competitors have been engaging in acts that harm customers and consumers by using illegal and deceptive marketing practices and strategies designed to unwittingly wring greater revenue from their customers. Although the companies apparently think there are benefits in behaving badly, their marketing practices are increasingly getting them into trouble.

Aggressive telemarketing—which has always offended consumers—has landed a number of leading firms in hot water. Comcast and Direct TV have just admitted charges and are paying fines to the Federal Trade Commission for violating telemarketing rules by ignoring the federal do-not-call list. The FTC has also filed a suit against Dish Networks for similar violations.

Companies tend to advertise heavily when competition is high and ads for cable, satellite, and broadband services have helped the revenues of thousands of television stations, newspapers, and magazines across the U.S. Unfortunately, the veracity of advertising claims in cable, satellite, and broadband services has been widely questioned by consumer groups, governments, and other competitors. In recent months Bright House Networks filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission about the practices of AT&T, the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureau chastised Cablevision for advertising claims after complaints from Verizon, and Verizon itself has been sued for misleading claims by NJ Division of Consumer Affairs.

The industry also sought to market different levels of broadband Internet services to customers and planned to charge different rates for users—a strategy that would allow them to advertise a low price even when many customers would have to pay a higher price based on usage. Plans by Time Warner, Comcast, Frontier Communications and other firms to offer tiered service plans have now been dropped after complaints by customers and legislators.

Cable and satellite firms have traditionally been mavericks and rogues in the media industries and many Internet service firms followed their example. Even though the industries have matured and the number of players has been significantly reduced through mergers and acquisitions, the wild and woolly world they created is still evident in their marketing practices.

We can only hope they will learn to become good corporate citizens—or at least firms concerned about their own reputations.

COMCAST FORGETS THE BUSINESS IT IS IN

Sometimes companies forget what businesses they are in and Comcast seems to be the latest media and communication company to do so.

The problem evidenced in the dispute between the FCC and Comcast over its traffic management policies blocking or slowing BitTorret and other files in violation of FCC network neutrality rules requiring open access. Without addressing whether regulators or Comcast are right in the dispute, it is clear from the company’s response that it has lost sight of it core business.

Comcast argues it was engaging in reasonable business practices by limiting the flow of BitTorrent files (often used to download large video, audio, and text files) because they push up the flow of traffic and slow the system. In Comcast’s view, the system and its integrity are its raison d’etre and represent the business it is in. It is easy to understand why the company and its executives might think so.

Comcast spends the majority of its effort and personnel creating and maintaining its system and infrastructure, tackling issues of system capacity and capabilities, and working to ensure system reliability and speed. It provides video, Internet, and voice services via 575,000 miles of wires serving 15 million cable subscribers, 13 million Internet users, and 4 million digital home providers. In the last three years Comcast has spent $13.6 billion in capital expenditures on the system.

Unfortunately, the extraordinary network it operates and maintains—the lines, switches, head-ins, Internet and telephone connections—are not the business of Comcast, they are just the requirements for conducting the business. Its real business is providing customers access to the video, audio, text, and voice communications they desire.

Its central purpose is serving the needs of the end users, including those who want to acquire capacity-eating BitTorrent files. It is the purpose that its executives seem to have forgotten when they decided their network management practices were more important than the wishes and desires of their customers. Their absent mindedness is not completely surprising, however, because the company has long had one of the poorest records of customer service among media firms. Lots of problems develop rapidly if you think it would be a good business if you just didn't have to deal with bothersome customers.