The rumored Comcast deal to buy NBC Universal from GE is now reality, and Gizmodo explains why Comcast is buying NBC in 114 words:
Eventually, the current cable TV business is toast. There is NO WAY today’s teenagers are going to be shelling out $150 a month to get 500 channels they don’t watch when what they do watch is available for free over the Internet. Eventually, therefore, this whole “carriage fee” game is done—or at least radically changed.
But it’s going to take a while. At least 10 years.
And all those future adults who are going to be watching TV for free over the Internet in 10 years are still going to need Internet access (or else how are they going to watch?). And Comcast is in a great position to keep providing it.
Whether you like the deal or not, this is clearly a move to control the fee structure so that Comcast can minimize its own content expenses, and maximize what rivals pay for the content it owns. The changing landscape of content-infrastructure control is again at the fore, and this article in The New York Times shows just how nervous some media executives are about the shift to TV watching on the Web.
