Content Delivery Networks

4Publishing

“Publishing” is a broad term. In the print world we think of a publisher as someone who commissions writers and takes a risk on the print run. When we try to translate that model to traditional broadcast, we find a split between production company and broadcaster. Together, the production company (which takes the risk on the creation of the master content) and the broadcaster (which takes the risk in creating the content distribution infrastructure) could be argued to work together to “publish” the content, but nuances between the models are so abundant that I think – should I have made the same statement before a combined group of publishers, producers, and broadcasters – I would be beating a hasty retreat by now!

To further complicate things, adding “online publisher” to the discussion opens up more parallels and more nuances once again, since barely any capital investment is required to create a “print run” or a cloud‐based “distribution platform.” Indeed most online publishing models ensure that their costs are simply a function within their operating expense, de‐risking the business significantly.

Obviously that lowered risk in turn makes the online publishing space a reasonably competitive space, so over time hairs will be split over increasingly irrelevant (in any practical terms) but differentiating technical capabilities.

So what we have found over the 20 years of the emergence of online publishing is intense commoditization on the infrastructure technologies ...