"People have been glum for the wrong reasons," says Bill Roberts, director of video product management at Adobe, the creative software publisher. "Never before has more content been captured or consumed. The barriers to content creation are low, but monetisation is changing for the first time in 50 years."
Monolithic, often state-backed broadcasters that control both production, and distribution through the transmission networks, are losing ground to more creative, more flexible and sometimes better-resourced satellite and cable channels. Increasingly, they are losing ground too, to internet-only, or "internet first" operations.
As Roberts points out, OTT video distributor Netflix has branched out into original content, creating the US series House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. And Netflix can more properly be called an internet-first service rather than purely an online service: the company recently announced its programming would be available to Virgin Media subscribers, via their set-top boxes.
