My prediction: 2011's Hottest New Over Top TV Company: The BBC

I wish I had gotten to go to NewTeeVee, the GigaOM conference taking place this week.  Sadly, I was in New York for another meeting.  A couple of days of total immersion in the land of the cord-cutters would have been a lot of fun.

Right now, the big fighting is about how to get content that was created for movie theaters and televisions on the interwebs.  There are no real technical obstacles to doing this.  It's all about the law, specifically copyright.  Content development is financed by selling the rights to that content.  Right now, the vast majority of that content is bought companies that make their core profits outside the Internet.  That won't always be true.

At the start of the cable era, cable television was just an antenna for broadcast stations to improve signal quality.  Then people starting make dedicated cable stations.  They spent their first 20 years buying reruns of network shows and foreign documentaries (thank you, BBC).  Eventually, they started financing their own TV shows.  And when that happened, they started to see their ratings take off.  Now the top rated cable shows routinely unseat broadcast television.

The same is going to happen on the web.  Custom web shows are in their infancy. They are still sporadic and of hugely varying quality.  There is no standard distribution mechanism.  All those things are slowly changing.  Big name stars are starting to appear in these shows and distribution services are growing stronger.  Creating a channel on Hulu, the XBOX, or Roku gives companies instant access to millions of viewers.  Some platforms like XBOX are true global platforms.

And that global nature could make this loop of the history reel very different.  Cable television companies, like their broadcast antecedents, were geographically limited.  They fit nicely into the TV licensing model on national and regional terms.  The web doesn't have to do that.  On the Internet, you can build a brand new TV channel and aggregate viewers from across the planet - creating a new generation of global media giants.

Content that is created for the Internet doesn't have to come with the huge web of licensing restrictions.  It can be created on day one for a truly global audience.  And as a result, new Internet giants could quickly eclipse traditional TV networks that are busy trying to optimize a national or regional model.  As was recently pointed out, the XBOX live network has more users than Comcast.

And the first of these new global mega media giants?  I think it might be the BBC.  Long an exporter of quality programming and the operator of a global satellite and radio network, the BBC's iPlayer is the UK's Hulu before Hulu.  Pushing the iPlayer out globally could allow that organization to aggregate the largest global audience of any broadcaster.

Stodgy New Media Revolutionary?  Photo from Redvers