Who will lead HDTV broadcasting?

If there’s one thing you can definitely say about the future in HDTV, it’s that as demand for HDTV services rises, so will the demand on bandwidth carriers.

Video content is so much more bandwidth intensive than normal internet services such as calling up webpages, and we’ve already seen warnings pitched to the UK telecom’s industry that the infrastructure may not be able to handle the demand.

While we’ve seen cable operators gobbling up infrastructure across the US and Europe for delivering triple-play broadband services, we’ve even ISP’s such as Google buying up dark fibre networks.

The game here is clear - if you can buy up the right kind of infrastructure, whether optic cable-based, or wireless, then you can deliver and supply high-bandwidth services such as HDTV - ahead of your competition.

So does this mean to say we’re going to see an explosion in the market for leased lines, providing high bandwidth broadband for businesses?

I’m not convinced many companies are thinking that far ahead, and instead are waiting for the telecom companies to fail them first, before they seek to invest in proprietary ownership of their own networks.

I think the real leaders of HDTV broadcasting will not be the service providers, or the contextual advertisers, or the telecom infrastructure providers - I think it’ll be the companies who can control all three.

That means a company that has its own network, can deliver its own content, and can supply its own advertising.

At present, there is only one company even in the running for this accolade - Google.

Over the years they’ve been building up a fibre network, and they are now in the process of buying up the wireless spectrum in the US.

They have already demonstrated their ability to aggregate content on the web, and now own video content outright via their purchase of YouTube.

And this week Google quietly announced that they were making available video advertising available to publishers.

Google are leading the field, and innovating in areas nobody has even considered.

The question is, when will everyone else catch on?

The strategy is clear - buy into not just HDTV and video download services, but also infrastructure and advertising. Only then will Google have any real competitor.

The tragedy for many businesses is, that when they finally realise that, it will already be too late.