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As serious as the cable industry is starting to get about the threat of the online video streaming company, there are still quite a few elements that need to be in place and improved upon before one market will entirely upset the other (if it does at all). Cord cutters are indeed appearing by the droves to leave cable TV service behind in favor of less expensive, more mobile services like Netflix and Aereo, but the internet-based companies necessarily have different kinds of problems from their cable competitors. Capacity is one of them.
Aereo’s service in New York City and Atlanta, Georgia ceased to accept new customers — two out of the 11 cities in which the streaming TV service is available. The company assigns individual antennae to users who stream TV over personal devices through a cloud-based recording. Despite having reopened service to those who were put in a wait list in New York, the swift stoppage of capacity for new users sends a signal about the reliability of service — something internet TV companies have struggled to maintain in the face of sudden outages and downtime.
Source: Citi Research via Business Insider
While running out of capacity can be seen, on one hand, as a sign of the company’s success, it’s never a good thing to have more customers than you can handle — and this is where the online streaming video and TV market has to improve. Capacity and outages have plagued companies that supply online video services — Amazon and Netflix for two — and accruing new business will have to coincide with web-based video streaming services gaining user trust in their capacity potential and continuity.
Capacity is actually a concern for the global internet community as a whole; analysts warn about the push against bandwidth levels as the web expands into more regions of the world, and more users sign on. IPv6 — the new protocol for web addressing — is being touted as one avenue out of this pending bandwidth crunching, but it has yet to receive wide adoption. Internet TV companies should make capacity a top priority in order to continue their meteoric growth patterns.
