It was never going to be an either-or scenario says Danny Peled, GooMe’s CEO,  in his recent interview to the Israeli business daily “Globes”.
For the sizable portion of the population willing to pay a premium for new services and legal content, cable will always be there and probably remain the market preference for years to come. The point here is that any of the new retail options don’t represent the destruction of the existing cable business so much as the opportunity to diversify that model experiment with varying content offerings from TV, VOD, WEB and Home Media.
You can view the  interview here (Hebrew).

The annual Rosh Pina Festival , the most important  media conference in Israel, was held last weekend for the 10th consecutive year bringing together  all the major players in the  industry, and offering great panels and presentations.

This year festival seemed to be all about Over The Top and how the industry is going towards complete open environments (oh, and also a bit about the iPhone phenomena). From every angle and every panel  I could just see so clearly how the barriers for providing an OTT TV service are on the way to being solved and how OTT will eventually become the mainstream.

The consumers are obviously ready for it:

• Online video viewing is constantly increasing  – November 2009 was a  record month for video views, with nearly 28 billion videos watched
• Consumers want to be able to access Web services through their TV
• Viewers demand special interest content on top of familiar programs

We now see how the entire industry is  also shifting towards the OTT platform:

• Increasing amount of premium on-line content (Amazon, Netflix, Hulu)
• Adding internet connections to TV sets
• Increasing bandwidth to the home
• DTT platforms provide access to approximately 25% of the channels as compared to 75% for private channels
• Personalization & On Demand solutions for easy browsing through thousands of channels and unlimited content

Danny, GooMe’s CEO was a guest speaker at the festival demonstrating GooMe’s OTT platform called M Cube. As Danny concluded “Now, everyone can have the option to deliver OTT TV”.  A  wake-up call for the pay-TV and cable providers? Danny’s enlightening key note was featured on the ‘TheMarker’ , you can view the article here (Hebrew).