This only further highlights the problem that network operators face. Not only are they being asked to capitalize increased traffic that their current all-you-can-eat pricing model doesn’t monetize, they’re subsidizing the cannibalization of their own TV revenue opportunity. That’s particularly true for the cable MSOs whose primary revenue stream has always been TV. The markets are getting close to breaking here.

Enterprises have wanted video indexing for some time and MPEG4 provides a metadata standard to store the information but there’s still the question of how it could be collected. Google may now have the answer, and if so there could be a new enterprise service coming out of the technology since the enterprise users list captioning and cross-linking as a major requirement for their own content and private content delivery networks (CDNs).

We still believe that TV Everywhere would benefit from some non-aligned authentication source, or from a system of federation run by the networks that contribute the content. Still, even in its current form, it offers the first chance at dodging the problem with ad sponsorship in online video—the “too-few-eyeballs-for-interest” problem. This makes streaming content an incremental viewing source to traditional TV.