AT&T, DirecTV, And The Future Of Video — readwrite.com

Over the weekend, AT&T struck a deal to buy DirecTV, the satellite pay-TV company, for $65 billion. At first blush, it seems like a bet on the past: Satellite broadcasting is a one-way service in a two-way era. It's only capable of providing what the industry calls "linear" programming—the traditional channel arrangement, broadcast according to a schedule, not according to a viewer’s whims. The future of video is on-demand, delivered over the Internet. The buzzword for this is “over the top”—in other words, delivered over infrastructure like a cable hookup that itself already delivers video. Most people believe that “over the top" services like Netflix and Hulu are the future of how we’ll consume video.

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