FastWeb founder turns his attention to Internet television and video-on-demand
MILAN: In seven and a half years, Silvio Scaglia transformed FastWeb from a start-up with a plan to bring fiber-optic cables into houses from Milan to Palermo into a company with €1.3 billion in annual sales and 1.1 million clients.
Context & Ripple Effects
Silvio Scaglia spent seven and a half years proving the demand side of the broadband equation: FastWeb grew from a plan to run fiber into homes from Milan to Palermo into a €1.3 billion-revenue carrier with 1.1 million clients. With the access network built, he is now turning his attention to what runs over it — Internet television and video-on-demand.
The timing puts him in a crowded field. GigaOM profiled vPod.tv's bid to make video publishing mainstream nearly a year ago, and in January Ars Technica asked whether the Venice Project's peer-to-peer TV client would become net neutrality's calling card. What distinguishes Scaglia from those software-first entrants is that he comes at Internet TV from the wire side — he owns the kind of last-mile fiber the others have to lease.
First-order effects
- Scaglia's attention and capital shift from building out FastWeb's subscriber base toward Internet TV and video-on-demand, adding a founder with proven Italian broadband execution to the emerging online-video field alongside vPod.tv and the Venice Project.
- FastWeb's installed fiber footprint becomes a strategic asset for whatever video venture follows: a ready-made high-bandwidth path to more than a million households that software-only competitors cannot replicate.
Second-order effects
- Italian broadcasters and satellite pay-TV operators face a rival whose distribution costs fall as fiber penetration rises, pressuring their pricing for premium content rights.
- Content owners gain an additional bidder for on-demand rights, and peer-to-peer TV projects like the Venice Project get validation that deep-pocketed telecom figures see Internet-delivered video as a real market rather than a hobbyist niche.
Third-order effects
- If fiber-network builders keep moving up the stack into video distribution, the line between pipe and content owner blurs — sharpening the net neutrality questions already raised by the Venice Project debate, since the same companies carrying the traffic would also be selling what rides on it.
- The pattern points toward television being restructured around IP delivery, with advantage accruing to whoever controls both bandwidth and the customer relationship rather than to traditional broadcast gatekeepers.
The trend: Broadband infrastructure builders are moving up the stack from selling connectivity into distributing television itself, making Internet TV a contest between network owners and software-first entrants.