Via Ars Technica, “Slingbox getting no love from 3G cellular providers“:
“Sling Media wants you to be able to watch your TV on your mobile phone. Unfortunately, the cellular carriers aren’t biting.”
In an open “free” market, one would expect that this would not be a problem. However, each carrier had a de facto monopoly on access to their customers, and they do anything they can to protect that value.
This was similar to the way that AOL and other closed-network service providers behaved toward the Internet.
I feel for the carriers because I know what it’s like to be a service provider and want to mediate how outside groups market to one’s own users, especially from better funded marketing … it’s a hard dialectic to negotiate between open access and giving away customers.
That’s just another way in which companies create conditions that are as close to monoply power as they are able to create for themselves. There isn’t a bright line between monopolistic behaviour and common sense business choices, it seems.