Sticking points
With all the uncertainty, several points of contention are recurrent. One is the simple definition of broadcasting over the Internet. Many people are concerned that Webcasting is the equivalent of international broadcast. As a result, matters get sticky when a broadcaster owns rights to domestic distribution and wants to put that material on the Internet.
For example, RealNetworks earlier this year paid US$20 million for exclusive Internet audio broadcast rights for Major League Baseball (MLB) games, essentially stripping the right of local radio stations and others that have non-Internet broadcast rights to the same games.
One illustration of this conflict is ongoing in a dispute between the Voice Actors Union, advertising agencies and radio stations.
Members of the union charge that because their ads have been played over Internet airwaves, they should be paid nearly three times their usual offline broadcast rate, since the Internet offers international distribution.
The radio stations are balking, however.
"We think that's ridiculous, and we're pursuing ways to strip the ads," said Kevin Mayer, CEO for the Internet unit of radio conglomerate Clear Channel. He said his company, which yanked its stations from the Net partly because of this issue, will start to broadcast radio online again "in the not-so-distant future."
Another issue for radio broadcasters enters when syndicated content is streamed. The argument goes that if a station buys syndicated material from a network provider such as ABC News and broadcasts that content over the Internet, it cheapens the value of the material in other markets, making it difficult for the provider to resell it.
The dispute boils down to "what the definition of broadcast is in and of itself," said Jupiter Media Metrix's Mooradian. "Can Webcasting be defined technically as broadcasting?"
This competition is pushing content holders to secure more rights for themselves in the medium, exemplified by deals being brokered by RealNetworks with professional sports leagues.
"The rights holders are trying to get the maximum value for those rights," Antil said. For example, the National Basketball Association has sold the rights to the NBA playoffs to NBC for television but has sold the rights for radio to EPN.
ESPN.com has deals with MLB and the NBA, among others, to stream game highlights via the Web. Although it pays for the rights to broadcast such sporting events on television, many of those rights preclude the Internet.
"Entities like the broadcast networks were used to control the online rights as well," Mooradian said. "But the content owners are starting to parse out those rights as well and (are) demanding additional value from those rights."
Analysts say the rights to distribute content go back long before the Net arrived, having cropped up repeatedly with the introduction of most new mediums. What's different about the Internet is its unprecedented reach and flexibility, which has made it the first genuine melting pot for all types of media--music, text, video and audio.
"In the past with new media, it's been easy to keep track of who had which rights. All of these various rights holders can now all pile into the same media," Forrester Research's Bernoff said. "Before the Internet, CNN and The New York Times weren't in competition. Now they are."
News.com's Corey Grice contributed to this report.
