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This chapter deals with the economic foundation of online video clouds. The chapter analyzes the various options for business models, from advertising to subsidies to subscriptions, transactions, profit-sharing, licensing, various inter-industry charges, etc. It analyzes the effectiveness of the various approaches for different types of content, and the implementations by video cloud providers.

How will the various types of established companies in the media sector be affected by the change to 3rd generation online video? This chapter analyzes this question. Traditional TV organizations - over-the-air broadcasters, channel providers, and cable/satellite channel distributors and aggregators - will continue to decline in their capacity. Their parent companies will transition to online distribution, too, but with neither the audience sizes nor the advertising base they used to have. Nor are they likely to be technological or content innovation leaders. However, they have incumbency advantages of brand, size, and experience. Content producers will benefit from global demand, and premium next-generation products require significant resources. Creatives around the world will find a new toolset for entirely new forms of expression. Advertising agencies will decline. Telecom companies will benefit for a substantial rise in communications traffic but face substantial costs of upgrade, especially for wireless to keep up with capacity requirements. Cable companies will be subject to contradictory forces, for their roles as distribution networks and as channel aggregators. And tech companies will drive the pace of the markets.

This chapter builds on the technology capabilities and introduces a set of central players in the next generation of TV media, the video infrastructure platforms. Their operations include data centers, server farms, content delivery networks, and internet service providers. We discuss each of these submarkets, the various organizations active in them, the fundamental factors for their emergence, and the market structure they generate. Closely related are data operations, which have become a key part of its business. The nature of these data companies and their business models is discussed.

For online-based TV to function, many categories of companies and industry sectors need to interoperate with each other. They range from various hardware segments to infrastructure elements, storage and data centers, content producers and distributors, game providers, users and viewers and content contributors, advertisers, billing services, and many more. Within each sector, too, various providers need to interoperate with each other, even while they may be often rivals. And with digital operations increasingly global, interoperability must cross borders, too. The chapter analyzes the various options for interoperations: technical standardization; commercial deals; mandated access; antitrust breakup; and a market mechanism based on intermediaries with regulated access.

A central question for the emerging TV media environment is: What will the industry structure of these cloud video markets look like? If a few companies will dominate, then this will have major societal, business, and policy implications. This chapter analyzes several fundamental economic factors: economies of scale, scope, data operations, as well as network effects and distance effects. Video clouds also have major operational competitive advantages, including branding and marketing, privacy and security, and several bridging functions across technology standards, laws and regulations, and financial flows. We measure market power in the various submarkets. In combination, economies of scope, scale, and verticality create high winner-takes-all for infrastructure platforms and for content platforms. The main source of market power are those of vertical integration across the several of the distribution chain. The chapter analyzes these advantages, and the several types of vertical integration, centered, respectively, on specific companies in infrastructure, content, technology, data, and retailing. It identifies the factors that favor a domination by large and often global companies. In the final section of the chapter, we provide empirical findings for market concentration in the various submarkets of streaming video. Most likely to emerge is a two-tier structure, with an oligopoly of a few major “tentpole” video cloud companies integrating the many elements that are supplied by smaller specialists.