Across the industry, and even here at Yankee Group, we have attempted to use terminology to make a distinction between television that is distributed over traditional broadcast and cable infrastructures — and television that we get over the internet. Many people use the terms broadband and internet to describe video delivered over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

Of these terms, internet video is the most appropriate, because broadband can mean many things, and it doesn’t actually draw the distinction between internet, broadcast, cable, satellite and IPTV platforms — which are all broadband networks.

Also, every television signal out there is already broadband…inasmuch as it uses more than 3kHz of bandwidth or has a data rate greater than 64 kilobits per second. These are the bandwidth and data rate required to make a telephone call, and they form the baseline against which “broadband” is compared.

For comparison, the NTSC analog television signal in the US occupies 6MHz of bandwidth — or 2,000 times as much bandwidth as a telephone call. Cable television networks are broadband networks as well, and not long ago “broadband” specifically meant cable infrastructure.

So if I stepped out of a time capsule after a decade of solitude, I’d think that “broadband video” meant cable television.

I won’t lose much sleep at this point. Now that I have the time capsule experience behind me, I see that the misnomer is a good thing. Because it’s a sign that broadband connectivity is becoming ubiquitous enough that we no longer think about what the alternatives once were.

[Fade to black to the screeching sound of pairing modems]