Lately, Carl Howe has been getting cranky every time anyone (namely me) brings up the expression “Over The Top.” I wouldn’t say that it’s pure crankiness but more like qualified clarity. Carl likes clear definitions and telling stories from the beginning — in other words, he’s a consummate analyst who prefers for us to not use ambiguous shorthand such as over the top.
And the reason for this is simple. If you have a color — say, green — then the color blue falls equally in the categories “not green” as well as “not red” and so on and so forth. “Over the top” is another such slippery slope. By defining “over the top” businesses as any business that runs across a communications network but that isn’t monetized as a transaction on that network, we quickly reach the simple ideas such as online advertising, internet video, and iTunes as over-the-top businesses that somehow manage to escape monetization from the network itself — the Anywhere Network of yore.
But what about transactions? If I buy a car online, is that a transaction that goes over the top? Or is that just the nature of telecommunications?
At some point, we no longer expect that the network will participate in revenues. If we transact a billion-dollar deal over a combination of airplanes, hotels, conference rooms, rental cars, e-mail, mobile telephones and conference bridge lines — we clearly don’t count the deal as accruing to those companies involved in the delivery of the underlying services.
Most of our economy consists of over-the-top transactions. Which makes it ambiguous to define some digital media as being “over the top.” Someone is making money off of these activities, it’s just not the same set of companies each and every time.
There has to be a better way to talk about this, and as analysts, it’s our job to develop new terminology while speaking in language that makes sense to everyone. This means that we can’t invent new terms every day and expect everyone to step to our new rhythm.
But with that in mind, it’s time for us to get to work.