Q&A: Verizon's Terry Denson

Terry Denson, vice president of FiOS TV content strategy and acquisition for Verizon, spoke at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Orlando last week.

On 100 Mb/s fiber broadband: Are customers asking for 100 meg? No. Very few. But it raises the ante on the competitive landscape, so that customers believe that 100 Mb/s is what they need to have. All that time, we're able to offer interactive, high-definition services, which forces the competition to make a choice: Do they want to market to broadband customers or risk losing the video customer? A hundred meg ends up being a threshold because it's sexy. I don't think customer behavior is going to get there for several years. Some outliers will demand that and maybe more. But what really drives it isn't so much consumer demand. It's competitive marketing tactics.

On “King Content”: In our business, the distribution business, people talk about “content is king.” What do kings do? They tell you what to do. [In the future], the distributor displaces the content provider. The advertiser relies on the distributor because no one will report better metrics [on the advertising] than the distributor. We can tell the advertiser who tuned in and how often; we can give them specific measurements. And interactive services will allow the advertiser to be closer to the customer.

Who says content is king? Content providers.