"I don't think that the payback is as clear as people are claiming," he told me at his Rome headquarters last week. He insisted instead that a telecoms giant (Telecom Italia is a top 10 company in one of the world's top 10 economies) should focus on what it knows best, distribution through its networks, but also take "calculated, careful steps" to pick and choose the best content for its customer base.



That selection process is as crucial as ever for media giants — like Disney — that make billion-dollar bets on movie franchises and TV shows. As the company prepares to roll out its own streaming service next year, and perhaps to take majority control of Hulu once the Fox acquisition closes, it is gearing up to face ever tougher competition from Amazon and Netflix.



I appreciate that this fact is far from a fresh insight. But one analyst I spoke to recently highlighted an intriguing possibility. He talked about a future inflection point of peak "eyeball hours" — the greatest number of hours in a day that the average person can physically find time to watch content on a screen, multiplied by the total population worldwide with access to such screens. Once we reach that moment, he explained, every single content provider and distributor would be caught in a deathmatch for survival, in a marketplace that will no longer continue to expand in lock-step with technological innovation and internet penetration. It is conceivable that one day everyone on Earth could have access to an affordable viewing device, fast mobile internet and a reliable power source. Then in the absence of growing frontier markets (Netflix launches new original content for South Sudan! Broadband fibre line reaches McMurdo Station in Antarctica! Facebook user numbers surge in Ecuador's Amazonian rainforest!) Content providers and distributors would be forced to defend their margins as they fight for slices of a global pie that is no longer getting bigger. Some corporate leaders clearly think it's better to begin with a big slice.



Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC and CNBC.com.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.