As the broadband market races ahead with ever bigger investments in the future an obvious question begs attention: when will these investments begin to look like they’re going to pay off?

Right now, there’s no way to know, because the business foundation for conducting next-generation B2B broadband commerce has yet to take shape. Instead, we’re moving into a period of economic uncertainty where service providers’ propensity to invest on faith in the market’s basic plumbing can’t be taken for granted. If network capacities and functionalities don’t advance at the pace needed to generate timely returns for everyone who depends on broadband networks to deliver their goods, the pileup on the information highway could be massive.

Content providers are investing heavily in Web outlets for their programming, anticipating that added exposure beyond the TV will drive ad revenues higher. Service providers are pumping vast sums into everything from network capacity upgrades to big software development and applications projects to the customer premises equipment that will deliver a new television experience to consumers – all to be funded by new revenues from advanced advertising. And in the mobile world, billions are going into spectrum purchases and network expansion to support multimedia services, again with big hopes for advertising gains.

On paper, expectations that delivering content to consumers wherever they are whenever they want it will drive greater ad exposure and hence more dollars make perfect sense. Broadband IP-based technology provides the coherent cross-platform delivery mechanisms to make ubiquitous access to content a seamless, simple experience for everyone across all devices. And that same technology can ensure ad placements to fit every business model.

But is the experiment in ubiquitous media driving new revenue where it needs to go, especially if content owners have to begin footing a larger share of the infrastructure bill? It’s a question being asked on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere as well.

Addressing the recent TV of Tomorrow conclave in San Francisco, Jeff Richards, vice president of digital content services at CDN (content delivery network) supplier VeriSign, commented, “This is a very contentious topic in Europe. Citing a recent meeting in London with content suppliers and service providers, he said, “In our meeting ISPs were saying, ‘We’re under-provisioned to push the content you’re sending over our network, and we’re not positioned to double our capital spending.’” On the content side, Richards added, some of the providers were saying, “It’s not my problem.”

Richards noted that in the U.S. three of four TV broadcasters have launched TV over the Internet. “There’s no resolution of where revenues are going to come from to cover the costs” of video-driven capacity expansion, he said. Presently, Richards noted, YouTube is registering annual revenues close to $100 million, but the real costs of bandwidth might be twice that amount. “Off-loading the costs of delivering video puts huge strains on ISPs,” he said.

A similar point was made at the same conference by another player in the core arena with close business relations to broadcasters who use the Web. “Advertising isn’t making money [for video providers],” said Tony Yi, vice president of business development at Narrowstep, a supplier of Web publishing and CDN services for providers of high-value video. “We need tools for our professional broadcasters to make money, because they can’t make it on advertising today.”

If revenues going into content sites are well short of meeting real costs, it won’t be easy to induce content owners to pick up some of those costs, no matter how unfair the burden on service providers might be. And, as for the prospects for greater revenues from advertising on the service provider side, there’s still a long way to go.

Service providers are betting they can create an efficient ad placement mechanism that will bring addressable and other forms of advanced TV advertising into the mainstream and, with it, new dollars to cover infrastructure costs. But the biggest barrier to forging a national advanced TV advertising platform is the failure of content owners and service providers to agree on what these new models look like.

Content owners, Web players and service providers are in it together with many mutual interests conducive to deal making. Finding ways to cooperatively build and fairly share advertising revenues while allocating costs equitably is the only way to ensure that users will get what they want as fast as everyone betting on ad returns from the converged services bonanza expects.