Nokia Media Terminal

A reader writes: "Nokia has announced an media terminal at IBC'2000 (International Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam) which seems to be a serious competitor for the home. It includes DVB receiver, x86 PC hardware running Linux & XFree. The hardware supports also recording the TV stream to the hard disk (TiVo functionality) and other cool stuff."

Comments

But who will sell the razor blades?

[SonOfFlubber]

I see a lot of comments comparing this to WebTV, and rightly so. Having worked there and now working at Nokia ( but it is a big company and it is the first time I have seen this 'appliance') I have to wonder how this is going to shake out.

Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market since they are providing the right piece of the puzzle - the sleek phone that everybody loves, and leaving all the messy customer relations to the mobile phone service providers. The question is whether that approach will work for the emerging television/web convergence market.

The pioneer of this market, WebTV decided a long time ago that the money to be made is in the subscription to services, and not in selling the hardware itself. There is a subsidy given to the licensees of the WebTV hardware, so what you pay for a WebTV box is really not what it costs to make. The hope is that the subsidy will be made up in future subscription revenues. Fine if every body signs up for the WebTV service, but what frequently happens is that WebTV box you bought for Great Uncle Elmer's Christmas present is still sitting in the box since he is unsure how to hook up all of those cables. No hook-up, no subscription revenue stream.

WebTV's approach is a lot like the razor manufacturer that gave away razors so that you would buy their replacement razor blades, the profit being in the selling of the blades. Nokia seems to think that they can profit from the selling of the shavers, and giving the profits from the replacement blades to someone else. Good luck.

I do have to commend Nokia for embracing Open Standards though. WebTV was acquired by M$ and a lot of changes were imposed that did not work out.
There are a lot of Linux and *nix friendly prople there; they were still using Linux for hardware bringup when I left there. When we were told that the client OS was going to be WinCE, the developers soon were in the habit of squinting and gritting their teeth while saying "wince" whenever they mentioned the OS's name. Nice thing about Open Systems is that if it doesn't do what you want it to do, you open up the source code and code it yourself. With a proprietary OS, even in the mother company, you submit your ECRs(Engineering Change Requests) and wait for it to work its way through the system and pray that it did not get too mangled after those dozen planning meetings before it finally gets assigned to someone to code.

Dual License...

[Christopher B. Brown]

That "little license thingy" does not prevent Nokia from having a chat with Netscape Communications Corporation (or AOL) and making other arrangements.

Note the following bit of the Netscape Public License:

V.2. Other Products.

Netscape may include Covered Code in products other than the Netscape's Branded Code which are released by Netscape during the two (2) years following the release date of the Original Code, without such additional products becoming subject to the terms of this License, and may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.

Note the phrase may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.

The result is that NCC, as original "owner" of the code base, has arranged that they may license the code to other people on other bases.

Nokia could get the code under the MPL; that would indeed require that they contribute back changes in source code form. If they get the code under some other licensing arrangement, the MPL obviously doesn't apply to them.