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Where Will Broadband's Killer App Come From?
tripletwentie asks: "Here's an interesting story from ZDnet that talks about the success and the pitfalls of the world adopting broadband, and how regular Joes like us will change the world the way we know it today. Is it really the idea that you can get any piece of music for free that will attract people to buying broadband or maybe the idea of streaming movies straight from your computer to your flat screen tv? Sure, broadband in the house will become a utility like having electricity in the house, but what will get us there? I would love to hear the thoughts and ideas of the programming world." While the article is breathy in anticipation of the promise of broadband, I think its an intersting thing to note that media companies are also in an interesting position, in the fact that certain media companies are already in control of the technology behind broadband itself. Can anyone say "potential conflicts of interest"?
If I could watch my choice of TV shows -- while not paying a monthly fee (like cable) -- and pay only for those, I'd be in heaven. Why should I need to shell out $45/month if I only watch The Screensavers and the X-Files? I'd even accept a commercial or two mixed in there.
But there's so much crap on TV, that it ain't worth paying for (so I don't).
Method of processing duck feet
I think we have already seen the killer app, Napster and its sucessor Gnutella have provided broadband users the ability to really use their bandwidth. The majority of the content being provided on these kinds of services are from Cable and DSL subscribers, who are capable of uploading to multiple broadband and 56k subscribers at reasonable speeds. When it comes to browsing the web and checking your email, a 56k will do fine. But when you want to download full movies, albums or software from Gnutella, only broadband will do.
One major point that must be remembered is broadband is not a panacea to cable companies, but certainly a relief to their monopolies. Tired of paying $40 for basic cable? Get broadband.
I think the point of Broadband, or 56k, or any internet connection, is that there is no "killer app" to it. The point is information transfer, and FAST information transfer.
Take the car, for example. It didn't start on one huge service, like a Napster. It started because people needed transportation. The TV started because of entertainment value. The "killer app" idea isn't applicable, in my mind, to a broadband connection - instead, we have to look at it for what it was designed for - massive data transfer in a short amount of time.
All in all, the killer-app of broadband is data transfer, just like the killer-app of the car is transportation and the killer-app of the radio is listening to music. There isn't going to be one big thing. People are just going to get used to it.
Duh. I think it's called pr0n.
--Oh how I crave a nice drink. Alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving particle physics.
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
The killer app is time shifting. Rather than setting a VCR/DVR to record your favorite show, or go to the movie theater at an appointed time, you can dictate exactly when to start, stop and pause your entertainment. Email is an example of this, I send you email, and my message is time-shifted to a point where it's convenient for you to respond.
The second killer app is going to be video conferencing. My relatives will all have web cams by the end of this year, and real time family conversations across state boundaries is important, especially for those with kids. But the video is crummy! USB 2.0 and faster video cameras will take us to a better picture locally, but only broadband and multicasting will take us the rest of the way. For broadband to truly work out, though, multicasting HAS to be implemented on a wider basis. It should become a requirement for IPv6 routers to deal properly with multicasting, and we need IPv6 so we can get our own IP address easily and cheaply for each device in each home.
But the real reason broadband hasn't picked up is that the consumer market cannot support the infrastructure. Nearly every major advancment that made it in the last hundred years made it because business adopted it. Business will NOT adopt broadband until it is as reliable as a T1, yet SDSL connections (which approach and pass a T1 in speed, and are often more reliable/dependable than other broadband services, not to be confused with ADSL) are as expensive as a T1 or better. Not only that, but a T1 can handle both phone and data, according to need.
Broadband is suffering right now as a consumer service, but isn't going to take off until business starts investing in its reliability and speed.
And it still bugs me that I can get 2Mb over cable modem from some web sites, but not others. My connection is fast enough, but web hosting sites need to get exponentially larger pipes for broadband to make a difference - either that or a fundamental shift has to take place in the way it works - perhaps a distributed model such as akami(sp, I know).
-Adam
My enemies hate me more than your enemies hate you. Mine put up better "why he sucks" sites.
The killer app IS the web
After you've used cable, DSL, T1's, etc, there's NO WAY you can go back. Unless you like viewing ONE PAGE, OF ONE SITE at a time. Booring. Slow.
56K is too slow to run 5 google searches, follow link upon link in 'new window'.
56K works okay to telnet here and there, look at a page or two, get a package or two....
But there's downloading linux distros, mp3's, games, pictures....so many web sites, like message boards, etc, are just designed for people with fat pipes.
BroadBand will seperate the haves/have-nots
Being on the @home broadband network, I can tell you that the REAL killer apps are still the Nimda and CodeRed worms which continue to run loose on many machines. Talk about a bandwidth siphon! I can't think of anything else that's sucked as much bandwidth as these guys.
My generated report indicates over 152,000 attacks since June!
That report was generated with WormScan, a neat tool for analyzing your Apache logs. I should probably disclose that I'm the author of WormScan - feel free to give it a go against your logs.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Microsoft thinks XBox will be the killer app for broadband. What could be more power & network intensive than multi-player FPS's with voice comms?
at least for me...
And that would be forcing a service to broadband: i.e. I'm a Time Warner Cable subscriber and I HAVE to use AOL to access broadband. If that happens then there will be no incentive for independent companies (the ones who historically make the killer apps) to design something new and interesting. All of the control will be in the hands of AOL, MS (via AT&T/Comcast/Cox) and the like.
Now, I think that AOL service should be an option if you're a TWC subscriber, but I think that broadband and services should be orthogonal.
We're a programming shop, 80% of which is web browser based client/server apps (you know, stuff like /.)
We have nine full time employees. (5 programmers, 1 gfx designer, 2 managers, 1 sales). We have no premises and don't all live in the same city. Our whole business runs from the back bedrooms of each of us.
IRC is our favoured medium of communication and most hours of the day / night there is at least one of us in the channel
The sales/management team go on site to clients for meetings which clients like because it saves them travel time time too.
If that's not possible we just hire a room at a nice posh hotel which always goes down well.
Once a month we all get together and have a face to face meeting around a nice, company paid for lunch.
It's definately my favourite ever job and would not be possible without a good solid 24/7 connection. The minimum anyone "here" has is 128k ISDN but as the [A]DSL rollout continues we are gradually moving over (I'm on DSL).
Before we started the company we all worked together in the same office and I know that that has been a factor in our success. And successful we are. Our overheads for the year (April-April) we covered by the end of August! We're all looking forward to the profit share scheme come May I can tell you.
Our lives have dramatically improved. We are more involved in our family lives now we have the freedom to do so. Gone is the pressure to be at work by 9am every day. Those of us that have children get to see them more, doing the school run and participating in after school care. This has enabled my partner to go to work two days a week while having little impact on my work time.
No more trying to cram stuff in to the lunch hour.
No more having to use the computers / programs they give you, no BOFHs to contend with, no 4'x4' cube to go mad in, music as loud as you like, no more having to have clean clothes, a shave and a clean self!
I'm sure it's not for everyone. My friends think that they wouldn't have the discipline to keep working but I enjoy my work (usually) so that's not so much of a problem. And if I'm doing something tedious then my environment makes up for it. I can go water my plants or watch my tropical fish or pop out to the shops for a bit.
Actually I find it hard sometimes to stop working (which is why we introduced the profit share scheme so we wouldn't feel hard done by at 1am!)
It wouldn't be quite as feasable without broadband.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Apparently that cable operator thinks there is some advantage to controlling the content that flows over their lines. P2p networks, open access and a broadband internet don't seem to fit into their vision of broadband, seems likely that they'll build closed content broadband networks so that they get to define what the killer app is.
Consider:
Oh, the cable operators' killer app is interactive television. Perfect marketing information that they can sell, shoving products in your face. Is that your killer app?
Remember when everyone was sending emails to each other asking when the Internet's killer app would arrive? Duh. The killer app was email. This is the same, how many of you interrupted a game of CS (counter-strike) to wonder when the broadband killer app is going to arrive. Or who has streaming music playing from awesome sites like launchcast.com while reading this article? I'm not saying those are the killer apps, but in a few years we'll look back and say 'duh!' to ourselves because we already were all using the killer app at the time.
Need I say more than the topic?
Talking about Napster,
I read some article at http://www.talkbroadband.com stating that Napster attending court again not so long ago.. Wonder if they will make a decent come back and become the killa app?
Broadband isn't really -that- big of a jump. It just unites the cost-effectiveness of a modem with the speed of a leased line. Granted, the technology used may be a bit different, but the end result is a simple evolution. Was there a killer app that made people upgrade from win3.1 to win95, or '95 to '98?
It'll just be a matter of time before more people switch over. I doubt there will be any mass exodous in the future. If anything is holding people back currently it would be poor availability of service and the bad reputation of the available service (which the recent @home failure doesn't help with).
I mean, as it is, people are waiting months to get DSL installs, so obviously there's enough of a demand for the service.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The killer app for fat pipes is location transparency. Whether I'm at work or at home, I want my view of the world not to change. I don't care where the data comes from, as long as it's quickly accessible when I need it. Thanks to my laptop + company VPN + DSL I can already achieve this, (except for the bad coffee and free soda machine) but I wish the throughput was higher and the latency lower.
Also, since I've had broadband I've noticed that my local software cache has dropped significantly. I used to download and keep Apache HTTPD, Tomcat, Sun's JDKs, JBosss on my local HD, but now that I can download them in under a minute from their respective websites, I don't have to cache them locally.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Allowing everyone to broadcast quality video and audio to many thousands of viewers without needing to waste bandwidth by duplicating streams!
Once multicasting is supported, everything changes once again.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
The Killer application for Broadband is already here. It's the wider Interactive/Personal Digital TV concept; including integrated home entertainment portal or convergent net appliance. This allows a IP enabled Set Top Box (STB) to deliver high speed Internet Access, truly personalised Interactive Digital TV, true on demand content (Video/Music/Applications/Games), in fact any IP based Service.
STB's are also a disruptive technology, because they less powerful that PC's, they are simpler to manufacture, and easier to use and therefore significantly more attractive to Joe Average Consumer. The STB looks set to replace the majority of PC's in homes within a few years, ~£/$1000 PC's will be unable to compete with highly integrated STB's for ~£/$200;
So unless the consumer in question really needs (or more likely wants) the power of a PC, they will take an STB.
In the same way that the big iron was replaced by simpler/cheaper Mini's, and subsequently replaced by a simpler/cheaper PC's. The PC will be superseded by IP enabled STB's, which function as a NC's.
It appears to me that Larry was right after all; the future is thin!
Checkout KITV.CO.UK to see how we are doing this today.
We are working with BBC to do this on our platform, BBC Interactive offers a personalised mix of news, entertainment, documentaries (viewed on demand) Eastenders (Soap) and The Tweenies (ChildrensTV) to Blue Planet and Walking With Beasts (Natural History. This is the BBC's first broadband interactive service.
a ct ive.shtml
a ct ive.shtml
Once the content has been broadcast it's added to a Video Server and may be viewed on Demand.
Here are some links with more info.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/digital_tv/inter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/digital_tv/inter
http://www.kcom.com/news93.html
http://www.kcom.com/news85.html
Actually I have submitted this to slashdot before but it was rejected.
The second BBC Link should have been:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/news/news348.htm
I use a ton of my bandwidth (DSL) for my own web hosting (RSS news feed updates, etc.) and to stream my MP3s. I got a little sick of listening to the same stuff over and over again on the various radio sites and decided to run my own. It is nice to know that wherever I am, I can get my music via WinAmp. Then there is remote access to my machine.
On the other side of it is what I pull down into my house. I think the biggest use of broadband in the future will be for Microsoft product updates. Just kidding. I tend to pull things like MPEG files from TV shows that are no longer available (Sifl-n-Olly) and MP3s of songs I can't rip because they are on record or tape. Then there is always the content on Sputnik7. It is nice being able to queue up some anime/videos to watch.
I think the biggest problem will be getting respectible DL speeds if it does take off. If I was paying for content I certainly wouldn't want to see the player hang due to BW problems. Since there really isn't much people can do about QoS right now, it could be a problem.