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"?

Comments

There IS no Killer-App

[Ieshan]

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.

Location Transparency

[cpfeifer]

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.

True Multicasting

[statusbar]

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