Slashdot Mirror
Competing (Commercial) Visions For The Internet Future
Stirland writes: "This
article in today's NYTimes says that AOL's new
plan focussed on creating content for broadband could
have cable companies over a barrel.
It tries to compare programming on cable to 'programming' on the Internet.
It's an important article to read because it gives us an idea of what cable companies' potential plans are for the broadband Internet. Given that they're not regulated like DSL, and they're the fastest growing providers of broadband Internet access, this has profound implications for the next generation of the Internet.
This article omits the fact that Excite@Home tried this 'programming' approach on broadband. It failed.
Another reason this article is important: Contrast AOL's approach described here with Amazon.com and Microsoft's .Net strategy. These are two polar opposite visions of the way the Internet will develop. The media vision vs. computing vision. The interesting story here is that it isn't that one is 'open' and the other 'closed.' They're just open and closed in different places -- places, obviously, that suit the companies' strategies. Why should you care, and what's in it for you? These competing visions are currently duking it out at the FCC under open-access proceedings. So the future of the Internet is hanging in the balance."
Although AOL is a big company I personally would rather give my money to a reliable hige company than one that could fold any minute. Just how I feel...
The infamous installation software for Comcast installs broadjump software that has the same idea: "push" content to the user instead of having the user "pull" content from the network.
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
We're all going to DIE!!!!
Okay, maybe not... but who says any of these groups is going to be right? They can have "visions" all they want, but they often don't turn out as planned. I bet we'll see pieces of all these visions come together to form something new.
>[
> [
Why care? Because IMHO it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the net is all about, and if AOL tries this, they're fux0r3d even harder than they were after the AOL/TW merger.
What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero. (Conversely, you can lose a bundle if you're wrong and don't realize it in time, but with great risk can come great reward :-)
And there we had them, Hooked :)
...and I already have such a feature that comes with DCable... you can fetch the local movie showtimes, get the local weather instantly, etc. AOL just wants to take over the world. The way I see it, this would become merged with a DigiCable feature on Time Warner cable systems (of which I am not I subscriber, so I wouldn't know).
For those of us not under the control of the FCC, we may beg to differ that this will decide the whole internet - there may be something that can be added to the internet by the rest of the world, perhaps ?
if so, i'll keep shelling out the $50 a month for unreliable pacbell dsl.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
... so you're saying porn, spam and fraud and annoying marketing hang in the balance
The future of the Internet is hanging in the balance
In the USA only, thanks.
While a great deal of the current content on the Internet is indeed US-based at the moment, there is a whole big world out there that these "strategists" seem to ignore with great success. Nothing says that "Hollywood" has to stay in Hollywood (witness the spate of movies and television programs that film in Toronto and Vancouver) and Internet content-creation is even more portable. Given enough (regulatory) reason to move, much-that-matters will move.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Surely the internet can develop in all directions. If one company wants to make it commercial, and another doesn't, so be it. /., with completely different content, which run parallel, and have no need to (and so don't) interact.
For example, there are AOL groups like
Just because the internet is literally linked, doesn't mean it is in practice. It's the people who make it what it is, not just the technology.
"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that."
I'll sign up for the programming if it interests me. To translate for marketing executives: I want to see anything by JMS, specifically, I want to see "Crusade" finished. I want to see Star Trek Voyager, no, not the one that already exists --- I mean a GOOD version of Voyager. I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections". CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
If these companies can't give me what I want, then they won't get my money. Lately, I've been bitten by a camera collecting bug. I want to get information on really cool old cameras that cost less than 20 bucks. Can they "program" for that? I doubt it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Billions of people in the world, many of the internet users and we're supposed to believe the only options for the future of the internet lie in the hands of amazon.com, microsoft .net and AOL???
Are we truly doomed to the mindless commercialization of EVERYTHING?
not to be an idealist, but i think that commercial attempts to control the internet will largely fail because we're faced with smart terminals that allow us, the internet populace, to do what we want and go where we want. it's not like someone can force me to stop using Mozilla and start accepting their over-commericalized (and popup driven) vision of the internet without a fight. and no attempts at fighting your customers are going to result in happy or loyal customers. it's the same reason the music industry is in for it, because they are trying to control the listeners and we don't like it, and we know we don't have to put up with it.
:)
anyway, i should go read the article now that i've gone and run my mouth off!
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
provide the text of the article to us nonsubscribers?
The internet is not meant to be a broadcast medium, nor is it very good as one. Ask online radio stations that not only must now pay high license fees, but also must buy lost of servers and bandwidth to stream audio to a few listeners, nothing like traditional broacast mediums (radio, tv, even broadcast cable and satelite) which scale much better.
Truely the internet is meant for and best at 2-way, end-to-end communications. These schemes to make the internet a playground for a few big content providers can cause nothing but trouble.
I dislike companies that try blur the line between Internet access providers and Internet Content providers. All I want from ATT or Verizon is fast internet access. They and AOL can take their content and shove it. If they can't make enough money providing me with basic internet access, without charging extra for what I click on, then I'm sure some other company will be content to take my money providing me with just the service that I want.
Has anyone seen the new nullsoft streaming video format? Opinions can be non-objective but in my opinion it rocks anything MS, Apple, or real have to offer.
So how does this tie into the whole AOL story? Well, some of you may or may not know nullsoft was bought out by time warner AOL some time ago. Now in addition to the MP3 technology nullsoft has a streaming format ready to go. Nullsoft has sort of become a PARC for AOL.
Just a interesting side note I wanted to point out.
Here's a mirror of the text of this website. Login/password haters of the world unite!
http://members.cox.net/infornography/nyt.txt
I won't even read the article because I am forced to register. Give me the option, not a requirement.
Are they thinking that somehow they will be able to "port" over the popular "must have" shows?.....I don't even watch HBO on television, still nothing for me...
The only way I could see this as positive is if somehow AOL and Comcast block Microsoft's attempt to own the content delivery. If AOL were to switch to some form of Linux too, that would keep delivery platform neutral....that's about the only good I could see from this.
"For a long time, we kept asking cable operators to let us import our traditional business model into the broadband arena," said Lisa Hook, who oversees America Online's high-speed, or broadband, business for AOL Time Warner. "We kept saying, `Sell us wholesale access to your network and we will have the direct relationship with the customer,' " Ms. Hook recalled in an interview last week. "It became clear that that was really unknown in the cable industry, and we've realized that moving more toward an HBO model for carriage makes a lot of sense."
I currently use a Comcast cable modem connection, and used to have a lot of problems with it (though lately it's been fine). I didn't enjoy calling tech support, because the level 1 guys are flunkies reading off a clipboard, but once you get to level 2 you can get some actual help. And when you have a serious problem that it takes a computer geek just like yourself to understand, Comcast actually has one somewhere up the line.
That's because they kind of care. While AT&T, Comcast, and others like them are large corporations, they still manage to deal with their users reasonably well. I'm sure more localized providers like Cox and Optimum Online do a great job with customer relations.
That said, I'm much happier that America Online has chosen this route. I'd have to have AOL, the most faceless company on the face of the Earth, be helping me with my tech support questions and installations. When I have a question that it needs an expert to answer, I don't want to speak to one of a hundred thousand AOL flunkies.
Better to have those with "the direct relationship with the customer" be those who actually know what state the customer lives in.
- Jeff
Can you see it?
CmdrTaco@aol.com
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
One where they are not just consumers and pirates and are not obliged to to spend every waking minute sucking up marketing and shelling over greenbacks. A vision where some shade of freedom, human rights, and free speech still exists. . . . one where pissing off a corporation is not necessarily illegal. . . . one where the world is included and the universe does not revolve around the corporations and government that make up the US powerhouse. ...and of course, lots of pr0n. ;p
Its too bad this worldwide forum is quickly just becoming just another mechanism for controlling the masses.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The cable modem content-creation efforts failed, partly because the ideas that can be generated by one group of Central Planners are usually much lamer than the ideas created by a large number of different groups (even if they're not well-funded) - the anti-server policies adopted for performance reasons discouraged development of real applications, though some content applications developed by other people in the market succeeded at getting people to want to buy cable modem service (some of the games, and of course Napster). Another big reason, of course, was that there were only so many viable market niches for search engines, and the Excite business model depended on banner advertiser funding at a time that the market was going through rapid discovery of what that was worth (much much less for late arrivals in a crowded market than for the early adopters when web users were also mostly well-paid early adopters in an uncrowded market.) And Blue Mountain Greeting Cards didn't appear to have much business model at all - your mother could send out cutsie MommySpam(tm), but nobody got paid anything
AOL is another example of this - it's content that wanted more bandwidth, but that had become successful without it, though unlike some approaches, it's a combination of user-developed and service-provided content on the service's computers rather than the users'.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The future is going to have aspects of both strategies. The problem that AOL is going to face is that being a provider of broadband content isn't going to be that valuable. On the otherhand, being an distributor and moderator (for lack of a better word) of broadband content is the place to be.
Think about it, already we see on television that there is no shortage of crap to watch. The problem is figuring out what crap is worth watching, and when it is on. The solution, of course, is Tivo and ReplayTV. This solution has the side effect of choking off money (through ad revenue) to the providers of content. This does, however, illustrate the struggle that content providing services are already getting burned by.
Basically if you want to be a content provider, plan to provide a service that people will be willing to pay for. Be like HBO or any number of pr0n sites. Otherwise you will get drowned in the sea of noise that is thousands of small-time producers who are willing to do their work for free because they enjoy it or to gain noteriety enough to go work for HBO or any number of pr0n sites.
Smart money is on the people who can filter through the noise and consolidate the content in a useful way for various audiences.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
AOL retains it's customer base by convincing the customer that it IS the internet. The average AOL user hears internet and thinks AOL. They are a content provider and in order to keep their customers they need to keep convincing those customers that they need AOL for a reason. I see lots of people who are completly shocked that they can get the same content via any other internet service without AOL. I think they have a hard battle ahead of themselves. MSN Explorer is really cutting into AOL hard by offering a easy to use interface while not requiring the fees involved.
There is room for independent sites on the web and they will continue to exist while they can find an audience that will sustain them.
Well, I think some people have kept with AOL because they got accutomed to some of the custom content there, or the specific communities.
Hard to grow that though, with so much competing free stuff out there.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
You guys never cease to amaze me. You talk about the internet like its an American exlusive and you will make all the rules. Check out how Europe is working on ousting the American control of the internet over there. Other than ripping off the rest of the world, you guys have no idea or concern about how anyone outside the US wants the internet to evolve. You think we give a damn about Microsoft or AOL's visions? You may like to live under those monopolies but we sure don't. How about getting your heads out of the sand and looking beyond your borders for ideas and recommendations. Ohhh, excuse me, I lost me head for a minute there, I know that'll never happen.....
-Hope this means faster pr0n...
-The more pr0n the better!
-Imagine what this will do to pr0n?
-I love porn.
-You've got pr0n!
It seems that the main location for experimentation is college campuses, which often have high-speed LANs in the dorms and may not be too aggressive about firewalls to the outside world, though there are also some US ISPs and DSL providers that allow servers on their DSL connections.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
" What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero"
If only we had such sane markets. It matters not if AOL is a junk company or not, only if joe stockbuyer thinks it is. AOL has looked like a bad investment for years and years. You look at their various moronic business plans that they never really deliver on, etc. But as long as old Jod keeps buying it, it goes up - not down. Knowing they are wrong is easy, predicting the moment the bubble will burst in another thing entirely.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
It strikes me that this kind of hanging-in-the-balance thinking is rooted in our big-media cultural mindset, like saying that the future of music hangs on the results of the next Grammy awards. It doesn't, considering how few musicians are actually involved in the Grammys. The vast majority continue to play the same gigs for the same audiences as before.
The only thing that concerns me is how it might affect your and my ability to post and surf each others websites. As long as those stay online, I don't care whether AOL or MSN has more members. The corporate interests all want to control whatever they think might threaten their profit streams, and in that sense I don't think really matters which of them wins these wars. There aren no good guys among them. What affects us is how much they are allowed to restrict on our access, and the only way we peasants will win that war is if Congress decides to bite the hand that feeds it and do a Bell breakup on these guys, prohibiting any of them from owning a controlling interest in a significant facet of the Internet.
Or, alternately, monkeys could fly out of my butt.
is a merger of your tv, and your internet. Everything at once, at your finger tips.
The idea is simple... TV on demand, watch what you want, when you want... We would all like that. Especially if there were few to no commercials.
Second, the internet, what you're using right at this moment.
Example: you're watching the movie you decided to see, for no apparent reason.. All you Aspen Extreme people know who you are... and all of a sudden something pops in your brain because of a scene on the TV. The press of a button, and you're on google! You do a search, surf, now satisfied, you go back to your Movie.
Now even better... you're watching TV and see a commercial. Press *55 now to go to our web page!
See what I mean. Everything, in one box. No, not for us Gamers, or serious programmers, but for the everyday I-just-check-my-e-mail user. This is the projected future of the internet, and people like AOL are betting their business on it.
But with 9 years of surfing (using gopher for me) can I drop my computer and go solely TV??? That's the obsticle they need to jump....
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Quoth the poster:
.NET, I don't know. And Palladium. Ergh.
So the future of the Internet is hanging in the balance.
It seems a little hysterical to me to say such a thing. While we should be concerned and involved in the process, companies like AOL/MS/etc.. have to bring products to market that poeple will buy. They are not the best products, but they are saleable. Products with extreme DRM or forced commercials won't sell, I don't think. There will always be a gray market for non-DRM content, commercial-stripped content etc.. Until they make it easy and cheap to pay for the content, people will continue to "steal" it.
As for
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
True. But given that the stock has been in a three-year decline from around $90 in late 2000 to today's $12 and change, I'd say that had you gone short at any time in the past three years (outside of the past two weeks :), the market would have rewarded you quite well for your prescience and patience.
Anyone who thinks "It matters not if XYZ is a junk company or not" has only to look at the stock charts for said companies over the past few years.
(And anyone who wants to talk about Enron, Tyco, Worldcon and Martha Stewart would do well to look at a one-year chart before they spoke. The market is a far harsher judge of business impropriety than Congress can ever be.)
Broadband will help people get their spam faster, as noted by User Friendly
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Has commercial television killed PBS?
PBS would be dead dead dead if it had to compete in commercial space. It doesn't, and indie music and films don't truly compete in any meaningful way with their "corporate" counterparts. The concern is not whether independent web sites and content providers can survice. The concern is what I can do (copy, backup, skip commercials, burn to CD/DVD) with "corporate" content which I bought and paid for.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Information wants to be free, you can't stop it once it is out. The whole point of the Internet is to distribute information. There is nothing hanging in the balance here. Even if AOL dominated and got their way you forget that America is a small part of the global landscape.
:)
I am an American, so I am not some elitist European either. I just wish that more people would look at the big picture. Furthermore, I would rather have 56k dialup before I would accept restrictive broadband access. Fortuantly my current DSL ISP gives me raw bridged ethernet access instead of restrictive PPPoE AND I can do whatever I want with it as long as the FBI doesn't come knocking on their door.
AOL/TW et al. realise it's much easier to manage people if they are just passive consumers of the content they provide. The problem is, with the Internet there is an overwhelming supply of content for every persons particular interests. Unless they are able to duplicate all of that, people will decide for themselves what they want to see.
Um the stock market is how much "the right to have a say in a companies doings" is worth, it has no bearing whatsoever on the actual quality of the company after the IPO.
The fact that it is effected by the company is enough to make one wonder what type of insane world we live in.
Boy, adapting your business model to the likings of the cable companies really sounds like a recapie for disaster! The only reason cable companies are successful is because they can extort their clients; competition for the last mile really destroys this advantage.
August 26, 2002
A New Model for AOL May Influence Cable's Future
By SETH SCHIESEL
he top executives at AOL Time Warner and Comcast probably did not feel like heavyweight boxers as they hammered out last week's deal for the looming AT&T Comcast cable television giant to distribute the America Online Internet service. And yet, the agreement may represent a technological transition point in the cable TV business as important as the "Thrilla' in Manila" heavyweight title fight in the Philippines 27 years ago.
Internet technology could now create the same kind of era-defining shift in cable television that satellites did back then. And for the media industry, the big question is which sorts of companies can benefit most from this transition -- the companies that operate the cable systems, or the ones that provide the "content."
When Muhammad Ali defeated Joe Frazier on Sept. 30, 1975, in Manila, the fledgling Home Box Office network beamed the fight to cable television operators in the United States. It was the first time a cable network used satellite technology to distribute live programming to affiliates around the nation. Viewers, who up to that point had considered cable mainly a means to better reception of local broadcast stations, soon realized that cable operators could provide original programming available nowhere else.
Just as important, cable operators soon realized that their success hinged on their relationship with the providers of that programming. As networks like HBO, ESPN and CNN blossomed in the late 1970's and early 80's, they attracted millions of households to cable for the first time.
The top executives at AOL Time Warner -- which owns HBO, among other cable channels -- now hope that its America Online unit can fit into a similar mold. After years of insisting that America Online had to "own" its customers and trying unsuccessfully to persuade cable operators to lease the use of their lines as "dumb pipe" for high-speed Internet access, AOL Time Warner's executives came to a realization this summer: The only way to persuade AT&T and Comcast to distribute the cyberspace service over their cable lines was to package America Online as if it were a premium movie channel.
It is a wholesale shift in America Online's business model and presumably for its future prospects. The new approach means that viewers who use the America Online service over the cable lines of the combined AT&T Comcast will be billed by AT&T Comcast -- not by America Online -- the way the price of HBO is included in a customer's cable bill, rather than the customer receiving a separate invoice from HBO.
In other words, the high-speed AOL customer will be as much the cable company's customer as they are America Online's. Customers who sign up for the America Online service will have their cable modem installed by AT&T Comcast. Customers who have a technical problem with the service will first call AT&T Comcast, just as consumers who have a problem with HBO call their cable or satellite provider.
And when a customer buys something on America Online -- online transactions are expected to play a big role in AOL's future -- AT&T Comcast will receive a cut of that revenue. This arrangement is comparable to the way cable operators now generally receive two minutes of advertising time for their own use for every hour of a cable network's programming they carry.
What all this means is that, a few years out, the question of whether last week's deal was a good one for AOL Time Warner will probably depend on whether the America Online unit can create the Internet equivalent of must-have offerings like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City."
Last week, AT&T Comcast, which is to receive about $38 a month from America Online for every high-speed AOL customer served by its cable lines, seemed to have gotten the better part of the deal. And over the next year or so, other cable operators may very well follow the lead of AT&T and Comcast and strike similar arrangements with America Online.
If other cable companies follow suit, though, the risk facing the entire cable industry over the next decade will be whether America Online succeeds with its new strategy. The cable operators could find themselves in a long-term position of weakness just as they have found themselves at the mercy of programming conglomerates like Viacom (with CBS and MTV), the Walt Disney Company (with ABC and ESPN) and yes, AOL Time Warner, with a stable that still includes HBO and CNN.
"For a long time, we kept asking cable operators to let us import our traditional business model into the broadband arena," said Lisa Hook, who oversees America Online's high-speed, or broadband, business for AOL Time Warner. "We kept saying, `Sell us wholesale access to your network and we will have the direct relationship with the customer,' " Ms. Hook recalled in an interview last week. "It became clear that that was really unknown in the cable industry, and we've realized that moving more toward an HBO model for carriage makes a lot of sense."
Brian L. Roberts, the president of Comcast, who will run the combined AT&T Comcast if Comcast, as expected, completes its acquisition of AT&T's cable unit later this year, also uses the HBO analogy. "We're approaching this relationship with AOL like a premium movie channel," he said. "The HBO model lit a fire under cable, and it really took off. Likewise, I think the model we've worked out with AOL can really light a fire for cable modem service. Just as we have more than one movie service, like HBO and Showtime, we will have more than one Internet provider, and we will help each other become more successful."
AT&T Comcast and whatever other cable operators America Online strikes deals with will probably continue to deliver a "house brand" of cable modem service. Moreover, that house brand will almost always be less expensive than America Online cable modem service. Therefore, America Online will probably have to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years to develop the Internet equivalent of ESPN's "SportsCenter" or MTV's "TRL" -- material that is available nowhere else.
The payoff for America Online could be spectacular. Consider that the lament of cable system operators like Mr. Roberts these days is that programmers largely have them over a barrel. A cable system that did not include ESPN, MTV and CNN would have trouble retaining a lot of its customers. That is why ESPN can increase its fees by 10 percent to 20 percent annually and cable operators will still pay it. (Cable operators now pay ESPN close to $2 a month for each subscriber.)
In addition, the power of "must have" networks like ESPN allows programmers to force cable operators to carry additional channels. Walt Disney, which owns ESPN, is able, in essence, to say to cable operators: "You know you need ESPN, but if you want ESPN you also have to carry ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN News. Take it or leave it."
The cable operators have little choice but to take it. And that is the leverage that America Online hopes to exert in a decade.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, people close to AT&T and Comcast said last week they did not think that America Online could develop sufficient original, proprietary "must have" services to gain that sort of leverage. They say the Internet itself, available to all comers, will be the primary reason why people sign up for cyberspace service -- whether America Online's or the house brand.
Of course, America Online is counting on just the opposite. Stay tuned. Or logged on.
Last week, AT&T Comcast, which is to receive about $38 a month from America Online for every high-speed AOL customer served by its cable lines... Cable operators now pay ESPN close to $2 a month for each subscriber. So cable company gets a channel to pay it, instead of the other way around. Seems like a great idea for the cable companies.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
perhaps you should have looked at a chart before commenting. AOL has been a a bad investment for years. for the past two years the street has been extremely sceptical about aol and its future.
there are plenty of stocks (like roxio) that are still elevated by unrealistic expectations, but aol has not been one. i do believe that aol has some more points to lose. if i were to open a position, it would be short.
I was thinking more about watching this stoopid company through the '90s. It never looked like a fundamentally good company. But people kept buying it and buying it. Eventually the bubble was big enough to buy a real (if evil) company with real assets (Time/Warner) with the stock of their basically valueless company. for me they jumped the shark about the time they came out with their first PC client - which is long before most people knew they existed. Anyone else remember when they were Macintosh only?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
"This article in today's NYTimes says that AOL's new plan focussed on creating content for broadband could have cable companies over a barrel.
At least the internet's future is not 'focussed' on spelling.
~Ben
First off, the goal of the corporate entities on the Internet from Day 1 has been to turn it into TV. They've largely succeeded.
Second, the idea that "market forces" can affect anything is rather touching, but so naive. The corporation$ will determine what you are allowed to "choose". Sort of like Republicans vs. Democrats, Ford vs. Chevy, etc. Some fucking choice.
So, the Web was made to function, and the corps took it over, corrupted and polluted it. Who is surprised? Who thinks that anything but huge $$$ runs anything any more?
Ack.
The author spends much time building up an example of the broadcast TV and cable industry, and how the cable companies are forced to carry certain content to keep customers. But the problem is that this line of reasoning fails utterly when applied to the internet.
In the TV industry, you have a limited number of content providers and a limited number of content carriers. It takes a few barrels of money to become either a provider or carrier. Not so with the internet, at least not entirely. While you could make the case that there are a limited number of carriers, there are too many providers to count. Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of computers can set himself up to be a provider.
So AOL would be just another provider, only the content would be sent over the cable pipe only if you subscribe to it. Unless they propose coming up with their own protocol for this, I don't see how this would differ from just another site on the internet, except serviced exclusively through the cable connection. I don't see how this model is very different from having a site on the regular internet and requiring people to pay subscription fees to get into it. And the moment that they did come up with some "killer app", someone else somewhere will duplicate it on a site that is more widely available, and people will then say "why am I paying AOL through the nose for this when I can get is more cheaply on my own"? You can't do this in the traditional broadcast model because of the cost factor involved in setting up your own content. But on the internet, this cost prohibition is either not there are greatly reduced.
In other words, AOL is too late. The internet has been so widely established as not simply an American phenomenon, but a global one. I can't think of very many other technologies that a single protocol (i.e. TCP/IP) is so widely and tacitly accepted as the de facto standard. Not so with broadcast content (try playing a European PAL DVD in your American NTSC player and you'll see what I mean, and I'm not talking about region codes).
Yes, some people will subscribe to this because they don't know any better. But I don't see it becoming the resounded success that they want it to be without reverting to the days of BBSs and isolated networks. And I don't see anything warranting the somewhat alarmist cry of the person that posted the story.
Nothing more to see here. Move along.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Oh he never existed? Well it all makes sense now. Mr. Katz, you are a fraud sir.
What really matters as these large companies battle over who "owns" the Internet is not the content and programming provided, nor the method of how this content is provided to customers. What really matters is what restrictions are placed on customers (our) ability to be our own content provider and publish information back to other users. Most of the cable providers place restrictions (either technically or by policy) on hosting any services. By doing this, the providers are trying to change the Internet from being a network (two way) into being a content delivery system (one way.) This is the real danger.
ÕÕ
Given that they're not regulated like DSL, and they're the fastest growing providers of broadband Internet access
See a pattern here? End government regulation now! Stop government-enforced digital "rights" managment and other anti-user legislation! Get the government off our backs!
I think that it hasn't arrived yet, that this will be 'something' else. Something that will superset everything else.
Ultimately I think it will be an AI Star Trek type thingy with voice commands, able to do almost anything. I say this because I can recall a old couple many many years ago who came into the computer retail store I worked in, who wanted to see the first mac with a built in microphone and built in speech capability. Telling them that it was not star trek yet was exactly like taking a lollipop from a child. They were heart broken.
Point being, there is a major pent up demand in the culture for that kind of tool. It has been sold in the culture through multple shows and movies for decades now. This is what computers are supposed to be.
The first company that can legitimately say say "This IS Star Trek" will make a mint. I think everything else is sort of grasping baby steps towards this sort of thing.
heck, If you have ever seen the film of the introduction of the very first Mac will note what a visceral reaction was achieved with such a jump in technology, even if alot still had to be fulfilled and developed over the coming year. Just the idea that it could be achieved ...
Heck If Steve Jobs comes out with something that is a legit star trek level type system in the next few years, he can blow peoples mind all over again. But I digress. (And I do not own a Mac)
Of course, this is insanely difficult. but ....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
AOL retains it's customer base by convincing the customer that it IS the internet. The average AOL user hears internet and thinks AOL.
... esoteric. But then, so are the tastes of 99% of the people in the world, in one subject or another.
... that is the only thing the media whores running AOL-Time-Warner these days can see within their small minds.
Only to some degree. I know a number of people who use AOL, and most of the "internet" they spend their time on (the World Wide Web) isn't on AOL. Of course, their tastes are
AOL is suffering from the fact that the Time-Warner portion of the company has ousted most of the leadership of the AOL side of the company. In other words, the old Media Moghuls have taken over the AOL side of the company, and it shows in both their thinking and their behavior. It shouldn't be any surprise, in that light, that AOL is persuing the 'dream' of becoming a big cable company
It should also be no surprise that such a strategy will prove disasterous, should the internet survive. Unfortunately, the very same people are in Washington lobbying and purchasing legislation that will eliminate the internet as we know it, and replace it with something that represents the Home Shopping Network and Interactive TV more than it will the internet as we know it today. Should they succeed, this strategy will no longer be inane, it will be inspired. Inspired by the destruction of the last vestige of free thought and freedom of expresson in America, whose demise they will have orchestrated and profited from handsomely.
Gives new meaning to the song "Burn Hollywood Burn" doesn't it?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
IIRC, they never were. I have an AOHell client disk for the Apple II at home...never used it because I didn't like the idea of being locked into using whatever crummy software they provided. (I used ProTERM 3.0 to dial into GEnie, the CS department's terminal server (for Internet access), and local BBSes instead.) I think they introduced DOS and/or Win16 clients around the same time they dropped Apple II support.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
AOL's new plan focussed on creating content
Two words: Pluto Nash
Seems to me that there should be some sort of "keep your fucking hands off" rule, nobody fucks with anything and everything is left just as it is! (though minus the pop-up ads would be nice)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How is this different from the LIVE, FREE video feeds of YOUNG TEENAGE CELEBRITIES doing all sorts of risqué things that I get in my inbox everyday??? :)
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Wow, now that is diversity. If they'd wanted to be even MORE 'cross-platform' they should have had a client for the Lisa as well. Maybe even the Apple III...
...and of course, lots of pr0n. ;p
Geez. Don't you already spend enough of your time masturbating?
You've got dried come between your fingers.
And it's about time for you to replace that keyboard. There's a whole ant colony now living off what you've dripped in there.
After actually reading the article, it seems to me that this is not a big deal. It seems to boil down to this: If you want, you can pay more for AOL-style cable modem service, and have access to AOL-only content. Or you can pay less, and receive the same AT&T standard cable modem service we all know and loathe. If you don't want AOL, or aren't an AT&T customer, it's completely irrelevant. Hence I think the real problem is this: The perception that this will change the face of the internet hinges on the assumption that AOL is a major content provider. It's not. It's a service provider -- the real "content" of the internet comes from hundreds of different companies -- Amazon, eBay, online magazine sites, etc, and that's only taking a commercial view of content. The only way this agreement could possibly change the face of the internet is if AOL somehow comes up with content that is so compelling that NOT having AOL is a clearly inferior option. AOL is in the same situation they were in regarding dial-up service: millions of people paid AOL for their content+internet, millions of others decided that the internet alone was more than enough content. There are plenty of very important issues on regarding the future of the internet (access for all-broadband availbility-myriad technical issues on and on and on), and this simply is not one of them. AOL is not the internet, and this does nothing to change that.
You silly Canadians, you have high-speed internet access in even fewer parts of your country than the US.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Prodigy. Geeze can't we get past this Alpha Male chit. "I OWN THE UNIVERSE!" What crap! A.O.L. = A$$hole On Line. Sorry big boys..the genie is out of the bottle. Or maybe the RBOC's have seen that Pandora's box has been opened (how long till dial-tone is dead?).
... the "0ld-guard" is probably not the place to side.
In my view the Internet is only about 1 month old in "human years".
Ya ain't seen not'n yet because us engn'rs don't need no eng;'sh (google will translate) and we sure dn't nd U!
A new world is forming and many are siding with the "old-guard".
Ask any historian
I hope comunication will defeat Communism and I pray it will defeat the current state of affairs of Democray!
YES I AM INNOCENT TILL PROVEN GUILTY.... AND NO YOU CAN"T INVESITGATE ME WIHOUT A WARRENT... (sigh) living in America I wish that was true.. Screw U GWB!
I apoligize for the rant....I feel America is losing the high ground and I don't like that.
And how difficult will it be for an american who is fed up with the tyranny building up, to emigrate there?
PLEASE emigrate somewhere. The more of you idiots who experience what real repression in other countries is like, the better. Americans are the most spoiled rotten people on earth. Yeah, Mr. Teenager, you're oppressed. Oh NO! The feds are cracking down on your ability to steal music. OH MY GOD! When will the oppression end???
Meanwhile, did you know it's illegal in Germany to believe that the holocaust never happened? That's right. You can be put in JAIL for having the wrong opinion.
Or how about France, where it's ILLEGAL to mix English words in French broadcasts. And let's not even get into the fact that it's illegal to own Nazi artifacts.
Please, do us all a favor and just stop leave. The less whining from idiots like you the better. Go live in one of the socialist "paradises".
What type of 'insane world'? One that produces someone who spews such nonsense as yourself, sir.
And anyone who wants to talk about Enron, Tyco, Worldcon and Martha Stewart would do well to look at a one-year chart before they spoke.
What about LNUX?
AOL bets farm on a bad idea. What makes the internet different from cable in the 80's is the cost of developing "content" isn't a barrier like it was then. You couldn't clone MTV back then but you can clone slashdot or any other "killer" content that people don't want to pay for.
what, say you, is the stock based on other than public opinion?
that public opinion might be swayed by the sucess of the company, but in what way is it dependant upon it?
balance?
because of the FCC? Last time I checked, the internet was a world-wide thing, not something controlled by the United States government, specifically the FCC.
ChopSuey
I woudl have liked that song better without the vocals but true.
:-D
If they take the internet away, we'll just have to start our own.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Charlie Rose, Nova, Frontline? You don't see shows like this on cable channels. The problem is that the demand for shows is not necessarily the same is the demand for advertising on those shows. Advertisers want the 18-24 demo because they are easy to influence with ads, even though older people have more disposable income. PBS largely survives because people are willing to pay for the programming. Since the people willing to pay for programming are different than the people easily influenced by ads, there is a different set of programming, unavailable even on specialized cable channels.
These socialist paradises are becoming very unfriendly towards immigrants. It's nearly impossible, for example, for a non-ethnic-German immigrant to get German citizenship within their lifetime. It's becoming increasingly difficult to even get into any EU countries at all.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Mozilla is my favorite AOL product. Sure, it's free software and has quite a few contributors, but the majority of the core programming team are AOL employees, so AOL is primarily to thank for its continued active development.
And whenever I'm in Windows I use Winamp, another fine AOL product.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm surprised that no one appears to have commented on what is perhaps the most remarkable item in the NYT piece:
Last week, AT&T Comcast, which is to receive about $38 a month from America Online for every high-speed AOL customer served by its cable lines, seemed to have gotten the better part of the deal.
I guess!
Where is this money to come from? Is the cable operator supposed to charge, say, $49/month for AOL Broadband, keep $38, and pass through $11? Since ATT Broadband already pockets some $39-49 per month (depending on how it's packaged with cable tv and digital telephony) for my cable internet service, where is the incentive for the cable operator? And, what happens when competition from other providers (DSL, MSN BB, 802.11ab, etc.) drives down the price of broadband? Will AOL's margins be squeezed? The cable operators will be loathe to give back any of that $38. So where will all that money come from to finance these new, exclusive high-quality content services that AOL/TW will supposedly be supplying?
Remember, too, that current cable television services are based on precisely the reverse business model -- cable operators pay the programming services, not the other way around. The article itself points out that ESPN collects about $2 per subscriber per month. Fees collected for premium services like HBO are typically split 50-50 between the local operator and the service provider. So the article's claim that this is just AOL/TW playing the traditional cable game isn't true to the facts, either.
So where does AOL think all this money is coming from? Advertising revenues? E-commerce transactions? Not bloody likely!
Remember though, in the end it is about the consumer. If you don't ilke it, stick with it. There are still a (few) gopher sites around, even though I havn't seen one since 1995. There are a couple BBSs in my area, though I haven't called one since I got on the internet.
I used to be into irc, one guy at work found out, and decided to check it out. In half an hour he found 10 warze sites, and concluded that it was irc was about. I used it for hours at a time, over several years, and never once encountered warze (or porn, which is appearently the other big thing on irc). Porn is a major force in web-commernce according to slashdot posts, but I rarely encounter them.
If the consumer doesn't like it, they won't find it. If the consumer finds it useful they will. Now you might find that you are a minority consumer, but just because you don't want what everyone else does, doesn't mean that you can't get your fix.
I don't care if AOL wins, and 95% of the net population subscribes to their service, which can only be accessed with their client in windows. Knowing AOL/TW, I don't expect to have any interest in the content I cannot access. My TV is only used for nostalga trips with my Atari, I have no interest in any of the programs I could get. Maybe there is something of interest, but I haven't seen it. YMMV.
Keep trying. One of these days, you'll post something funny.
As long as the clueless Luser is still shelling out for M$ and getting an unsafe IIS by default I care what they spend their $$'s on. The idiots out there impact me just by being the natural self. As for the financial part I can't help but agree absolutely. My aunt and uncle actually PAY for AOL, and LIKE IT, no accounting for taste.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I drive a Harley!
After all people can type 100 words per minute, but how many people can speak that fast?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This amazing new "push" technology will ruin the internet! Oh wait...
Big media is global.
Neither Vivendi nor Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is American. Don't you think they are doing exactly the same calculating that ATT and AOL are doing? John Malone, the American cable magnate, has been trying real hard to crack the European cable market. EuroDisney. Do you feel safe from them where you live?
Europe will of course be safer than the developing world where the big guys are going in before there is a mature market to crack. Many countries might never get to experience a 'net with a frontier, it will be like the walled garden Compuserve of the mid/late 80's. Murdoch is especially agressive in this area, having a lock on global satellite distribution outside of the US. Most media markets are protected in some way from foreign ownership,, these protections are under attack, being on the WTO's agenda for the next round of negotiations. Brazil recently amended its constitution to allow for foreign ownership.
So, if you live outside of the US, you should watch what goes on here closely and make sure it doesn't happen where you live.
Most of the cable companies supported by AT&T Broadband doesn't let you run a server on *your* machine - you can't take that nice In reality, while the cable modem upstream bandwidth is limited, it's not THAT limited. Most of the equipment can limit you to 128kbps upstream, which is a surprisingly large amount of data transfer for any activities other than distributing lots of CDs or movies. You wouldn't want to run a high-volume commercial site on it, not only because it's too slow, but because the cable tv Service Level Agreements say Look, it's just television, if it goes down for a day or two in bad weather, go read a book or help your kids build snowmen and the cable modems get the same quality of repair service. 2.5Mbps upstream is more than a T1 - a surprising number of medium-sized business offices don't need that much for downstream (though it's always nice) for the number of people you're sharing your cable feed with. And most of the newer cable modem systems are running on Hybrid Fiber-Coax - if they run out of bandwidth, it's pretty easy to split the segment, but more importantly, the cost of Packet Shapers has been coming way down - they can stick a box in the upstream that starts throttling individual connections if the total gets too high.
The real reason they banned servers was that the beta-test cities had some equipment problems causing high packet loss (perceived as low throughput due to TCP retransmits) which led to all those bogus but effective Don't Be A Web Hog smear ads from competing telco DSL services - and the equipment they were using couldn't limit individual users below the raw transmit level of 768kbps, so they were worried that they might have worse public relations problems (i.e. even lower sales) if they started having neighborhoods with bad performance because of somebody's p0rn server. By the time Napster came along, they had performance under control, so they had official policies about "Napster is Bad Evil Bandwidth-Eating Copyright Theft" even though half the employees thought "well *duhh*, it's about *time* people had a compelling reason to get broadband besides gamez for their kids" :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't disagree with the general tendency of the US to impose its own moral agenda on other countries, as shown in today's Register article about the FBI hacking into Russian computers. However, a small correction. The US imposed tariffs on Russian steel, and then the Russians started banning American chicken imports, supposedly on health grounds. As far as I am aware, US beef was always available here in Russia, although it's very expensive. The ban on chicken was lifted recently too. This mini trade war is not about moral agendas - it's good old protectionism and retaliation.
Please.. it should be obvious that the future of the Internet, nay, the future of COMMUNICATION lies in the hands of one very simple technology.. it is called SYNAPSE!
Now, if only I could figure out the problem with the damn data bottlenecks...
Mark my words, you feeble geeks.. SYNAPSE IS THE FUTURE!!
I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections".
Hell yeah. I'd never even heard of Connections until I got cable and saw it on Discover Science. Awesome stuff, history filled to the brim with fascinating trivia. You'll never hear about this stuff in your history classes.
Burke was rumored to have done some speaking here in Portland recently, but I missed it. Want to see him speak, along with Spalding Gray.
The stupid site won't let me register. What a fantastic use of the internet eh?
the 2 biggest cable operators don't give a sh!t about what u use your bandwith for.
France Telecom and Cybercable allow you to put a web server, or an ircd, or a counter strike server, or an anonymous ftp, or whatever floats your boat.
Cybercable just dropped upload limitations, not sure for France Telecom, through.
i had a sig, once..
Meanwhile, did you know it's illegal in Germany to believe that the holocaust never happened? That's right. You can be put in JAIL for having the wrong opinion.
Or how about France, where it's ILLEGAL to mix English words in French broadcasts. And let's not even get into the fact that it's illegal to own Nazi artifacts.
What a revealing couple of quotes!
I wonder why Germany and France would have such intolerant attitudes to Nazi scum?
Oppression here is the same as anywhere, the penalty just differs. For every thing you can't do or own legally, there is something here that is similar. For every illegal opinion, there is one here too. Hell, you saw what they did to the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, right? Their beliefs and practices where supposed to be legal, and they probably were. They just weren't popular and some closet-communist (Janet Reno) decided to burn 'em out. I'm betting you'd at least get a trial in Germany for disbelieving in the holocaust.
AOL isn't just AOL
I wonder why Germany and France would have such intolerant attitudes to Nazi scum?
Nazis aren't exactly popular here in the US, either. The point is that here in the US, you can believe and/or own whatever you want. It's called freedom, and I really wish Europe would learn about it someday.
Of course, it's very ironic that Europe uses the techniques of the Nazis to "protect" their citizens against "unpopular" ideas.
They may have existed before then, but even I never noticed them until they took over applelink in.... what... maybe '88?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Sure, fringe will exist... but what about the access to it? If internet providers become content providers, they can certainly also become content filterers... they have the legal right (at this point... who knows what crazy wackiness the US justice department will invent next?), I believe.
-------
Incite and flee.
These companies have definiteley got things right, theres so much info out there its just a whole lot easier if we all have our share of it sorted out by the big guys and fed to us on a plate. Don't think, just eat. Heck you could even eat SPAM [pink shit, not UCE] so long as you dodn't think aout what you were eating, though I personally don't trust any "meat" that does not change colour when cooked.
After all, the last thing we need is some big open unrestricted information carrying network with everyone having their connection and wandering off finding/expressing all sorts of different ideas and opinions about stuff. *shudders*
I'm a citizen. Not a consumer.
You can provide for me. Not program for me.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }