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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."
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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 :-)
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.
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
But you have no idea how many think they had to... or maybe you do, probably somewhere around 95% sound right? I received those packages in the mail and was quite suspicious. So, I setup a Win98 test box on my network in order to load up the software and see what it does. Well, that was a dead end because I ran into so many problems with hardware requirements. But keep in mind, this was a rather old machine, some 133 MHz or so setup that I picked up around 95 (still, it should be quite capable of connecting to the Comcast network without any bloat, and was able to in the past). I called in tech support a couple times to see if I could find solutions for some of the problems and basically ended up finding out that it didn't change any hardware settings or whatnot (I thought they might have be trying to push everyone through proxies with the switch-over). Now, that was just me, but at least I had suspicions. I also setup my grandma's box with Comcast cable, and when the software came in the mail she must have called me and/or mentioned something about the software several times, along the lines of "Will it still work after the date listed, because the package said it is absolutely critical to install the software before the network switches over.". I explained a few ideas about the network each time and she seemed to finally agree with me and everything turned out alright. But for the million of other Comcast subscribers that don't have a nerd to turn to, how can they be sure? And, more importantly, will they just end up taking the "safe road" and installing the software anyhow?
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)
"Isn't that basically the same as a TV or radio broadcast? "
It would be, if I also had the ability to make a TV broadcast, and any viewer who could view "Their" content, could also view mine.
So a lot of people have nothing to say, nothing to distribute, no reason to host an http service, and so a lot of them are simply forbidden to do so, etc.
But that doesn't make the internet a broadcast-to-consumer medium.
NSV has no advantage over QuickTime and questionable advantage over MPEG-4.