Industry Threatened by Innovation at the 'Edge'?

penciling_in writes "In an article on CircleID, Bob Frankston, best known as the co-developer of the legendary VisiCalc and Lotus Express, shares his concern regarding industries desperate effort to control 'the edge' -- VoIP, P2P, Video on Demand... 'The commoditization of the transport is making it increasingly difficult to make money just because you own the pipe. The cable industries have a long history of owning the content and demanding a share in companies whose signals they deign to carry. As gatekeepers they have the ability to command a high fee for passage. The problem is that the scarcity is going away and with the shift to narrowcasting (as in Video on Demand) there is no scarcity. Instead they must own the content themselves if they are to retain any advantage. The Comcast/Disney issue (see: Comcast Family Protects Power) is portrayed as a media consolidation and convergence but that doesn't make sense. With transport becoming increasingly abundant it is easier for new players to enter the market and we should see increasing divergence once millions of people can experiment with new ideas.'"

Comments

Hrmm

[acehole]

When new technologies appear and make things more convinent, someone who was making money off the older technology loses out. Some companies want to simply protect their revenue without either pre-empting the change in technology or changing after a new technology has been adopted by the mainstream.

If VoIP became mainstream, how many telephone companies would go bankrupt? how many would fight tooth and nail to implement measures that would ensure that they got a piece of the pie?

The time for Artists to gather together is NOW!

[torpor]

Content-delivery ain't what it used to be. Joe Bob Basement Studio can put his mp3's in the same pipeline that Mega-Record Pimp Corp can.

The difference is, whether people will pay attention to you or not - not whether they -can- through whatever means are available, but whether they will.

At ampfea.org we've been gathering together, as a crew of Artists, to present a united front and stable base of operations for use by our individual members to use for promoting their artistic efforts.

This is the future. There's no -need- any more for media giants banded together to share/consume resources for promotion, there is now the need for Content Producers to cut through the dreck and get good material online, and deliverable. It costs nothing to promote an .mp3 track these days, far and wide, to all and sundry, and it can be done very, very, effectively.

I see the day when those 80's Golden Dreams of media control in the hands of the people is actually feasible. Lets hope we avoid some of those other predictions ...

Re:The time for Artists to gather together is NOW!

[torpor]

That's what I'm saying: its not getting the material to the end-user, that is easy now in this digital age, for anyone. Its cheap. Super cheap.

The problem is, getting the attention of the end-user. There's too much other stuff going on to compete for that persons attention.

Artists banding together to solve this problem, technologically, I imagine is the worst nightmare of the Big Media Board ... but it is being solved. My fans, combined with your fans, combined with our other muso buddies fans == a massive fanbase to which we can all cross-promote together. Collectively, an Artists Group promoting to a Fan Group will result in both groups expanding in size ...

The means to do this are now in our hands, as artists. What's needed, is more artists, banding together collectively, and then doing it. There are no longer any technologically significant barriers to this problem.

Direct purchase

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine purchasing your shows direct from the producing company. One new copy made available per week. Mine to download and then view when I felt like it. No 'channels' or 'networks' in the traditional sense.
No adds.

Or another scenario; I live in a large city ( > 4 million). Only the very largest of companies can afford to advertise. With narrowcasting a sort of advertising model could be supported where a small business might only choose to advertise in a 2km radius - or maybe only to profiled recieptients.

Dunnno.... but things have got to get better.

AC

Parallels to the history of print

[kompiluj]

You might not know but the inventor of print, Gutenberg did not want to print large volumes of books - he wanted to print books that would look similar to the hand-copied ones (hence fancy font and illuminations) - see the Gutenberg bible - these were the incunabuli
He wanted to make much money. Were it not for his followers that stole his invention and started mass production of books (very similar to those we now nowadays - set up in antiqua typeface) that cheap books started to exist and made wide dissemination of knowledge possible.
If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible.

Re:Parallels to the history of print

[cmacb]

"If there were patents in Medieval Times, surely Gutenberg would obtain a one, and no print as we know it would be possible."

Don't be silly! Of course there would be print today.

The Gutenberg/RIAA (hey, maybe they'd even call it project Gutenberg) foundation would monitor it all and make sure that the "right" things were done. Your newspaper would cost $15 or so and you'd have to make sure that when you were done with it you either shredded or burned it so that nobody else could ILLEGALLY read it.

Quoting from a newpaper, book , or magazine would of course be out of the question. The Internet would represent a big threat, in fact the GRIAA would attempt to pass laws that ALL written content be on PAPER DAMMIT! and not appear on our video screens. Both Democrats and Republicans would fall all over themselves to help the GRIAA maintain law and order, after all, our laws are recorded on paper, in writing, and all of that would be property of the GRIAA. Can't afford to piss them off (and besides, Orin Hatch is no doubt an author as well as an accomplished composer and would have all sorts of personal reasons to wish that GRIAA violators would have their houses burned down).

I think things will change. When a lot of the old farts at the head of these industries (and our government) die, and probably not before. Lets hope they are all heavy smokers and drinkers. Actually I think it's a safe bet. (Except for Orin that is).

How about a distributed wireless network?

[Quizo69]

The problem of content and transmission today have to do with one thing - making money for someone. Everybody thinks in terms of paying for either bandwidth speed or throughput, or paying for content exclusive to one provider. This is not going to get us anywhere.

What I envision is much simpler - pay for a piece of hardware once(high speed wireless transmitter/receiver with intelligent peer routing), and then the bandwidth is not paid for by anyone, because there's no traditional infrastructure to set up. If a company would just make this type of equipment it could set free all those who currently are beholden to their ISP/cable companies for "giving" them a certain amount of bandwidth in exchange for $$$. If you make these wireless internet nodes in such a way that they auto-aggregate and reorder themselves based on surrounding nodes, you would effectively have unlimited bandwidth (to the limit of transmission tech of course) not monopolised by anyone. Much like Bittorrent, the more nodes you had, the faster it would be. Conversely, you could have high power models for remote areas to transmit/receive further.

It's a paradigm shift in thinking (since the very notion of not needing to pay constantly for access is foreign to most), and I don't have all the technical answers to this sort of idea, but surely the idea itself has merit?

Re:How about a distributed wireless network?

[coopaq]

Every geek I know dreams of this. Of course the cable that is in the ground right now is faster than the wireless technology which you propose.

While some may settle for, let's say, 10Mb/s bandwidth they get from sharing their "neighborhood" wireless connections the physical wires directly to the cable/phone/ISP will be faster due to their really expensive hardware and fiberoptics which they own. We all will have a tough time putting Cisco routers in our houses.

All of us here seem to have this otaku for wireless and free internet service so we can download our free content and free music which will all be produced for free of course.

We will find a way to live in a globalised world with more competition and commodities and a balance will be found around the monopolies we see today.

One could make the argument (easily) that our country (the US)is a monopoly and soon, if not already, we will be experiencing serious and unexpected competition which will drive many of our standards of living downward or sideways at least. It will make these industries that are threatened by the edge actually threatened more frequently and more rapidly.

Article raises an interesting question.

[Duderstadt]

While most people are ignorant of this fact, unlimited access to the Internet requires nothing more than an access point into the global communications infrastucture.

You certainly do not need a so-called Internet Service Provider.

So, what would it take to create your own access point?

Re:Change the business model

[El Torico]

I want to agree to this, but with a few caveats.

The costs of transmission will decrease for every new technology as it is used and matures. However, it isn't cheap to maintain a large network since it becomes less expensive, but it never becomes cheap.

Technology is only one variable; people, law, markets, etc. all have to be factored in. It isn't so easy to predict the death of an organization since it has options for staying alive that you didn't consider. As much as I don't like Verizon either (especially the old Nynex part), they have managed to stick around.

Being a content provider is no guarantee of success. There have been more than a few spectacular failures of media companies (Vivendi comes to mind as a recent one).

On a side note, I have always wondered why the 5 or 6 largest ISPs never tried to build a true cartel (aside from the law).

Just owning the pipes counts for something...

[transporter]

I have been involved in a wireless ISP providing high speed Internet access to people in rural areas who can't get DSL. As innovative as our product is, as we use Motorola Canopy to get to the customers the phone company didn't want to spend the money on, our backend is still provided by...that same phone company. The phone company makes about 18,000-plus a year just on its T1 line to us. We get more customers and need another T1 or to go to a T3. The phone company makes even more off of us.

So the moral of the story is, don't discount owning the pipes. Some people may find a way around part of your business, but you can still stick it to your remaining customers for quite some time and get away with it!

Transporter