At 12:26 PM 2/1/2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
Also, phone companies ARE gradually laying fiber everywhere, and while
they may or may not take it right up to your house they'll certainly
take it to your neighborhood, and maybe only "finish off" with copper.
It's just that installing fiber is expensive,
About $900 per house, where I live, according to some acquaintances
in the telco.
and takes time, and
customers won't pay much of a premium for it. They "have" to do it
anyway to compete with e.g. cable, and they are all doubtless running
scared in front of the possibility that nobody will own non-cell phones
anymore in a year or five so that either they are in a position to
deliver streaming media to the home in competition with the cable
company or they all belly right up in that market. A bit of a race, in
other words, where they are ahead and behind at the same time.
The term of art is "triple play"... phone, entertainment, internet
access all from one provider.
It won't be done for computer users, though. Not enough money in it,
and what there is is already developed. Delivering entertainment, on
the other hand -- there aren't any visible upper bounds on what one use
there. If you treble the bandwidth, you just make HDTV cheaper and
permit more stations and make it more feasible to deliver movies on
demands in real time -- bleep through 4-5 GB in 1 minute or two, then
display it at your liesure...
Subject to a raft of content management requirements (maybe I don't
want you fast forwarding through commercials? Maybe I want to charge
you "per viewing"
The big question/challenge in that business is how do you monetize
individual uses of something that has previously been consumed as a
utility stream e.g. rather than broadcasting a program for all, or
none, to view, and charging advertisers by using statistical
measures (Nielsen ratings), can I actually measure the viewership
(with demographic breakdowns) and charge on that basis.. Yes, Mr.
Vendor, 354,313.5 people watched your commercial, of which 516 were
in your target demographic.... Or, rather than charging you $10/month
for HBO, and you can watch that movie as many times as you want, we
can charge you only $0.99 per viewing of Movie #A (so the we can pay
studio X their fee) and $0.89 for a viewing of Movie #B (because
Studio Y didn't give as many gross points to their star, so they can
discount it)
Jim
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