[opendtv] Re: More on Verizon & Google

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:03:06 -0500

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

>> Egalitarian has nothing to do with it. The point is, the Internet
>> is for the most part ad supported, and that's why it is popular.
>> If people had to pay by the minute, or by the number of hops their
>> datagrams must travel across, or by the e-mail or web session, the
>> equivalent of which they had to do with telephone service back
>> when, the Internet would never have become what it is today.
>
> Once again you are pulling stuff out of your A$$ Bert.
>
> Advertising plays a minimal role in the generation of revenues to
> pay for the operation of the Internet.

Would it have helped if I said "content" on the Internet?

I know people pay the hookup fee, Craig. But the hookup fee is not what pays 
for your access the information stored in a zillion web sites, and very often 
not even for your e-mail service. FOTA TV doesn't need that hookup fee, at 
least not nearly to the extent a wired infrastructure like the Internet needs 
it. So you factor that element out of it, and you're left with the same mostly 
ad-supported model.

> The major difference from the old telco model is that consumers
> are paying for the pipe, and to a limited extent for some of the
> services you listed above. The typical broadband service includes
> access charges, e-mail hosting, and increasingly server space for
> website hosting.

The major difference is that the hookup fee is a flat fee, Craig. E-mail 
hosting can be purely ad-supported. The old telco model was to pay for every 
amount of service you used, as well as a basic hookup fee, which is EXACTLY 
what you are advocating for TV.

> Swamp Head is paying about $15 per month for the hosting of our
> website and e-mail. We do not recover any of this cost with
> advertising, but one could say that the entire point of having the
> website is to help consumers learn about us and our products.

A business will of course fund its web site any way that it wants. Just like 
the content owner of a FOTA TV program would do. It's ad supported typically, 
but in principle it doesn't HAVE to be. PBS is not totally ad-supported, right? 
The important point being, both in FOTA TV and on the Internet, the end user is 
not paying for every service he is using, at least not directly. The end user 
gets as much service as he can swallow, no change in price.

I'm not even limiting this to FOTA TV. Even the current MVPD model, while it is 
a walled garden, is not a pay-per-service-used model that you advocate for TV. 
The fact remains, FOTA TV is as close to the Internet model as you can get for 
TV program distribution.

I would be perfectly happy to get an unbiased reading of what FOTA usership 
actually is now, Craig. Unfortunately, today's FCC need not apply for that job, 
as far as I'm concerned.

Bert
rds 
 
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