[opendtv] Re: News: Those licenses will soon be worthless...

At 4:07 PM -0400 4/26/05, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
>On the opposite side of the coin, let's assume that
>an ISP agrees to host a web site for an aspiring TV
>producer. If this guy is good enough, that web site
>will generate loads of traffic, even if the downloads
>are all non-real-time. They're all huge files. The ISP
>will charge this aspiring producer accordingly, and
>will have strict limits on how many of these guys he
>can accommodate. Has that become similar to a walled
>garden?

This is NOT a valid example. Very few volume users of bandwidth for 
downloading large media files depend on the ISPs that host their web 
sites. Once you reach the point where this becomes a significant 
bandwidth problem you move your media files to a company that has the 
ability to host them properly - e.g. Akamai. Your site can still be 
hosted by ANY ISP, but the download files will be linked and 
delivered by edge servers.  And yes, you pay for this privilege. 
There is no free lunch.

>The ISP will want to either provide these as
>multicasts, which instantly creates a walled garden,
>or if the ISP is also a multichannel TV provider,
>perhaps the ISP will move those files to his broadcast
>tier. Again, walled garden.

Again, you've got it wrong. ANYONE can access media files from a 
service like Akamai, if the company paying Akamai to deliver their 
files makes them available to the general public. That being said, 
they may use a transactional model to collect fees for the content, 
as CNN and others are doing, or they may use a company like Alkamai 
to provision their private networks (Intranets).

In the end, I suspect that the telcos will move to a model that will 
look much more like Akamai than a cable head end.

>
>I think it all boils down to this. If the stable
>equilibrium position is one where you have very many
>sources of content, each of which has very few people
>interested in downloading, the existing Internet is
>probably not too bad. But if (as I expect) a small
>number of hugely popular sources emerges, that's when
>walled gardens will again be created, to get that
>content out efficiently.

Close.

I agree that small operators will get by using the public Internet 
without special provisioning for their files.

But I disagree that the delivery of large media files to the masses 
will be restricted to walled gardens. Many content providers are 
trying to get around the gatekeepers who run the walled gardens. They 
will seek out services that make their content available to anyone 
with a broadband Internet connection.

You are confusing the walled garden (gatekeeper) business model, with 
a business model that seeks to bypass the gatekeepers by moving 
content to the edges of the network where it can be delivers to 
anyone, including all of the people who get their broadband service 
from the walled garden gatekeepers. The only thing the gatekeepers 
can do to stop this is to block access to digital media files that 
come from competitors. The telcos would LOVE this!

Regards
Craig
 
 
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