[opendtv] Re: The Boldest Dumb Idea I've Ever Seen

I think short news segments link CNN Headline news might be useful on a 
cell phone sized screen.  It's the pay by the minute idea that I don't 
think will fly.

Also, I think cell phone screen resolution can be so low that the video 
bit rate could also be very low.  This makes it an idea Internet 
streaming option for Wifi delivery and brings us back to the walled 
garden debate.  Will folks purchase proprietary content by the minute if 
the entire Internet is available and mostly free?

- Tom


John Willkie wrote:
> What is that analgous to?  
> 
> If I remember correctly, in 1956, a portable radio (with battery) was the 
> size of a small picnic basket.  The sound was considered tinny.
> 
> When I got my first portble radio in 1964 (Radio Shack, shopper's world, 
> Natick MA), the 9 volt battery lasted about six hours and the radio was very 
> tinny-sounding.  But, it worked in bed, where I wasn't supposed to be 
> listening to the radio when I should have been sleeping.  I used it for about 
> five years, until the tape fixes fell off about 1969.  However, I used it 
> never inside, after I got my Hallicrafters S-120 (which is still stored up in 
> the rafters 30 some years later.)
> 
> Portable radios didn't become useful until the late 1970's, with the advent 
> of the Sony Walkman and other fm/am/tape/cd playback devices that came along 
> later.   No crappy speakers: headphones. I once sat down and figured that 
> I've spent more than $2000 for such devices. As an ardent bicyclist, I've 
> always been interested in handheld media so that I could listen to NPR, news 
> and music on the radio while riding.
> 
> I've also owned three portable hand-held TVs.  But, they didn't make me pay 
> by the minute to watch tv, and they let me watch all available forms of 
> wireless TV.  I found that they were useful only for spot checks of the 
> signal  my LPTV station, and only for a few seconds.
> 
> To think that people will for any length of time spend $$ per minute to watch 
> walled-in content that is not unique, that is only a subset of the content 
> available by satellite (when will we have hand-held DirecTV receivers),  on a 
> small screen that won't work well as a feeder device to larger displays, and 
> at A TIME and PLACE(s) that one should not be watching TV, and indeed, 
> probably left home TO GET AWAY FROM a TV set, is to be smoking the good stuff.
> 
> The real purpose here is to try to reverse the decline in ARPU (average 
> revenue per user) of cellular companies.  I believe it won't even help that, 
> and it will lead to greater churn of customers as they realize the stupidity 
> of their purchase of the new phone.
> 
> The first adopter of MediaFLO is Verizon.  Have you seen the new flight of 
> national spots for Verizon? They are pimping a new -- from them -- service 
> that gives you turn-by-turn directions on your cell phone.  Just a few years 
> back, Verizon was telling the FCC that it would never be economical to offer 
> GPS in cell phones.  So, they have either bitten the bullet and adopted the 
> Nextel model of GPS-enabled cell phones, or they are promoting a technology 
> that highlights the fact that they can (and do) track the minute by minute 
> position of their customers, down to which side of the street they're walking 
> upon.
> 
> The spot even features a guy who is so dumb that he asks a clerk in a 
> hardware store for such a phone, and she ridicules him.  It's been a long 
> time since I saw a spot that was so contempuous of it's customers and 
> prospects, but the Sprint spot with the guy who gets into a pretzel to watch 
> TV on his cell phone gets an honorable mention.
> 
> Just this week, I talked to a fellow at a venture-backed wireless startup (I 
> sure hope he doesn't read this list).  He thought that it was a good thing 
> that content producers, through content aggregators, were willing to license 
> short-form small screen repackaged versions of big-screen content.  Actually, 
> they'll license used content to just about any fool that distributes it 
> securely and can't rebroadcast it.
> 
> He even told me that their technology was complementary to and not 
> competitive with MediaFLO, then explained that their technology helps the 
> signal work even when a car goes behind a mountain, and the content is 
> optimized for small screen.  These are things that MediaFLO appears to do 
> quite well, thank you, with the base and enhanced layers.  I suspect that 
> Qualcomm will eventually be suing this firm for patent infringement on 
> several grounds.
> 
> I was once enamored of the EVR concept, until my late father explained how 
> stupid it was to pay $1500 for the hardware and $75 per hour to record TV 
> shows on film, regardless of the fantastic technology.  Less than a decade 
> later, all on my own, when I first saw the concept, I figured out that 
> Polaroid's Instant Movies (let's see, take the movie at Disneyland, and then 
> whip out the screen and projector to watch the results inside the park) was a 
> fundamentally stupid idea, despite the technology.  Now, I'm saying that the 
> mobile phone technology's emperor is wearing no clothes in it's walled TV 
> venture.  With those three exceptions, I've been in favor of virtually all 
> new forms of entertainment and communications in my lifetime.
> 
> In 1952, most people could foresee that they would never pay $0.10 per minute 
> or $5.00 per month to watch on a small color screen, with tinny sound, three 
> minute versions of soap operas, national newscasts and sports highlights. 
> 
> "What's the killer app?"
> 
> John Willkie
> 
> ________
> Cliff Benham wrote:
> 
> Richard Hollandsworth wrote:
> 
> 
>>I would never watch a video on a tinny/tiny screen,
>>
> 
> 
> and in 1952, I bet no one thought anybody would listen to a tinny sounding 
> portable radio the size of a pack ofcigarettes.
> 
>  
>  
>  
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