[opendtv] Re: Twang's Tuesday Tribune (Mark's Monday Memo)

At 10:18 AM -0700 4/29/04, Kon wrote:
>Good point but one little problem - Geocast was satellite-based. As were
>others such as Cyberstar, Astro, ...

Sorry, but you are incorrect. I know the people who ran the company 
and I can assure you that the business model was to use the 
terrestrial DTV spectrum. They were attempting to develop a receiver 
and to sign up broadcasters to push the bits, but the infrastructure 
was too fragile to make the business model work.

>  >2. Without a reliable infrastructure there is little incentive to
>develop the receivers necessary to launch such a service. You don't
>have to believe me...just ask Dewey.
>
>That's true. Reception is the usual killer. And a percentage of the first
>trial group usually has a problem with reception. But the killer has always
>been lack of a business plan.

The business model is valid. But you cannot launch a product that 
must be sold at retail and installed by consumers, where there is a 
risk that upwards of 25% of the receivers will be returned.

>
>What do you sell on the datacasting service?

We just went through that Kon.

Just think of it as Akamai on steroids.

>
>Website caching? Nope, got that on Cable/DSL.

It complements these pipes for this application, allowing you to 
update caches in things that are not connected to wires.

>Movies? Nope, got blockbuster down the road, or cable/sat. tv.

Ever hear of Dotcast...they are using NTSC to deliver movie bits for Disney.

>Games? Nope, got Gamespot on the Cable/DSL modem.

The future of games appears to be on-line gaming. You need a good 
two-way pipe to play in this market.

>News? Nope, got the paper at the doorstep for $1 - why do I want a 
>$300 newspaper receiver? If not, I use my Cable/DSL modem.

Because it is getting too expensive to distribute those papers to 
your door and the product is growing less competitive with electronic 
media. Ther are a number of broadcasters who are also in the 
newspaper business, like Belo, who are anxious to deliver the paper 
electronically, so they can eliminate those presses.

The number of people who subscribe to papers continues to decline. 
People want news when it happens, not yesterday's news this morning.

Obviously NOBODY uses the Internet or radio to get their news.

:-(

And you are not buying a newspaper receiver. You are buying an 
information appliance that does MANY other things. The newspaper is 
just one of MANY applications.

>Distance Education? Nope, colleges are already using Cable/DSL.

Yup. And they ship the rich media to you on CD and DVDs because it is 
too expensive to stream it, and you many not be connected to the 
Internet when you want to view a class.

>
>You might say that there are lots of scenarios here that will work in a
>different variation, but the difference is that I've lived all these
>scenarios first hand and seen companies fail at attempting to deliver this
>content, whereas you are just pipe dreaming about it.

They did not fail because of the lack of a viable market. They have 
failed due to the lack of a viable infrastructure. And to a lesser 
extent, they have been waiting for the technology to mature so that 
cheap, reliable receivers can be deployed.

I'm sure you remember when the STB guys were moaning about the memory 
footprint required just to decode MPEG-2. Moore's Law is swamping 
those early arguments. One does not push a vision for the next 
quarter. When you are building an infrastructure that is intended to 
work for decades, you must take the long view. I would not have 
gotten far, trying to push "Desktop Video tools for HD production in 
1992; just getting a computer to play full resolution SD was a real 
challenge then. But it was easy to extrapolate that HD would be 
feasible in a decade.

What we are talking about here is working together to enable markets. 
There are more than enough powerful interests who DO NOT want to see 
this stuff happen, who will tell you that there is no market.

>
>The only type of datacasting that works is non-consumer oriented i.e.
>professional or government services. Consumers are just too fickle to please
>in this day and age.

We disagree.

Regards
Craig
 
 
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