[opendtv] Re: News: Those licenses will soon be worthless...
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "OpenDTV (E-mail)" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:07:01 -0400
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> Yup. You can pay based on packaging (walled gardens)
> or you can pay based on usage, with a portion of the
> money going to the bandwidth provider and the rest
> going to the content provider. My belief is that
> consumers will favor ala carte services and that the
> public Internet will be the stimulus to drive this.
I think it gets more ambiguous than this, and I think
"a la carte" is an orthogonal discussion.
Let's say an OTA network agrees to sell some bandwidth
to an OEM, for the purpose of transmitting their
receiver firmware updates. That would be transmission
of non traditional content in a TV walled garden. It's
not really correct to say that the DTT multiplex is
transmitting based on packaging.
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?
I mean, an ISP can hardly allow just anyone to host
web sites with enormous files and millions of clients
out there downloading them, unicast style. So if this
type of service becomes popular at all, what will
happen?
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.
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.
Bert
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