NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/hardware-part1/4457

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 6.3 KB | 124 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Path: netnews.upenn.edu!dsinc!scala!news
From: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
Subject: Re: Can AT Surfer compete with Apple/Disney?
Sender: [e-mail] (Usenet administrator)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 19:05:38 GMT
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
References: <4g4t4s$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4g573b$[e-mail]>
Nntp-Posting-Host: gator
Organization: Scala Computer Television, US Research Center

In <4g573b$[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Jason Compton) writes:
>Greg_Blanchard ([e-mail]) wrote:
>
>: I said that the window of opportunity for a 'net surfer package is very
>: small. (in a year or two new tech will make the web as accessible as the
>: telephone or the whole concept will be as dead as an Atari 2600).  He
>
>Well, I wholeheartedly disagree with you on that point.

>Cable has a 30% market penetration in the US.  Cable's not very
>expensive.  A lot of money has gone into putting the current coax cable
>structure in.

And it's that very infrastructure that will drive the shift to digital
cable networking. For example, the cable system in my area is the
weakest deployed anywhere, it handles about 300MHz (the best cable
systems manage up to about 1GHz). They're currently at the hair edge
on the number of channels they can support, which is 2-38 plus another
4 or 5 in another band. That's it, anytime they want to put something
new in they have to kick something else out. If a new TV station opens
up in Philadelphia, we could lose MTV or CNN!

Now enter digital. You get 4-8 digital (MPEG-2) channels in the space
of each analog channel. While updating cable boxes isn't cheap, they
can pay for it by charging for new channels. And that $300 per set top
is one hell of a lot cheaper than new wire.

Cable modems are part of the whole "digital TV" picture; you get about
25 Mbits/second/channel using typical encoding schemes. That's 2.5x
your typical Enthernet speed. Sure, you'll have lots of people sharing
it eventually, but in the move to digital TV, every cable company is
going to be able to find a spare channel or two for cable modems,
since that's an instant revnue stream.

>Just up and replacing this with something totally new is not going to be
>financially feasible unless it's just as cheap as putting in cable, which
>I doubt.  Same goes for any "cable modem" solution--unless it's just as
>cheap for the home, it's not going anywhere.

There's nothing really pushing a move to better cable these days. If
people were convinced about the idea of video on demand over cable,
you would need it. That's probably something video dialtone will
always do better anyway, just based on deployment strategies. After
all, while going optical would give a cable system tons more
bandwidth, it also gives them much more distance. So they could cover
the same number of homes with many fewer head ends. The actual slice
of unassigned bandwidth per home could well be the same.

The cable modem can easily be made attractive. For only a little more
than you pay your ISP today, you get a cable modem ($2/month or
some-such) that Ethernets into your computer. You have an unholy ton
of bandwidth (at least until all your neighbors get signed up), and no
phone charges. You get to laugh T1s (not too loudly, of course, since
a cable provider could very well have you hooked into the net via a T1
or maybe T3, until some serious cable modem base is established). Even
with that, their server will cache things, just like the "big nets" do
for their Internet bridges.

>People aren't going to buy totally new technology more often than they
>buy cars.

The average Joe, probably not. Me, I buy a car every 6-8 years unless
it dies before then. I buy a new computer or major piece of one at
least once a year, not to mention other high tech items (TV, stereo,
audio, synthesizers, etc). If a cable head office can find 1000 or so
guys like me in their customer base, they could very well make another
$250,000-$500,000 a year off the cable modem idea. And it's a pretty
sound technology -- the modem to computer link is the real limit today
(most folks aren't putting 100Mbit/s Ethernet in their homes).

>The fact that VHS VCRs and home computers caught on, I believe, is
>something of a fluke.

Not at all, they're great examples of consumer product introductions,
no more surprising than CDs (which I think everyone reading must
understand). Cable has helped prove that we have a nation of video
junkies. It was just a matter of time before recording TV became a
consumer priced item. The writing was on the wall -- compact cassettes
were already overrunning LPs in popularity, even before CDs came on
the market. The reason, of course, is that the same system that you
play it on can copy your buddy's records. So (in the same country that
had a passing fancy with the 8-track), you didn't need LPs anymore,
just cassettes.

Sure, the VCR needed a killer app to launch the volumes, and that,
history records, was home porn. Folks who'd never be caught downtown
in a popcorn-free theater in the bad side of town could see what they
wanted at home. The next big thing was home recording, both time
shifting and "I got it off HBO". Rentals clinched the deal, and once
the volumes were up, buying a movie hit the consumer-tolerance factor
in price, much as recorded music had.

> Don't count on ISDN madness sweeping the nation.

Things happen for a reason. PCs caught on because people brought them
home to do homework on. PC games gave them something else to do with
those systems, and begat the second wave of home computers, bought
mainly to play games and other bits that had become consumerized. The
Internet isn't consumerized yet, and even though the Web is pushing it
that way, I think it's going to take more than today's Web to hit that
volume. It's not necessary right now -- even the 9 to 20 million
internet users (depending on who's estimate you use) is enough of a
driving force to seed a consumer-friendly market. Consumers don't
flock to something unless it's already there.

Dave Haynie          | ex-Commodore Engineering |   for DiskSalv 3 &
Sr. Systems Engineer |  Hardwired Media Company | "The Deathbed Vigil"
Scala Inc., US R&D   |    Ki No Kawa Aikido     |     [e-mail]

         "Feeling ... Pretty ... Psyched" -R.E.M.