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Written by Ken DiPietro
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Friday, 01 April 2005 |
While reading up on the news that is related to our industry I found
the following two stories that I thought needed to be mentioned and
commented on.
As quoted from this article:
"Charter
Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR) today announced that it has begun
offering video mail as part of its Charter High-Speed(TM) Internet
bundle of services. Charter Video Mail(TM) is available free of charge
to customers, regardless of the speed of their connection. While a
webcam is required to send video mail, no additional equipment is
required to receive it."
Further down in the article is this paragraph:
"Ms.
Hedges said the constantly-evolving high-speed product is designed to
meet the needs of customers and stay ahead of the competition.
'Internet service is a highly competitive offering,' she said. 'We
compete on price, speed, security, content, features and functions.
'Video mail is a feature that will prove to be very popular with a
certain segment of the high-speed market.'" Later in the same article we find this:
"Charter
Video Mail -- using the Vibe Solutions Group platform -- provides for
up to 45 seconds of recording time, with ease of recording through
VCR-like (stop/record/preview) functionality. For customers with speeds
of 3 Mbps and higher, the service also comes with Greeting Card and
Story Teller applications. Greeting Card includes more than 40
different video greeting cards that can be customized with a special
message. Story Teller enables a user to assemble and record pictures in
a video slideshow to share with friends and family.
For the
receiver of video mail, retrieval simply requires clicking on a link.
Rather than being stored in the recipient's inbox and taking up
capacity, the video mail is stored on a server for a full 30 days."
So,
this is a bandwidth hungry application that is being rolled out by
Charter who believes that it will appeal to a "certain segment of the
high-speed market."
Next we have this article and the following quote:
"Owners
of Portable Media Centers, smart phones and pocket computers will be
able to download daily programs and other video content from MSNBC.com,
Food Network, Fox Sports, IFilm and other content providers, Microsoft
said. The company had announced plans for the MSN Video Downloads
service at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Microsoft
said about 20 content partners, including CinemaNow, MTV, Napster and
TiVo, have agreed to make video formatted for devices using Windows
Mobile since the launch of Portable Media Center last year."
A little further down in the article is this quote:
"Microsoft
said subscribers will be able to select content such as sports clips,
news headlines and music videos from the MSN Video Downloads Web site.
Some content can also be downloaded to PCs running Windows XP. The
service is available in the United States for an annual subscription of
$19.95. Some free content also be available without a paid membership."
We
keep talking about customer usage patterns as though they are static.
The idea that information from 2002 might be useful in predicting
anything in 2006 other than what the historical values were seems
ridiculous to me. As these two articles clearly indicate, we are not in
a field that is linear, far from it. Rather than a slow evolutionary
climb we are more faced with a punctuated equilibrium where we will see
sharp climbs that plateau for an indeterminate amount of time before we
see another sharp rise again.
To illustrate this I would like to
point out what happened when Napster first became mainstream. (Let's
leave the legality issue out of this, we don't need any red herrings
introduced in this discussion.) In a matter of a few months dialup ISPs
noticed a steep rise in both bandwidth usage and duration of connection
time. This one application caused a number of people to become
disenchanted with dialup and convinced them to make the move to
broadband.
We keep talking about what the next "killer
application" will be as though this would be just one thing that would
all of a sudden capture the entire population and cause a huge surge in
traffic. What if the next "killer app" turns out to be a number of
smaller applications that all converge over a short timeframe?
The
real questions that needs to be asked is, does anyone really believe
the demand for bandwidth will go down? I submit that there is nobody
out there who can put forth a qualified argument stating it will. The
issue is how fast will the rise in bandwidth happen and how fast can we
accommodate it. |
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