Executive Advisory Program

The Future of TV

Posted by: Jack Santos

Let me preface this post by stating that I don’t consider myself a videophile, or even an audiophile.  I have friends (like Mike Clapis, owner of Clapis Associates, or Dave Passmore, Research Director of our network strategies group) that would probably puke at what I have done with my flat screen TV.

But I just accomplished something with my home media setup that I can only say is what EVERYONE will be doing within 5 years.  This also explains, in tangible terms, the recent acquisition of NBC universal by Comcast.

You see, I HATE that I am paying Comcast over $100 a month for what amounts to about 5 hours a month of TV watching (but includes 24X7 internet usage).  I also have wireless 3G access which, though not as fast as 8Mb/sec Comcast, is good enough at 1-2 Mbs.  And I pay for Netflix, which now offers online viewing of movies.

When I first started thinking about doing this I was told by a lot of nay-sayers all these “the sun will get in your eyes” excuses for why it won’t work:

Not enough bandwidth

Downloads will take too long

Picture/video quality will be horrible

PC isn’t powerful enough

Playback will constantly stop/start for a variety of factors

It won’t be easy to use for the average Joe

Two years ago that may have all been true.  What a difference time makes.

This week I cut my cable, and hooked my flat screen monitor up to the internet via a PC.  And now my access to content (free and pay) is even greater than what I had available via Comcast and “on-demand”.  The real bennie is the easier user interface – windows based, point and click  (a pox on cable directories).   Much  of it through a consolidated video search engine: “clicker.com”.  Video quality for the most part is as good as snow free, ghost free old time broadcast quality, and in some cases approaches 720P HD quality; 1080 is on the way.  YouTube, others are pushing the envelope on quality.  There is very little herky-jerky stop/start stuff going on, and I can still have PC window sessions and other things going on in the background (try doing that with cable).

 

 

The last piece that fit was a remote control;  I experimented with wireless mice, presentation devices, and wireless keyboards with varying degrees of success.  Until Kevin Kampman (from our identity strategies group) said “Hey Jack – I think there’s a an app for that”.  And there was.  I am now using iMocon on my iPhone to control the mouse and specialty keys (everything short of a keyboard), and it works well.  Point and click on videos, and away we go.

I will admit I take advantage of the Netflix unlimited download movies deal (for $15/month).  Still beats $100. I can also plug in my iPhone (when not using it as a remote) to play music on the 5.1 speaker system, or watch videos.

Add to this Digital Video Recording functionality, and the inevitable entrepreneurial zeal that will go into new features and functions based on PCs and iPhones. This is the future.

It took 40 years to go from ubiquitous broadcast TV to ubiquitous cable, with a hundred fold increase in content. it will take less than 5 to go from cable to ubiquitous Internet TV, with a thousand-plus fold increase in content. 

The real proof in the pudding is that my non-tecchie wife is loving it, and finds it easier to use than vanilla cable; and the choices....

Gotta go, YouTube's calling…

 

 

Let's do the time warp again...

Posted by Mike Rollings

Rocky Horror Picture Show fans will immediately sing the title of this post in their head.  It's funny how the mind associates things.  The same thing happened when I read a recent article:

(Edited excerpt) "The initial reaction was anything but positive. They thought it was a horrible idea... every institution he funded demanding ever more computer power and duplicating research on those machines. At the time computers were completely incompatible and moving data was a huge chore. The resistance came about because those institutions wanted to keep control of their computer resources. But, they soon saw that hooking up to it meant a huge increase in the potential computer power they had at their disposal.  They quickly learned that there was a tremendous gain for them, and it also fulfilled the goal of cutting spending on computers".

I read this and thought it could apply to a discussion about cloud computing, decisions about shared corporate computing environments, or just about any transformative change. 

What did this quote apply to?  Forty years ago today data flowed between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet -- the beginning of the Internet.  Mark Ward of BBC News interviewed Dr Larry Roberts, the MIT scientist fundamental to Arpanet.  The article "Celebrating 40 years of the net" describes what happened.

Happy Birthday Internet! The story is just another reminder that human behavior is a critical aspect of change.

 

NO Bars, NO Service

Posted by: Jack Santos

  A recent snafu with my cell phone roaming plan really brought home what it’s like to be one of the bandwidth have-nots.

Unfortunately, AT&T has a policy of not automatically transferring  features when you get a new phone.  So I ended up in a London hotel room, waiting for my cell to ring with directions to a meeting and…no bars, no service. My international calling plan was non-existent.

No problem. Call AT&T.  No service meant no 3G. No 3G on my laptop too.  Pull out the old, trusted fallback – the AT&T business calling card for international calling. 

Well my old trusted fallback was so old (2 years!) that no number on it was working (they were all disconnected and not forwarded).

Can’t call 1-800-CALL-ATT.  NO international access to US 800 numbers.

OK, frustration building (what was that about no bars?). Call the hotel concierge (help!). Here’s the AT&T international number, they say.  That, too, is out of service.

So I am in a foreign country (at least I speak the language), but no way to communicate to my carrier, with a phone and PC I can’t make calls with, and awaiting an incoming business call.  Not even Skype can bail me out at this stage (no WIFI in the hotel). What to do?

It occurred to me that for just a brief moment (or maybe an hour), I was in the land of the technology have-nots.  Off-net, no way to plug into the ether, starved, lonely, looking for attention, with nowhere to turn.

Kind of like an inhabitant of Vatican City, which according to Wolfram Alpha is last on the list of places with internet users – 90,000  (versus the US at 223M; by the way – China just passed the US with 253M users).

It also shows how much wireless is overtaking regular landlines – to the point of the atrophy of phone numbers for landline calls.  Or the inability to get number information, especially without internet access (an interesting conundrum).

So, you may ask, did I finally get “on-net”?   Yes – thru the British Telco operator, who connected me to a landline AT&T operator, who connected me to a wireless AT&T service number, who turned everything on in seconds. Problem solved.

Burton Group mobility analyst Paul DeBeasi has forecasted how wireless will overtake landline in all its forms (his posts here).  That time seems to have come. But our need for landline (and human-based service) just keeps on hanging on.

Pick a phone - get a network.

posted by: Jack Santos

Dave Passmore  (Research Director for our Network and Telecom Strategies coverage; he blogs here) recently made a comment that caught my attention:

    * With the Iphone, the cell phone world has changed from "pick a network - get a phone" to  "pick a phone - get a network".

I think it shows that with ubiquitous cell coverage, the network is a commodity.  Consumers drive selection, and they now focus on what's in their hands, not what network has better coverage.

Which makes me wonder when it will be:

    * "pick a phone -  pick a network"

That's what the AT&T landline breakup gave us...now the only question is when that will happen with US cell services (the rest of the world is ahead of us on this one....)

Dave tells me it may go in a different direction:

    *  "pick an application - get a phone and a network"

I am not sure about that...I think phones have made the transition from single use devices to platforms - it would be kind of like picking a radio and getting a car.

...unless one thinks of the entire phone/platform as an application suite.....hmmmm....

Net Brutality

Posted by: Jack Santos

Interesting news yesterday about the YouTube outage ostensibly set off by Pakistan's clumsy attempt at limiting YouTube access within their country (censoring anti-Muslim speech from the Netherlands). The politicization of the Internet continues…Pakistan complained to YouTube, but action to remove what YouTube finally deemed as "Hate Speech" was too slow for Pakistan (we’re talking hours here, not days), so unilateral action was taken.

It puts some of the Net Neutrality discussions in context of a broader picture. These are heavy duty philosophical issues we’re dealing with folks – what is hate speech, what isn’t (a very fine line, indeed)….and most importantly: who decides? countries? ICANN? The UN? The US? Content providers like Google (who want to be deliverers as well), or content deliverers like Comcast or Verizon (who are providers too)? In some ways, arbitrary decisions on spam and viruses are already made by all of the above – and one person’s spam is another person’s speech. Will Serbs consider Kosovar anthems hateful? Will Kurds feelings toward Turkish military recruitment videos be considered?

Then there are the just as important, but less hurtful (at least ostensibly) decisions made by carriers. When I first started allowing work at home within my department, we found that a cable carrier (then Time Warner) had made what appeared to them to be a harmless business decision – block VPN traffic. Unfortunately, we found out at a critical time when remote access to fix a production problem was needed. In fact, what probably happened was that some network bit-head started to turn off all ports except 80 and 443 (not to mention a few others) – the ones primarily used for web page traffic. Just for hee haws. When complaints started pouring in, Time-Warner management responded initially with ignorance, then defensiveness ("we decide what we run on our network") followed quickly by entrepreneurship ("this is business use – you need to be paying business rates").. In the new world order the distinction between business and personal is ever so slight – but that’s a topic for another time.

That, my friends, was an earlier version of what net neutrality is all about. Time-Warner backed off, opened the ports, and things haven’t changed….until now. Comcast sees its "On Demand" service revenue decline, while bit traffic on the network continues to go up because of movie downloads from the Netflix and Apples of the world. So the response becomes protective of lost revenue "movie downloaders should pay more – they are bandwidth hogs". And for businesses, the same storm clouds hold true for ecommerce websites, and business/home use.

In the spirit of Ayn Rand I believe that the market can solve this problem – if there was a market. For most homes, Internet access is provided by a virtual monopoly – the same kind of monopoly that would not allow you to add third party phones to their lines way back when.. Network providers would love to have THAT revenue stream as well….

So net neutrality matters, and net brutality continues…keep an eye on both.