[opendtv] Re: Bundling and competition
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 20:53:17 +0000
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> Perhaps "natural monopolies" logically lead to natural technology shifts
> like the "Negroponte switch."
-------------------
From Wikipedia:
In the 1980s Professor Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab at MIT originated
the meme, that came to be known as the "Negroponte Switch". Put simply he
suggested that due to accidents of engineering history we had ended with static
devices - such as televisions receiving their content via signals travelling
over the airways while devices which should have been mobile and personal -
such as telephones were receiving their content over static cables. It was his
idea that a better use of available communication resource would result if the
information (such as phone calls) going through the cables was to go through
the air and that going through the air (such as TV programmes) was to be
delivered via cables. Negroponte called this "trading places," but his
co-presenter (George Gilder), at an event organised by Northern Telecom called
it the "Negroponte Switch" and that name stuck.
-------------------
That sounds too artsy for my taste. It's not an "accident of engineering
history," as much as technical limitations of the technology of the day.
Transmitting radio (and later TV) to the millions, OTA, when cabled
infrastructure was still practically non-existent and/or very narrow band
(telegraph), was quite feasible. When TV came about, the expensive cabled
infrastructure was devoted to two-way narrowband voice telephony. There was no
practical way of scaling up two-way voice telephony over RF, to compete against
the cabled version.
Cable TV required an expensive prospect of laying coax everywhere, and even
that was only for one-way broadcast for a long time.
Still now, wireless allows multiple different media to compete in a way that
wired media cannot. So when you can add wireless telephony to the mix, that
allows multiple telephone services to compete everywhere.
Wireless OTA TV is exactly the same thing still. It allows competition in a way
that cabled TV doesn't. And digital OTA TV even takes away a lot of the
bandwidth limitations of analog OTA TV.
Wireless two-way broadband is still a problem, though, in dense population
centers especially. So there you have it. No accidents at all. Just
technological evolution.
Bert
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