[opendtv] Re: Twang's Tuesday Tribune (Mark's Monday Memo)
- From: "Kon Wilms" <kon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 11:15:52 -0700
>Backhaul.
>Read it again:
I'm sorry but which part of this quote do you not understand? -
"GE American Communications (GE Americom) announced today that
California-based Geocast Network Systems, Inc. (Geocast) will be
distributing its new rich-media program service that delivers high-quality
audio-visual and interactive content to the PC desktop via the GE-4
satellite."
>You clearly do not know what happened. Geocast was failing before
they ever deployed a receiver. As I said, the infrastructure was too
fragile to support the business. No doubt there may have been
Blah blah.
>Do you remember when the PC industry had to deal with the early
Multimedia PC disaster? I'm talking about the early '90s when nearly
25% of Multimedia PC upgrades were being returned because the
out-of-the-box experience was such a disaster. These upgrades
Early 90s can only be circa first releases of Windows and mm hardware, so --
Yes, the soundblaster did in fact suck in its first release (we Amiga people
used to ridicule PC users at every opportunity). However, Creative Labs made
some changes to their card and it caught on. Microsoft did some upgrades to
the OS, and windows became more game-friendly.
Funny thing though - they controlled the pipe as well as user experience. So
how that relates to GeoCast attempting to make good use of a pipe over which
they have no control is, well, irrelevant.
>GeoCast did the studies and found that the difficulty in establishing
reliable reception invalidated the entire business model .
Didn't they also change business models once or twice in mid-stride? That is
a killer too. Oh yeah, plus ofcourse the CONTENT wasn't there.
>Apples and oranges. Geocast was not representing its business model
as competition for broadband. Perhaps this is where you are getting
confused. These service are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Nope. Everyone in the datacast industry will agree one one thing - high
speed killed it. If you want to fight that concept then you are a voice in
the wilderness - don't know how else to put it to you.
The aren't complimentary -- Joe user can't tell the difference between news
on a web page delivered over the air and the same news from the web ('same
news articles'). But, on the other hand, he usually isn't *stupid* enough to
buy a new piece of hardware to duplicate what he already gets with his
cable/dsl modem.
>What I am proposing is an infrastructure that delivers MANY bit rate
intensive applications to the masses. Movies, and everything else you
listed are simply applications.
Propose all you want, but users do not buy technology, they buy
applications. All the technology you're going on about is completely
deliverable -- so put your money where your mouth is and instead of waving
your hands and saying 'but we can deliver all this content via blah and blah
and blah', tell me, as Joe User, what applications I can buy from your
service, and what the price entry point for a receiver device is.
>Geocast was not "playing games." iBlast did launch a game application
in the LA market. Needless to say if failed.
Um, your quote listed Electronic Arts. Maybe you need to check what they
make.
>And by the way, many school districts are using broadcast
technologies to do this today.
They are not in the large percentage. Most schools use the benefit of DVD
roms to distribute content. Heck, they aren't producing content and
courseware at such a rate that they need to datacast it.
>have a similar level of control. But it takes infrastructure. You
need to think about the distribution of K-12 courseware and real time
updates from teachers to local caches, both in the schools and in the
homes of students. I sure would have loved to be able to pull up the
courses my kids were taking, to see what the real homework
assignments were, or to receive an e-mail from a teacher when my kids
screwed up.
You should run that by these people. I'm sure you would have the door
slammed in your face faster than you can get half of that techno-babble
across to them.
>Yes, I said an e-mail. But not in the traditional sense. If every
receiver has a distinct IP address, and you give that address to
someone, they can send you a message via a one-way data broadcast
Yeah that's targeting. An IP address isn't used, rather a unique receiver ID
is. IP addresses can be changed and duplicated, you know.
>system. So imagine that a teacher has the address for every student
in the class, be it a traditional 2-way e-mail address or a 1-way
message delivery system. The teacher can blast messages to every
student, or send personal messages to individual students. This can
all be done by subscribing a STB to a data broadcast service that is
updated once a day during off-peak hours.
Sorry, no demand. We have a system that does that. It was demo'd at NAB in
1998/1999/2000. 'Wow that's cool' - but other than that no interest.
Changing distribution systems is a logistical nightmare - on and most
important - it MAY mean that some employees would be out of a job. And that
doesn't go down well.
Cheers
Kon
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