video over TCP/IP

Just the urls, ma'am.
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How do you want to get your internet video?

Bit Torrent
1
50%
rentals
0
No votes
all-you-can-watch monthly subscriptions
0
No votes
buying movies or shows individually, a la iTunes
1
50%
 
Total votes: 2

Jonathan
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video over TCP/IP

Post by Jonathan »

http://extremetech.com/ article about Starz launching an internet movie subscription and rental service using WMV
Leichtman said Vongo's subscription approach could gain an edge with customers, who are already accustomed to paying monthly for cable and satellite channels rather than buying shows or movies individually over the Internet.
...
"We should not think the success of iPod music extends to pay-per-use video," Leichtman said.
That's interesting. I wonder which business model will be successful.

quantus
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Post by quantus »

I agree that pay per use sucks and won't work. You all know this and it's been explained why before. The main problem comes down to the fact that media is now just a bunch of bits and bits are just a concept in their most simple form. The big revolution of the digital age has been that we can now store and transfer massive amounts of those bits quickly. Pay per use's main flaw is that if I have enough hard drives, I can store everything after one use and then share it with anyone. What's more reasonable is to charge for things that aren't contained in the particular order of those bits like bandwidth or storage for those bits. Since storage is limited, there will always be a need for bandwidth and vice versa.

I think the whole iPod marketing scheme is turned on it's head. It's the hardware and mods and maybe a very low bandwidth charge that should be the money makers, not the content. Performance artist have been historically poor for a reason (unless they do tons of live concerts) because they only produce things that are transient and have no resale value.

The whole recording industry was an aberation because storage briefly jumped ahead of bandwidth. Storage onto records and tapes made media transferable, but only as fast as I could use a pair of cassette players to make the copy and then hand the copy to the next person. Also, those copies were not perfect lossless copies. Turning music into a digital form was the first crack in the dam by removing the quality barrier. Then came compression and the inevitable march of digital storage and bandwidth doublings.

Holding a copyright is really pointless and as the bandwidth and storage limits are lowered or even removed, so too will copyrights be circumvented and then eventually removed.

There's no real way to stop piracy because in the end there will be hacks to get around any artificial barriers. The smart or powerful will continue to profit from these hacks first and then there will be a trickle down effect to the masses. Napster, Kazaa, Bittorrent, etc. are all products of this inevitability and their successors are coming.

Security, mostly the lack of trust of the unknown, is the major barrier to all of this still. This is the piece of the puzzle that so far has kept the establishment in place. There's no single easy to use method in which things that I trust can be trusted by someone else without question or at some qausi-trusted state and vice versa. Once this happens in a smooth, automated, but secure fashion, then the last barriers of fear will be removed. Once the fear of repercussions from violating copyrights are gone, then the MPAA and RIAA are no longer viable in their current forms.

So, the subscription model really won't work forever either. I works now because there's still the time it takes to download, break the encryption, and then act as a mirror with the equivalent bandwidth. The price will have to decay over time or else continuously provide new content for download. It's unlikely that content creation will keep pace with bandwidth and storage capacity increases, so even that tide won't be stemmed forever.

"Content" is a misnomer when used to describe things like television programs and songs. The "content" is just an ordering of bits, which amounts to nothing.

In the end, I think it's good to be in hardware and NOT "content" creation. Software is kinda a grey area in my mind though. There will always be a need for custom software, but mainstream software will have a hard time escaping the fate of "content".
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Jonathan
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Post by Jonathan »

quantus wrote:In the end, I think it's good to be in hardware and NOT "content" creation. Software is kinda a grey area in my mind though. There will always be a need for custom software, but mainstream software will have a hard time escaping the fate of "content".
I don't entirely disagree, but I'm not sure silicon is any better off. In fifteen years, everyone's transistors will be the same size. The price will not drop to zero, but the price of cheap plastic toys from China isn't zero, either. They're just commodities. Commodities with low margins and no room for a lot of fancy engineering?


http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 ... =3&tid=154

On the trust issue, do you see something like this AllPeers extension (perhaps in IM form, not browser) as solving the trust issue? Or is it no better than WASTE?
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel's positions, strategies, or opinions.

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