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| Thursday, February 1, 2007 |
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VRM watch 
| | Dave Winer: Denon's NetAudio (and why Denon doesn't know how lucky they are to have him for a customer). |
Because it's one more way the demand side supplies itself
Net losses
| | After listing a litany of lock-ins and other value-subtracts, he summarizes: |
| | IPTV is nothing else but the ability of your provider to have you buy into a mix of Internet access and private DRMed content for which it installs dedicated reception/decoding equipment at your end. |
| | By doing this you basically give up into a partnership into which your Internet provider is basically serving itself a reserved channel and abundant bandwidth to have you see and pay for this premium content. Further, the telco locks you into having to use its own equipment (as mentioned my old standard ADSL modem does not work anymore - as mentioned, I have basically upgraded myself into a "proprietary network" without realizing it - and the telco has created a "de facto" proprietary dedicated IPTV infrastructure and delivery channel to my home/office). |
| | The moment you realize this, you should also realize how you yourself have now sold your line to the very enemy of net neutrality. You have sold and paid for a telco that will devote the greatest and better part of the bandwidth you have supposedly leased, to serve to you its own very content. (A little slower internet surfing will not be noticeable when most of you have already been long spoiled by bad and inconsistent service from these very companies.) |
| | The telco can therefore boast the delivery of a bandwidth it is in fact reserving for the greatest part for its commercial interests while serving you with just the same bandwidth (or less) you were getting before. |
| | In this scenario, you and I become the very unconscious allies to these companies while providing them with the very means to install and deploy their own private IPTV delivery infrastructure into our homes. |
| | Well, here's the first problem: Cable TV is "private delivery infrastructure", and so is old-fashioned phone service. The mess Robin describes is not a conceptual stretch beyond Business As Usual — for telcos, cablecos or most of their customers. A few techies may know a line has been crossed, but that's far from obvious to the rest of us. |
| | The second problem is that it's dumb in the long run for either the cable or the phone companies to continue subordinating the Net to their traditional offerings. The smart thing for them to do is provide the widest and most open possible Net. and to sell many services on top of that, including telephony and television. Crippling the Net to favor TV is a failing strategy, regardless of whether or not the feds mandate Net Neutrality. |
| | What the carriers need most is competition, and not just from each other. |
Moving movie
| | We sat in the front row, which in this theater is about seven feet from the screen and about six feet below it. My neck still hurts. But this also positioned us about five feet from Djimon Hounsou, who was interviewed after the show. |
| | Both Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio received Oscar nominations for their performances in the film. And both deserved them. It's a good movie. |
| | What surprised me most to learn from the interview was that the relentless and often harrowing violence of the film was actually "toned down". In reality, Hounsou said, the brutality and bloodshed of the war in Sierra Leone was far worse than it would have been possible to depict. (I started looking away after a boy's hands were chopped off, early in the movie.) |
| | The Film Festival is the a very successful love labor led by Roger Durling, who is also blogging the event. |
Handbasket weaving.
Worlds, a part
A newer deal
| | Mary Schmidt on the announcement of Windows Vista, starring seven dour CEOs lined up on chairs below a large screen that reads "The 'Wow' starts now": |
| | Um, fellas, if you, the grand poobahs, can¹t at least look excited — how are we, your target customers, supposed to believe the graphic behind your head? |
| | You¹ve got your work cut out for you with a mindnumbingly lackluster launch - and the remainder of your media blitz needs to be coherent. |
| | Chris has long been Microsoft's best evangelist, by the way. Just look at the Recent Discussions in the right column of his blog. Or look up Microsoft and Pirillo. |
| | But, even though their bark couldn't be worse, I'm sure they won't bite. |
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