Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV

Lots of people believe video distribution is going to change, and the only question is how long it will take. Some think the important thing is the number of alternative venues now available, or which will likely be made available, to view professionally-produced content users now associate with "cable TV."

All you need to know is what the content owners want to do, and when.

The networks aren’t blocking Google TV access to content because Google is uniquely disruptive. They are blocking Google TV access to network content because "web TV" economics likely would be incredibly disruptive to the current business.

Content owners want preservation of existing revenue streams--at least the magnitude of those streams--as "over the top" delivery modes develop. One might question whether that is possible, but there is no question the networks will attempt to maintain the existing business practices to the greatest extent possible.

Cable, for its part, claims the lowest-possible distribution cost, from an end-use standpoint. The objection many users will have is that the cost to deliver programming that is not wanted is not the important metric. What matters is the cost to view only the content any single viewer wants to watch.

The key is what content owners are willing to accept.

Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV

Will Car Rentals Be In The Future Of Automaker - 24/7 Wall St.

Business model and industry disruption does not always come from upstarts. Sometimes it can come from established players in the legacy system.

Consider how the world of car driving would change a great deal if vehicle manufacturers began to compete against rental companies, which are the auto companies’ largest customers.

BMW will begin to rent cars in Germany. The luxury manufacturer knows that not everyone can afford an expensive car and that other people do not need to own a car because they drive too infrequently.

Detroit will be tempted to follow BMW’s lead. Car sales in the US have barely recovered from last year, which means that they are at terribly depressed levels compared to 2005 and 2006. American manufactures have slashed their employees and factory operations, but the US market is crowded and new competitors such as Hyundai occasionally are successful at their expense.

Will Car Rentals Be In The Future Of Automaker - 24/7 Wall St

U.S. Mobile Ad Forecasts: Take Your Pick

Analysts at Borrell Associates admit they are "shocked" by their own analysis of mobile ad growth in the U.S. market, but stand by their forecasts.

Most other researchers take a more "linear" view.

Most new markets grow in a linear fashion until an inflection point, and then growth goes parabolic.

The issue is how soon an inflection point is reached. Borrell Associates obviously believes we are closer to an inflection point than nearly all other observers.

see more here

Mark Cuban Warns of Sharply Higher Broadband Access Fees

Count Mark Cuban as among those who expects broadband access fees to grow significantly as video streaming becomes a mainstream business model and experience.

Ironically, those fee increases will occur as operators have to provision lots more bandwidth and as users begin to cut back on legacy distribution such as cable TV, satellite TV or telco TV subscriptions.

"Expect your Internet bills to go way way up as ISPs make it clear that all this video over the internet is going to require billions in upgrades," says Cuban. "The irony is that while you may not like paying for cable channels you don’t watch, you will end up paying for cable channels on the Internet that you don’t watch as well."

"In this case you will be paying via higher net bills for the extra bandwidth required to stream cable channels that your neighbors like to watch," Cuban argues.

One might argue that is a good thing for service providers, as it will allow them to raise rates in a business where rates generally have dropped. It arguably will help access providers rebuild their business models from services based on voice or multichannel video entertainment.

The issue is that consumers likely will stubbornly resist such rate increases, especially if they keep shifting expenditure into wireless services. Not to mention a bigger version of a broadband problem ISPs have faced for some time.

Many ISPs have found that profit margins on broadband services do not scale in a linear way: prices per Mbps of service produce slimmer profit as the amount of bandwidth provisioned increases.

Also, the incremental revenue from investing in lots more access bandwidth is likely to be slim to non-existent. Cable operators will have to boost capacity to provide broadband-based video, even as they lose revenue from legacy video services.

Telcos faced a variant of this problem when they upgraded to broadband, and found that entertainment video was the only big "new" service they could offer, as the older copper network worked fine, or well enough, for voice and broadband access.

blog maverick

Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing's Implications

"Whether in the realm of communications, productivity, entertainment or business, tomorrow’s experiences and solutions are likely to differ significantly even from today’s most successful apps," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

"Tomorrow’s experiences will be inherently trans-media and trans-device," he says. "They’ll be centered on your own social and organizational networks."

"For both individuals and businesses, new consumption and interaction models will change the game," Ozzie says. "It’s inevitable."

To deliver what is required, specifically new levels of coherence across apps, services and devices, lots of innovation will happen to occur in the user experience, the interaction model, authentication model, user data and privacy model, policy and management model, programming and application model.

If you wonder why tier-one service providers think cloud computing is important, all this is why.

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Endpoint evolution in the enterprise

Dave Michels illustrates enterprise endpoint evolution.
http://www.nojitter.com/article/227900662

Phones: How good an endpoint?

Not so good, says Dave Michels.
http://www.nojitter.com/feature/227900658

Think Seriously About a Post-PC World, Ray Ozzie Says

"It’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has just announced his resignation.

"How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?," Ozzie says everyone must ask.

Whatever happens, the future is likely to include approaches that attack the complexity that now characterizes the PC-based computing model.

And make no mistake, Ozzi believes "we’re moving toward a world of cloud-based continuous services and appliance-like connected devices."

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that are constantly assimilating and analyzing data from both a user's real and online worlds.

Tomorrow’s devices will be relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design. They will be instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss. A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

"Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets of simplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success," Ozzie says. "If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-like connected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets."

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Windows Phone 7 Review: "Enticing," "Unfinished"

While it is superficially an enticing interface, whose appearance certainly distinguishes it from every other platform out there, the key problem with Windows Mobile 7 is the lack of information density, Charles Arthur, Guardian technology editor, says.

No matter what the screen size, you don't get many tweets, or emails, or just words on there, he says.

At first it's relaxing, he says, but over time, the lack of information density will make scrolling through long lists of apps tedious, and reading chunked information (such as Facebook and Twitter) exhausting.

Those issues can't be sorted without an overhaul of the interface, he says. If you want a lengthy review of Windows Mobile 7, with lots of comments from readers, this is worth reading.

Windows Phone 7 review: HTC HD7 on O2: did Microsoft write this? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Thanks To Social Networks, Americans Feel More Connected to People

We can debate the issue of whether people are spending less time "face to face," and what that might mean. It is harder to argue about the subjectively perceived value. People do think they are more connected.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/590/Default.aspx

A business built around online copy and paste

I think there's something to this. You might argue that people already use related sharing, rating or comment apps. But this approach potentially creates lots more analytical value, essentially surfacing content communities and making them more visible.

It's sort of a content version of "people who bought this also bought" or "people who liked this might also like" but bridging both consumer and producer parts of a content community.
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/tynt-a-business-built-around-online-copy-and-paste/1555

A Whole New Way of Looking at Augmented Reality

A humorous look at augmented reality, using subtraction rather than addition, which is the normal way we think about augmented reality application.

Starbucks Wi-Fi Usage Shows Dramatic Increase in Mobile Usage

Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett says laptop usage in the company's stores is flat, or even slightly declining, and that mobile usage is on fire and growing a great percentage every month.

Gillett also said that iDevices from Apple are used more in its stores than any others. How important is that? Well, Gillett wanted to use Flash on the social network, but there wasn’t any way he could because of Apple's  refusal to support Flash. So Starbucks built its system using HTML 5.

In other words, the new Starbucks Digital Network is going to be optimized for mobile devices rather than PCs, and for HTML5-authored content.

Starbucks CIO shows why next version of Windows is “risky business” for Microsoft — Scobleizer

Netflix testing $7.99 and $8.99 streaming-only plans

Netflix now is offering streaming-only plans in the U.S. market, for prices that seem to range from $7.99 to $8.99, or $9.99 if users want physical disc access as well.

Netflix testing $7.99 and $8.99 streaming-only plans in US right now, one is not a discount (update) -- Engadget

Google plays cross platform in competition with Apple

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/23/in-the-fight-against-apples-iads-google-plays-the-cross-platform-card/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29