Hi Rande... just stumbled on this neat thread!
Have you come across this recent piece in Discover?
discover.com
While some of what he says seems far fetched, one thing I feel very strongly on is that if the bandwidth that could actually support streaming clickable high quality audio and video on demand were to become available to the home, there must be an open layer to the protocols to allow development of the kinds of undreamed of applications that such bandwidth could offer.
I don't personally want some black box that provides 10 megabit/sec streams that are good for absolutely nothing but watching HDTV video out of Hollywood's film catalog.
But I actually believe that only the entertainment and recording industry can finance true broadband to the home. We're not going to get it from the Baby Bells! I look at the audio CD as the model. As you're aware, that was an amazingly bold idea, the very thought of digital audio media at the time when neither solidly error free storage of the masses of data required nor AD/DA converters with the required perceptual performance were available. To me the audio CD was an extremely important step in entering the information age since audio was the first widely deployed example of information coding of something that was not "lists of numbers". The DVD is an incremental step compared with the audio CD, even though it involves storage of broader band information, moving video.
Only the music industry was really capable of getting the audio CD going as early as it happened, and the media didn't become useful on computers till *much* later, and somewhat by accident - delivery of games - but now it's a general purpose storage media on every computer.
Am I right that similarly, broadband data to the home will require similar support from the entertainment industry?
But are my fears justified that, unlike the audio CD which is a general purpose storage media, abundant home bandwidth might be locked in as a special purpose point solution and not be useful for general applications? Like the set top satellite TV box I have at home, plenty of bandwidth but outside of passively watching the french language TV channel I subscribe to on Echostar 3, totally useless.
Democratic availability of general purpose bandwidth and computing are the best, but I don't know how to reconcile them with protection of intellectual property.
Granted by the time I'm a doddering victim of Alzeheimer's disease in some retirement home, abundant bandwidth will finally be available, but I'd love to see it in my active lifetime. |
