Jeffrey, you're entirely correct that these companies must be looked at differently, with a finite lifespan of maybe eight to fifteen years (IMO), and revenues declining in later years.
I misunderstood, thought you were taking the position that they would be gone in the next 3-4 years, which I don't see happening.
It sounds like our area of disagreement is over the speed we'll see VoD-speed connections become prevalent. I think that none of the current rollouts (cable or DSL) are anywhere close to VoD speeds.
The actual VoD adoption time will depend on technology improvements which we haven't seen yet, or which are just now coming out of the lab and into test rollouts.
As a technical aside, my take on cable is that it will not dominate because it is a shared bus architecture, like 10Base2 Ethernet (thinnet). DSL is a star architecture, analogous to switched 100BaseT ethernet, where each user has their own non-shared connection to the backbone. Sharing a coax with your neighbors, even if it is "just" 24 houses per cable, is still sharing, especially if you all want to download a different movie to watch on Sunday night.
So, I agree with the poster who said that DSL (with speed improvements) will likely dominate. |
