Peter, this responds to your two replies upstream concerning the placement and storage of content that would be viewed by end users.
re: "If the price was right, would you buy?
And, "I'd really care if moving files around my home was charged for or took perceivable time. I think of my LAN as being free."
From somewhat of a Heisenberg direction, and probably paraphrasing someone else in the process,
"When you change the way you look at things, you change the things you're looking at."
Were it not for the 'perceived time' qualifier that you used, it would appear that you regard bits as property, placing the emphasis on 'real' property as opposed to strictly 'intellectual' or 'informational' attributes that we usually apply to bits. Although when you paint magnetic media of any type with bits and bytes it becomes a problem of another dimension.
Do I care where my bits are stored? Sometimes, because to me not all bits hold equal weight. My company's data is more critical to me than last week's Hollywood pyrotechnic release, for example.
When I'm sitting in my living room or den, or on the beach for that matter, however, I probably couldn't care less where my bits were stored, especially if I'm looking at the same directory from which to make the selection, and the payload is delivered to me within the same acceptable time frames measured in sub-seconds or one- or two- second terms.
I submit that most end users who elect to do DIY in-residence storage over locally designed distribution systems will encounter more dalay (latency) related problems with home storage units than those who have super-100 Mb/s high-speed access to the head end and use a virtual partition of a managed storage entity.
But there is nothing preventing users from using both. And in fact most will, although the forms of remote storage used may not always be defined by the same terms. It has mostly to do with separations of content rights and the rights associated with the storage media used, leading to distinctions similar or identical in many ways to the separation of content and plumbing on the subscriber's access line.
For example, what is video on demand if not a form of shared storage that is accessible to - although it is not directly 'owned by' - all users on a cable system who subscribe to it?
Despite the enormous drops in price that makes storage affordable enough to store every movie and musical property ever recorded, how large and how sophisticated does the "favorites" file directory on one's local hard drives have to become before it become evident that an entry in a search box, or a selection from a directory list to a remote archive, yields results that are just as good if not better than fetching files from a LAN-attached appliance, and without the headaches associated with file administration and backups?
You later noted: "commented - it would be like a banking relationship - we've got your money and your bits ;-)"
That would depend largely on which model you're referring to. In a VoD service that comes as a part of one's triple play bundle, what you say is absolutely true. In a managed storage facility, however, or in a colo where caching and storage management is the horizontal player's only offering, then it is less so or mitigated entirely, if you have sole rights to the storage media partition area, whether physical or virtual, that stores your bits.
FAC |
