<If the average person can get cable internet access over TV for $4.95 and e-mail,and download movies,why pay for ATHM service? It might only be the die hard PC driven techno-nerds like us that want ATHM.>
I don't agree with that statement. IMO the internet access you get for 4.95 is going to be little more than interactive tv, maybe some e-mail and download some movies. The magic of the internet is NOT interactive tv. It is about a means of communicating in general. There are so many applications that have not even begun to be tapped. Already my wife can do grocery shopping on the net, anybody that has kids can see the potential of that. There is interactive games, online banking, business communications, telephone, videophone, info on about anything you can think of, I could go on and on, and we haven't begun to tap the potential applications. What we lack is bandwidth, and it seems athm is very well positioned to deal with that. Once we have the infrastructure in place, there will be plenty of imaginations captured in software and we will have uses we haven't even dreamed of yet. We need bandwidth at the server end, bandwidth in the main pipe, and bandwidth at the user end. I think athm will handle the last two very nicely, but it is all for naught without the server bandwidth, which I am concerned about. All of the data Yahoo servers send out their pipes every day, really boggles my mind how they can do it, I wonder if they have a whole building full of massively parallel servers? And what happens when everyone has 2Mb connections instead of 56Kb? I suppose they will find a way to deal with it though.
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