So let me see....Compaq figures it can sell a $4995 (plus $349+$89+49 a month+ cost of whatever VERY high speed internet access modem they use) version of a VCR....and just put Internet on it and it sells. Wow....
would make alot more sense if they just put a cable modem in it and allowed the user to have a real cable TV TUNER. This is what I have in mine, and it works alot better. Cost alot less than $4995+500...more like $400 total add on (cable modem was $300 leased from Time warner and TV addon was $129.) No need for burst cache, no need for an additional $349 sound card, no need for 300 mbyte disk files. I can also capture the video and compress it on my machine to disk if I want. And I pay only $44.95 for all the internet I can handle per month. And this on only a 200 Mhz Pentium I without MMX.
I usually watch CNBC and CNNfn on my monitor every monring while I am working on stock research. Just downsize the screen and put it up in the corner and turn up the sound enough to hear it. It is very crisp and works well.
So let's see. If I have a few hundred Pentiums, I can create a real 3D virutal reality version of say the super bowl and sell it for $499,995 but you have to add on the sound card (which needs a $3495 cannon to duplicate the cannon that they set off at qualcomm Stadium), a special version of Netscape to handle the beer vendors and nacho chips smells for $8995, and a giant temperature chamber to get it cold and nighttime like the superbowl. Hey....I want to be the first one at my company to have this neat thing and have everyone come by my desk to see how I downloaded the 1988 superbowl from Jack Murphy Stadium and watched the Redskins beat the Broncos. I would use the optional DS3 line card and $10k a month leased line to download the 28 GBYTE file that I need to play it.
Ok, so I can download video files from TV. Since I don't watch all that much TV, why would it be any market to download 300 MEGABYTES of this thru the average connection speed (i.e. what most users have available during entertainment hours) of 33.6k BITS PER SECOND? This would only take me 19.8 hours to download the 30 minute show. Or if I am in my office in which I get an average of 250k BITS PER SECOND, then I can download this in 160 minutes. If I use the new IS-95 HDR, I can get this down to 45-50 minutes to watch a 30 minute show. But there is less than 1% of the market which can go to 1 Mbps in the next year (ADSL, cable modems, DSL). (or like they say...you can just go out and lease a T1....just $4k a month...)
Wow....How about QCOM-Internet?...<gg> |
