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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KailuaBoy who wrote (27203)	7/27/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: Midtown eBoy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

KailuaBoy, Regarding your statement: "they are beginning to get enough plant upgraded to do some serious marketing." You overstate the extant pervasiveness of the @Home cable rollout. If @Home had 2-way cable laid throughout the land, I would say that it makes good sense to cut subscription fees by 50% to increase market share. But that is not the present case. @Home will simply be stuck with AT&T's decision to cut @Home's revenue by 50%. They can't take on more market share now, because 2-way cable is not rolled out yet. You should know that, for in your city of San Francisco there is no 2-way cable. AT&T wanted that vote to assure them closed-access, and only after that assurance will they now install 2-way cable so you can log onto the internet via @Home. Do you really think @Home will have 17 million customers by this e-commerce-laden Christmas to "monetize the customer." With the 700,000 customers that @Home has, each customer would have to buy about 10x as much product thru the web, as an AOL customer, for e-commerce revenue generation to the ISP. That's where the future revenue is if subscription fees get drastically cut, right? Also, AOL can charge alot more for advertising, being though each ad may reach 17 million pairs of eyeballs, than @Home can. It's about more than just the promise of cable availability someday. As for my use of an @Home cable modem, sure I can be counted as a subscriber of @Home. One of only 700,000 now. But my time spent online is zero minutes. I haven't even installed the @Home software or used my @Home address. I tried it on my other computer, and the software was problematic and the tech support sucked, and the mail delivery was sporadic at best. I'm may be an @Home subscriber, but there are more important metrics for measuring usage which figure substantially into an ISP's ability to charge advertisers a certain fee. One of those metrics is user time online, and I'm logged onto AOL over twelve hours a day, via TCP/IP on the cable modem.