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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (16123)	10/11/1999 6:26:00 PM
From: marquis103	Respond to of 29970

"Maybe thestreet.com really does have a grudge against ATHM." "Maybe it simply shows how shortsighted all the "wise" out there are." Very, very true on both counts. Russ

To: E. Davies who wrote (16123)	10/11/1999 6:45:00 PM
From: Estephen	Respond to of 29970

""Maybe thestreet.com really does have a grudge against ATHM. Maybe it simply shows how shortsighted all the "wise" out there are:"" maybe streettrash.com is shorting athm today..

To: E. Davies who wrote (16123)	10/12/1999 4:20:00 AM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

This is a nice reminder there is life beyond cable multichannel.com ** @Home Looks to Excite Wireless, DSL Users By FRED DAWSON October 11, 1999 Excite@Home Corp. is rapidly putting together a strategic agenda that looks beyond the @Home Network service's exclusionary roots in cable to an environment where wireless and digital-subscriber-line access are part of the broadband play. In one demonstration of the strategic shift occasioned by At Home Corp.'s merger with Excite Inc., the company is close to rolling out a broadband-enhanced version of Excite's portal service that makes use of the @Home backbone to provide ready access to Excite content no matter what service provider is used. At the same time, the company is actively pursuing deals with wireless carriers in hopes of being able to offer customers anytime-anywhere connectivity. "We will soon be rolling out our first integrated broadband version of Excite," Excite@Home chief technology officer Milo Medin said. "Our goal is to try to build a unified broadband experience." The spreading reach of Excite@Home's broadband services and the opening of wireless affiliations are responses to the same shifting online scenario that has stirred the debate in cable over how to proceed with deals involving other high-speed-data service providers, such as America Online Inc. But whether that means Excite@Home is ready to renegotiate the terms of its exclusivity agreements with its cable affiliates remains to be seen. "I think it's in the best interest of the cable industry to be able to do a deal with AOL, but being harnessed to @Home has prevented that from happening," Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. senior media analyst Tom Wolzien said. "So far, @Home's management doesn't appear to recognize that it's playing in a larger sandbox when it comes to its arrangements with cable companies." A cable executive at an MSO affiliate of Excite@Home expressed surprise at the service provider's unfolding broadband strategy. "This is the first we've heard about it, but it doesn't sound to me like it's in the spirit of their stand on exclusivity in their dealings with us," the executive said, speaking on background. Customers with high-speed-access capabilities would be able to get to much of the same content through the Excite broadband portal that they can access via @Home. "You may see caches [files stored on local servers] with localized content in the @Home experience that are not available through Excite. But otherwise, it will be fairly integrated," Medin said. Key to making an ubiquitous service possible is the nationwide broadband infrastructure Excite@Home has been building**, using high-speed fiber lines leased from AT&T Corp. in conjunction with regional data centers equipped with advanced routers and servers. By funneling the Excite broadband content through this distribution system, the company will be in a position to charge Internet-service providers for the content or to make the Excite portion available to anybody with enough bandwidth to receive what's available through the broadband portal. Officials declined to discuss what business strategies may evolve. But they made it clear that expanding the advertising base for broadband content via the Excite portal is a key part of the business rationale. "Most of the users accessing Excite are on dial-up, so they can't be counted as part of the advertising base for broadband content, but there will be a benefit on the advertising side," Medin said. On another front, the company is talking with AT&T Wireless and other wireless carriers in hopes of striking deals that would allow @Home providers to offer a personalized version via wireless devices. A customer who takes such a service would be able to access e-mail, the Internet and other services and applications through an @Home account from mobile devices, Medin said. Excite@Home cut a deal last month with AirFlash.com Inc. to work on a wireless service that marries the two entities' content. "Our relationship with AirFlash will accelerate our ability to partner quickly and effectively with wireless carriers to bring the best of the Web to their customers," Excite@Home senior vice president for content Joe Kraus said. Customers of carriers that offer this service will be able to gain access to their personalized Excite Web pages, as well as to Excite@Home applications that are tailored for the low-bandwidth access capabilities of mobile networks. In the future, such applications will expand from the pagerlike messaging level to more broadbandlike features as wireless carriers move to next-generation platforms, Medin said. "What we're doing in the pilot project may not be what we do when 3G [the third-generation wireless system] comes along," he added. The wireless connection would put Excite@Home in the position of being able to offer something more than a fixed, fast-access service, thereby differentiating its service from what's available from other service providers, Medin noted. "If you're a customer who has an integrated service, where all of your personalized account information is accessible to you wherever you are, you're not likely to throw away your cable modem when somebody offers you a DSL service," he said.