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Technology Stocks : Frank Coluccio Technology Forum - ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: alfranco who wrote (1083)	2/6/2000 7:03:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1782

AL, your caution is unwarranted. You make some good points. In this forum we often concern ourselves with how things will get between a and z, and what those technologies will be.. but in the end, residential users wont want to know the nitty gritty of those underlying technologies. Instead, they/we want content and applications to consume and utilize, respectively. But they will still want the ability to explore remote databases on the web and communicate with one another, or receive live content, real time, in various media forms. These "still wants" will perpetuate the need for ever-improved methods of high-quality real-time communications, in addition to the home-based access modes we've discussed. During the past fifteen years or so, I can recall about a half dozen spurts in these kinds of discussions which have focused on the clash between the TV and the desktop computer. Earlier on, the necessary storage and transmission capacities were not achievable in the broader consumer market sense to make them happen. It now appears that that's about to change. That is, it now appears that multi-use, multi-media appliances appear to be far more feasible than ever before. Teenagers already have capitalized on this through their downloading of MP3 files on hard drives which are rated in the xx GB range. The little cousin to this is the MP3 player which is worn like a WalkMan on the belt, capable of storing hours of near-CD grade, (or actual CD grade?) compressed audio files. Your idea of a residential processing center suggests a main, or central, home automation entity that will "process" and "store" content for the whole house. You allude to a large, single hard drive, if my take of what you wrote is accurate. I don't think that that's the only way it will be in the main, because processing and storage densities are ever increasing, making distributed storage and processing more feasible as time goes by. Perhaps for very large multimedia files, your view is more appropriate, if that's what you were referring to. I do see a centralized bandwidth controller in the offing, however, much like some of the arbitration capabilities in some set top units, responsible for bandwidth and other resource arbitration and supervision. To some degree, these capabilities will even be present in the BLueTooth model and other premises-based wireless schemes. Rgarding the access and costs associated with content you note: "Viewed free or as the case may be rented/bought per the content not per the transmisssion of said content. That is my view of the client choosing how he/she is served and when and what." Perhaps this will be true, especially by vertically integrated service providers who will also deliver content. But, what we will see here is NOT a form of free transmission. Instead, we will simply see the costs of transmission bundled through various marketectural schemes, thus shifting those costs and changing where they appear on the monthly bill, and not necessarily removing their impact entirely. Do you agree or disagree? Or, was I missing your point altogether? Regards, Frank C. ps - glad to see you've given a look at Cook.