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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hal Campbell who wrote (14395)	2/7/2000 8:48:00 PM
From: Ed Perry	Respond to of 17679

<< With local access barriers on their way to being broken and smart work-arounds promising to alleviate the Internet's backbone limitations, what's left to hinder casual, everyday use of streaming video? Just one thing: content. "People don't adapt new technology unless there is content to drive it," says Forrester's Schwartz. "Content is the driver for this, just as it always has been on TV. Bonanza drove color TV, and MTV drove cable." Schwartz envisions an "Internet tier" as a third branch of TV. "We might get narrow, niche markets with only a few thousand viewers. Perhaps there will be tens of thousands of these types of programs." Excite@Home's Medin has his own idea of the form Web-based streaming media content will take. It won't be long-duration entertainment such as movies, it will be short pieces such as video clips and it will be interactive. "People don't use their PC the way they use TV," he says. "The PC is veryinteractive. It has a keyboard, a small screen--you're close to it.>> ********************************************************** Great article. So far Ampex looks to be nicely positioned for an early leader in this narrowcasting market. Those waiting to deliver broadband solutions will miss out on the best gorilla opportunities. Ironically however, if streaming media narrowcast style is even reasonably successful, it will drive the demand for more bandwidth, backbone and local, along with the investment dollars needed to ramp up such supply. So as Ed Bramson said, any advantage for Ampex would be for "a couple of years." Hopefully, once the Ampex mission is accomplished, and that could as little as proof of the infrastructure to produce narrowcast and the business model structure to produce profitable narrowcast content, the package can be merged into a larger service providor / producer. With the run of early mergers even in this new media venue, I don't see how Ampex can last on it's own. Someone will eventually offer acceptable terms. Ed Perry