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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (7736)	7/25/2000 5:21:28 AM
From: lml	Respond to of 12823

Thanks for posting, Ray. The article highlights some interesting issues. I was not aware of Charter's efforts here in LA, so I would agree, its not getting much press, at least not to date. If the article is correct, and its scope is providing VOD access to 600K subs, then the service is likely being deployed across its largest franchises in So. Cal. -- Burbank, Glendale & Pasadena. On the technical side, I'd be very interested in gaining an understanding in the basic model. I presume it all starts with a set top box that provides an interface through the video may be ordered for download, as well as the medium in which the bits are stored temporarily for one-time "replay" to one's TV with possible use of large scale buffering that would allow more immediate viewing as the latter portion of the video continues to download. I presume the pipe the MSO would use to download the video would be apart from the bandwidth allocated for downstream Internet traffic, otherwise the MSO is going to receive a lot of complaints, or the sub is going to have a lot of unfriendly neighbors akin to those SBC DSL commercials that have received national attention. I'm just speculating here, as I am foreign to VOD, with me still living in the "dark narrowband age." Any help from the technically informed on this medium would be appreciated. I guess the key to any effort to rollout such services is to properly capture whatever market demand may exist for such services and price competitively to lure that sub to purchase that video from the MSO as opposed to running down to his neighborhood BlockBuster. Query: What premium can the MSO charge for this convenience? IMHO, a nice one, perhaps 30% (ie. $5 v. $4). If I were BlockBuster, I would worry, but I wouldn't stop there, and as we have seen they are taking the necessary steps to install their own backbone infrastructure, then likely lease access from whatever access providers possessing fat pipe points of access into homes representative of lucrative consumer markets. The reference to TiVo and Replay is intriguing as these devices provide an immediate storage medium with which to "deposit" the VOD as it enters the home gateway via the set-top box. The particular machine I have holds 20 hours of programming but at a rather low quality that ReplayTV labels "standard." The best machines today offer 30 hours of programming. I do most of my recording at "medium" quality that makes most recordings indistinguishable from most broadcasts with the exception of fast-moving action events typically found in sports programming. At "medium" quality the storage capacity of the machine is reduced to about 12 hours. For "high" quality" the capacity drops to about 10 hours. I figure for DVD quality this figure will drop to about 8 hours, which seems to jive with the article's assertion that a [30-hour] . . personal set-top boxes from Tivo and ReplayTV . . .can hold a half-dozen or more movies on a hard disk. Nevertheless, I defer to Frank or others who appear more knowledgeable about MPEG figures with which to fully gauge the relationship b/w digital quality & storage capacity. IMHO, this market is huge, and the MSOs that are not at least working towards this goal are fools. As I have iterated here earlier, it is my assessment that the more aggressive telcos are also interested in this market. Hence, the push for FTTC/VDSL or FTTH and hence the design for SVCs for DSLs. One question I have in all of this is what roles the DBS providers may play in this race to the set-top box.