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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (498)	11/30/2000 1:31:04 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

But I sense that you are referring to something that is proprietary between the MSO and Home. No, it would have to open. Excite works over any kind of connection and if you bother to log in it knows who you are and who your MSO is. When you access it through the cable modem you are sent to a broadband version of Excite with far more streaming video with more robust advertisements and customizing features that aren't currently available in the narrowband site. Because the @Home browser is branded to the MSO it makes perfect sense that the VoD for that MSO could have prominent placement within that version of Excite. ATHM could use Excite to work up the interface and ATHM to optimize the application on their network but it would make sense that while you could make it more functional on the cable system you'd want it to work across all types of connections. This way you have a much larger addressable user base and more information to mine about viewer choices. If Excite can tell me what movies are playing in the theatre in my area, surely they can tell me what options are available on the VoD for Comcast or any of the other MSO partners. Its a matter of matching the viewer with the system and having an application that plugs into their ordering and billing system. Tell me, under your proposed arrangement, when Mindspring subs and others get onto the system via OA, will their browsers permit the same level of STB/VoD search, control and previewing as Home's? Maybe they'd go through Excite to get to it. Maybe Excite creates a custom plugin application for that ISP's homepage. Its all about making itself indispensable. ATHM has to stop seeing the OA ISPs and MSOs as competition and start seeing them as customers. If ATHM doesn't do this than I can see a third party doing it. It doesn't make sense to duplicate all these different interfaces and ordering systems all over the web because it dilutes the value you get when you have the big numbers of viewers. You are always going to have viewers who for what ever reason are more comfortable ordering from their TV prompts......but that leaves out a growing number of people who'd get more value from doing it online.