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

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (9725)	12/13/2000 8:48:03 PM
From: Mkilloran	Respond to of 12823

MikeM12345...consider a few other points ..some people will drop a preimum channel that cost about $10 a month and switch to pay as you view VOD...net increase in revenue to cable companies on that point zero. Srttop boxes andconversion to digital right now is an extra charge ...many will not spring for the service on those terms. An example of this in the UK the settop boxes are beinstalled free to the customer thus making digital services like VOD available to all customers.

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (9725)	12/14/2000 1:20:00 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

The Baby Bells could be among the first winners from a Bush White House New FCC head could ease regulation By Richard Waters in New York Published: December 13 2000 19:54GMT \| Last Updated: December 14 2000 04:03GMT With George W. Bush heading for the White House, certain sectors of US business are breathing a sigh of relief. The Baby Bells could be among the first winners from a Bush White House. With big issues such as social security and education on its plate, the new administration is likely to take little interest early on in telecoms policy, says Scott Cleland, an analyst at the Precursor Group in Washington. That would leave the House in a position to set the legislative agenda and could usher through a bill that would let the local carriers into the booming long-distance data market. Michael Powell, son of Gulf War commander Colin Powell and a Federal Communications Commission member, is widely tipped to be named chairman of the agency. Among the biggest issues he would have on his plate: whether to relax ownership rules that have limited the amount of spectrum that a US wireless company can own. Such a move would relieve the pressure on wireless carriers and could prompt mergers between the six national companies in the industry.

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (9725)	12/15/2000 4:02:32 PM
From: MikeM54321	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 12823

Re: Digital TV - VOD TWX Details ftth- I looked up some facts about my current VOD service(I watched my first VOD movie last night and it worked flawlessly). I understand your upstream arguments about why the MSOs may be constrained in their rollouts. That was why I wanted to look up how my current rollout is being accomplished. These figures don't mean a great deal to me and I'm wondering if anything surprises you about them. These are all exclusive to the Tampa Bay area: -Time Warner is using Concurrent's MediaHawk system. -TWX purchased 36 MediaHawk servers for this rollout. -34 are in hub sites. 2 are in regional headends. -There are 35,000 digital TV subs today. -17,500 is the target for VOD services. -There are 1 million subs total(analog and digital) I have to say, in my very first VOD rental, I was quite impressed with the ease of use. You hit a few buttons to navigate about five categories of movies. Once you pick a category, you scroll down to the movie of your choice. Hit Play on the remote control and bingo! The movie starts and TWX racked up a $3.95 sale from me. While watching the movie you have access to VCR like controls(fast forward, reverse, pause). If TWX puts their entire movie library on the servers, I can't imagine why I would ever need to go to block buster again to rent an analog VCR tape. Now the part I'm curious about is the ratio of VOD subs to servers. At this point it appears they may try to put 486 subs per server. And you would think their may be about 500 or so subs per hub. So I wonder how realistic this is, if say everyone wanted to watch a movie. Would this system crash and burn? If they deploy all these servers right out in the hubs. That's pretty close to the customers. I wonder if this would solve the bandwidth problem? Thanks for any comments you can offer. -MikeM(From Florida)