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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 (10679)	3/12/2001 1:55:50 PM
From: geoffrey Wren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

But consider the supposed cause of the failure of the video on demand project: Enron Corp. said in a separate release Friday that its Enron Broadband unit had terminated its agreement with Blockbuster, indicating that the relationship "has not yielded the quantity and quality of movies needed to drive demand." Seems to me the bottleneck here is more availability of product than of distribution. Distribution has troubles, sure, but these can be overcome even with what is now in place. An interesting experiment going on right now is that of DVD rental by mail. Clearly some distribution problems, but will it catch on as preferable to the video store? For whatever reason, the studios seem okay with this distribution of movies.

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (10679)	3/12/2001 9:22:15 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 12823

Mike, I remember the C-SPAN panel discussions well. All of the gurus of the day arranged in an arc seating arrangement. The year was 1995. These guys had so much money that they couldn't get arrested in a bar brawl. If their dream works failed, no big deal, just move on. And move on they did. Barry? John? Rupert? Bill? Where have all the fat cats gone? They're still around and still trying new tricks. There are a lot of parallels here between the ENRON/BB deal and one of six years ago between TCI/Malone and Bell Atlantic/Smith. They were supposed to bring new tech into the living room with a product platform called StarGazer. Of course, that deal fell through, after much fan fare and bubbly, and as someone else noted here wrt the ENRON deal, there was always a specter that Bell Altantic's StarGazer And "FutureVision" (which was a planned video dial tone, or VDT, service) could not perform its promised Video on Demand over DSL at that time, either. Content and open video system (OVS) glitches, ostensibly, got in the way there, too. It looks like it's time for a little history lesson here: teleport.com Actually, if I recall correctly, Smith was boasting that video to the end point would be available over numerous media forms, including DSL, Malone's Cable (and content) and even T1/ISDN. It kept the PR factory going on all cylinders for about a year.