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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob S. who wrote (83173)	5/13/2002 7:30:11 AM
From: Robert Scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

"I think the next revolution in electronics will be taking place in the wireless broadband area." Spent a few hours in a neighborhood coffee shop this past weekend and was joking with the staff about WI-FI. I was surprised to learn that they had access - and it wasn't a neighborhood site - it was in the coffee shop. This was very surprising. Now, you must pay a monthly service fee to connect and you need the proper cards, etc in your laptop but this was bullish for the last mile. Regarding DSL, the problem is the A in DSL. No matter what I can receive, I need to be able to send and the other party needs to be able to send data at a higher speed in order for the video to be full motion. I can get synchronous DSL but it's too expensive. It would cost $80/mo to get 384K each way vs $50 to get ADSL - that's enough for full motion video but the key is also the other user - he/she must also have the ability to send high speed data.

To: Rob S. who wrote (83173)	5/13/2002 10:35:29 AM
From: Boplicity	Respond to of 99985

Rob, Rob, Rob, It's hard not to be cynical like that, but you are right. Sad but true, the key is the money that has been wasted and money that it will take to make the dream happen, years and years away.... That's just on the hardware side. We are not even talking about modifying the content to be able to be manipulated. Not only that. Is interactive TV, or what have you, really needed by the masses? We are talking about people that experience during the day an ever-increasing bombardment to their senses. Do they really want to sit in their chairs, in their collective vegetated state, to interact and go from a numbing input mode to one of participation? Heck, they couldn't even program their VCR clocks. All of this interacting on mass scale might be a generation away as it while we wait for the Nintendo generation and their over developed eye thumb coordination to join Mom and Dad in their very own easy chair. <g> b

To: Rob S. who wrote (83173)	5/13/2002 2:49:01 PM
From: Patrice Gigahurtz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

You do write a sobering view point...... So I'll agree that entertainment driven "content" isn't going to cause a rush on PC sales (and related tech) any time soon as far as video-audio data real-time. However, for information in general you can't beat the speed of the WWW format. I get all my news from the WWW, hardly ever watch TV for news. I get all my stock market info from numerous web sites (for free). I buy the street version of WSJ only because the latter's web site isn't free. I'll watch TV for sports however. So the WWW has a place in our society that isn't going to change soon, in fact can anyone really see the day (soon that is) when less eyeballs each year are glued to the WWW ? At some point someone is going to figure out how to make serious $$$ from all those "eye balls". I would offer this for food of thought only: What if say a Yahoo used its loyal base of "eyeballs" to access downloadable movies for viewing on their desk top (for a fee of course) ? Surely at some point the downloadeded movie would play properly on the progressive scan screen (?). And assuming its download using DSL; what are we talking about, maybe 1hr download time ? Would you consider that a profitable scheme for say a market in rural America ? Thus, real time viewing of Video-On-Demand (VOD) isn't in the cards any time soon but as far as downloading "content" that people want to see later on their PC screen I just don't understand what's the holdup ? The markets there as well as the technology, what's the holdup ? Surely the download "movie" could have software protection that would disable the "movie" after say two viewings (?). Thanks