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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lhn5 who wrote (16570)	9/6/2006 10:07:27 AM
From: axial	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Good grief. AOL? Even worse, AOL spam?

To: Lhn5 who wrote (16570)	9/6/2006 10:54:56 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

I think the format of Lhn5's message, since it has the outward appearances of a spam message, belies his reason for posting it, which he clarified later. I submit, however, that its importance may be less than earth-shattering, given its timing. AOL's decision to disclose it now, after so many other recently announced video offerings on the 'Net, strikes of anticlimax. Perhaps as recently as 18 months ago, certainly two or three years ago, this AOL release might have appeared progressive, even enticing, to many. The disruption that the Internet has caused has been so deep and widespread in this regard that, no matter how good a deal appears today, the pscychology that purveyors must anticipate amounts to: 1. "Who cares, I've already made my choice, I only have one set of eyes, and I can't get out of it anyway because my current choice is contractually bundled into my larger set of services"; or, 2. "If they're doing it, then someone else is doing it, too, or is about to, and it will be better and cost less." Even at this very early stage of the Internet's history, in relative terms, today's video offerings are already getting lost in the noise. At some point incremental offerings may only contribute marginally to additional overall bandwidth consumption; instead, they may tend to contribute to a shift of consumption from one provider to another. Also, as video undergoes a shift from NTSC to MPEG xx formats, six-to-one, sometimes as much as 10-to-1 'reductions' in actual bandwidth consumption take place due to ever-improving compression technologies. Of course, that last point in the preceding paragraph may only be a notion, and one that would not become a factor, unless Cable Operators at some point relinquished their primary delivery platforms (i.e., those employing analog RF-FDM modulation techniques), since each channel today consumes a full 6 MHz of bandwidth, full time. But it's an interesting fact to keep stored in memory, just the same. I say this even if computing actual bandwidth utilization were possible, after separating the many methods of distribution, multimplexing, back-hauling and grouping of services across all of the many cable networks that are in existence today, which is tantamount to taking a voyage into the surreal. Do you agree? Disagree? How about Tech101 and others? What do you think? FAC