Bob at all,
everything you wanted to know that @Home plans in the near future is in this article. Read and enjoy,the future is here.
How @Home Plans to Double Subscribers
By FRED DAWSON
High-speed-data service @Home Network has set the bar for the next year
of doubling its penetration rates with a new content strategy that
employs major technical innovations to radically alter the online
experience of its customers.
Over the next 12 months, the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, which
is controlled by cable companies, plans service initiatives in 10 broad
categories. @Home wants to exploit advanced networking capabilities,
such as the delivery of on-demand video content from big media companies
and the ability to store and securely distribute virtually any
multimedia file available on CD-ROMs.
"The strategy is to deliver services that appeal to as many categories
of user interests as possible," said Charles Moldow, @Home's vice
president for media development. "You build enough of them and, at some
point, you've created a mass consumer product."
Company officials said new video and audio information and "jukebox"
services, personalized information feeds, "software stores," digital
photography networks and other components will rely on an architecture
designed to support quick compilation and transfer of huge data files
from storage points throughout North America.
@Home will also pursue support for community interaction, it said, by
allowing people to engage in a wide range of activities, including
multiplayer games at "twitch-action" speeds.
While @Home's current service model calls for reaching 3 percent to 6
percent of homes passed within 12 to 18 months of launch, its new plan
is aimed ambitiously at generating much higher rates of penetration by
reaching into what @Home officials call the "early majority." This is
the current base of casual online users, estimated to be in the range of
15 million to 20 million people nationwide, where @Home and other cable
data suppliers are already reporting significant inroads.
"I want to get to 15 percent, and that means we have to go beyond early
adopters to target the early majority," said Dean Gilbert, senior vice
president and general manager of @Home. "We have the network in place to
do things that go well beyond simply providing faster access to the
Internet, and that's what we'll be building on to enhance our service in
the year ahead."
@Home is a joint venture of MSOs Tele-Communications Inc., Comcast
Corp., Cox Communications Inc. and Menlo Park, Calif.-based
venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. The company
claims about 50,000 customers to date.
CNN ON-DEMAND
The first glimmers of what lies ahead can be found in a Cable News
Network on-demand video-news service launching this month and in a new
user interface that expands the window for running video clips by 25
percent over the previous window.
Menu bars repositioned across the top of the screen to free up video
space allow users to quickly move from the home page to the CNN options,
which they can click on to receive audio/video clips on a wide range of
topics lasting from 30 seconds to two minutes.
@Home is working on specific near-term projects with about 35 of the 150
firms that now comprise the service company's development group, said
Moldow.
"We're preparing a number of high-quality video and audio components
along the lines of what we're doing with CNN in subjects like health,
fashion, weather, science and technology and sports," Moldow said,
noting that these will be included as part of the basic service.
The CNN model starts with distribution of content from a central source,
where material is updated throughout the day and distributed over
@Home's national backbone for local storage at regional data centers.
When a user clicks onto a subject, the video clip is downloaded in a
single data burst from the closest RDC, or from a more localized caching
server, to the personal computer for instant playback. Users wanting to
probe deeper into the subject can be linked all the way back to the
original source location for access to clips not stored at the RDCs.
@Home, along with using outside sources to deliver content, is also
compiling material -- including data and animation, as well as video --
at its headquarters on an around-the-clock basis to maintain a fresh
flow of information and advertising into its home page and various
subsidiary pages.
Advertising inserted at headquarters -- using video, as well as high-end
graphics -- is producing higher responses than anticipated, Moldow said,
without getting into specifics.
NEW CD-ROM CAPABILITIES
New developments in the transfer and encryption of very large data
files, such as multi-gigabyte games stored on CD-ROM, will allow @Home
to extend the store-and-forward model to a much larger base of
multimedia material next year, company officials said.
Cable interests, including @Home, have been working with Arepa, a
start-up firm in Cambridge, Mass., to develop such capabilities,
including a means by which CD-ROM material can be stored and encrypted
to prevent piracy in the process of transferring the material to the
server.
"I can show you CD-ROM content running across our network using material
that has never been retouched or reproduced," Moldow said. "This means
that thousands of titles and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
product already in commercial distribution can be made available for
high-speed online access."
This opens up a means of distributing software that can be exploited in
a number of ways that include pay-per-view, subscription and purchase
models. For example, Moldow said, suppliers of multimedia now
distributed on CD-ROMs could offer free samples of their material.
Such distribution modes can be used to support "software stores" online,
which is one of the services that @Home intends to introduce in the year
ahead.
And they can be applied to business uses in more sophisticated ways,
where the distributed networking architecture allows some components of
a given software tool to be cached at a regional location, thereby
reducing the byte volume residing at the desktop and permitting
suppliers to distribute upgraded versions of software without having to
download the complete file to every user.
"We're going to see continuing changes in the direction of highly
malleable software that is intertwined with content to create new
capabilities, where downloading entire files becomes too cumbersome and,
for many users, too complicated," said @Home's chief technical officer,
Milo Medin.
"We're very well-positioned for that with a set of standardized
interfaces and a distributed server architecture that supports
replication of Web sites and caching of Web pages locally," he said.
GAMING
A category of new services tied to the emerging broadband
software-file-delivery system is multiplayer gaming, which @Home is
pursuing with various entities, including Mpath Interactive Inc., the
company that pioneered this capability over the Internet. Six months
ago, Moldow had indicated that broadband-enhanced multiplayer gaming was
18 months away. Now, the introduction of such services appears to be
closer at hand.
"We've been testing low-latency applications and points of compatibility
between our network and Mpath's service," Moldow said. "The next step is
to get game publishers involved in building the hooks into their
material that allow us to port games to our platform."
This process is already underway, involving game supplier Electronic
Arts and possibly other vendors, industry sources said. @Home has found
that its network can support game-action latency (delays) of 75
milliseconds or under, which is the time that it takes for a move by one
player to be registered on the screen of someone else in another part of
the country.
This latency is low enough to support the fastest action games now on
the market, including those developed for proprietary player platforms
such as those offered by Sega of America Inc., Nintendo Corp. and Sony
Electronics Corp., Moldow said.
"We've solved the latency issue, and other issues are getting resolved,
as well, such as the writing of code for online applications to minimize
the amount of data crunching that takes place at the PC," he said,
noting that this is a problem that Mpath has already dealt with in its
commercial service.
Mpath is also working with @Home partner Cox to devise
community-interaction applications extending beyond game playing, said
Brian Apgar, executive vice president at Mpath.
"We're finding that people are spending a lot of time communicating with
each other in our space when they're not playing games, which
demonstrates that there's demand for a social experience that can be
greatly enhanced through broadband connectivity," Apgar said.
ALSO IN THE WORKS
@Home's list of new services for the coming year also includes more
information-oriented capabilities, such as a category of user assistance
under the heading, "How Do I?" In this application, users click on a
particular question, such as, "How do I make airline reservations?" and
they are given the basic information, as well as the icons for
connecting to points of reservation and ticket sales.
Moldow said other things in the works include tools enabling users to
readily create personalized Web sites and to engage in photograph
development, editing and distribution through the network. There will
also be a health service allowing users to get information on specific
problems and to seek advice via videoconferencing with medical
professionals, he said.
Multicasting applications, supporting distribution of live or
time-sensitive material, are also on the horizon, with tests of the
technology already underway over TCI's facilities in Fremont, Calif.
Hiram |
