Interesting press release this evening regarding XCIT and AtHome. I like who EGGS is partnering with. They are getting all their ducks in a row. This reminds me of a dam that is ready to burst. With all these great bits of news coming out regarding EGGS and the success of online shopping, sooner or later the dam is going to burst. Hopefully the earnings will be the beginning of the "Great Flood" for the stock.
dailynews.yahoo.com.
Tuesday January 19 7:45 PM ET
Nettrends: New Wave Of Internet Access Sparks Mergers
By Dick Satran
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Excite Inc (Nasdaq:XCIT - news) is one of the most visited sites on the Web -- and AtHome Corp. boasts super-fast Internet connections. Their high-powered combination should be, as they say, ''the new media network for the 21st century.''
But other big players will have something to say about what happens next, most notably the giant that lurked in the shadows behind AtHome Corp.: telephone behemoth AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news) After it wraps up its proposed merger with cable television giant Tele-Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:LBTYA - news), AT&T becomes AtHome's largest shareholder.
In the acts to follow, other big names will step onto the stage, and borrow from the same script, looking for a way to combine powerful new Internet connections about to reach consumers' homes with well-known brand names.
Lycos Inc. (Nasdaq:LCOS - news), the last search engine-portal company not spoken for, jumped on speculation it would be next to go. It soared $25.06 to $112.94, in heavy Nasdaq trading, on speculation that a telecommunications player with a high-speed Internet unit will buy it.
In a sense, all of the players are gunning for America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news), the online service that did it all, putting Internet connectivity, a community of AOL-loyal users and a sea of content under one roof. With over 14 million users, it's the biggest Internet service provider by far, and has a commanding presence in the emerging e-commerce sector.
Now, though, with a new generation of high-speed Internet services coming from telephone companies and cable modem companies like AtHome, there is an opening. The service providers are moving fast to pair up with content-rich search engines so that they can put a ''face'' on their wires, which all tend to look alike.
''It's a fairly old business model where the access provider dresses up the service with compelling content -- it's called an online service,'' said Ron Rappaport of Zona Research.
But think ''online service on steroids,'' or think of television as it started to become color television. ''It was a lot easier to sell shirts in color than in black and white,'' said Zona's Rappaport.
''With broadband (high-speed Internet access) it becomes faster and easier to sell things over the Internet'' said Halsey Minor, chief executive officer of CNet Inc., whose Snap online service launched a high-speed venture with its partner, General Electric Co.'s NBC network, and a long list of telephone companies.
A number of service and content providers are getting the same idea at the same time, with an increasing number of players launching online-type services that wed high-speed Internet connections to Web sites. America Online itself has launched such a service with Bell Atlantic Corp. (NYSE:BEL - news)
''Before, we had to convince people that broadband was actually going to become a reality,'' said Minor in an interview. ''Now, people are pretty convinced that it's the case.''
The high-speed connections are now the fastest-growing segment of the Internet, and the pace is starting to pick up, with regional telephone companies becoming more aggressive players and cable modem finally building an installed base.
That makes a host of new applications that simply weren't possible becoming viable almost over night, said Minor. He cites as a key example the downloadable music format known as MP3, which sends music over the Internet.
Web surfers who had to wait hours to get recordings delivered that way over the widely used 56-kilobit-per-second modems will get them at least 10 times as fast now over the digital subscriber lines, or DSL's, that telephone companies are offering.
On the Snap search engine that Minor's CNet operates, MP3 and music show up as one of the top five search requests. Snap will start to offer its ''Cyclone'' service to high-speed Internet users, so it can spit bits of multimedia files at users who make such requests. One of the content providers to the Snap high-speed service is a ''digital radio station'' that lets users listen to music, make orders online and receive the recording as an immediate download.
''There's already huge demand out there for that information -- and it's going to grow with high-speed ordering and delivery,'' Minor said.
Minor's Cyclone is just one of the groups racing after the prize -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) is working on high-speed access plans, partly with its Web TV unit, as are a number of regional telephone providers.
AOL has the installed base so important in the software business. But AOL hasn't been acting the behemoth lately, mostly because it's been hearing AT&T's footsteps on its turf.
The growing rivalry has ranged from the comical -- as in AOL's lawsuit trying to stop AT&T from using the expression ''You Have Mail'' in its WorldNet Internet service -- to the far more serious, the claim that AT&T, as a historic common carrier, will monopolize Web access with its new AtHome/TCI cable modem service.
Some see the AtHome and Excite deal as another factor heating up the looming war between AT&T and AOL, citing AT&T's previous failed attempts to start an online service, Interchange, which competed with AOL, and then making an offer to buy AOL.
''AT&T is the godfather at the shotgun wedding of AtHome and Excite,'' said Zona's Rappaport. ''AT&T needed this because of its failure to build a viable Internet service. So it was forced to buy.''
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