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Technology Stocks : Concurrent Computer (CCUR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jeffbas who wrote (7034)	2/11/1999 5:51:00 AM
From: Nimbus	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21143

Hollywood. Another model has been in the works for video content suppliers to provided copies of their material for a license to webserver owners who provide it to internet customers for little to no fee in exchange for visiting their site which is paid for by advertisers (as we well know). Remember, the bulk of video is old TV content, not movies, and sites like tvontheweb are preparing for this video-over-cable-modem paradigm shift. If there is bandwidth to the home for video, websites are prepared to supply it in vast quantities. I don't know about you but the list of movies I want to see over TV VoD is short compared to the list of other material such as sports, documentaries, How-To, and Classic TV items which the owners would love to mass market using the internet, which is available world-wide vs. the constrained head-end IVOD model. Cable Modems allow those thumbnail Video windows on our PCs, constrained by the original 28.8 paradigm, to open to full rate full screen using cable modem speeds, providing access to thousands, and one day millions, of live and stored video channels. Soon full 1-2 hour clips will even be newsgroup items like many pics (jpgs) are now. It has all been a bandwidth and storage problem, both of which are now becoming solved. A $200 hard disk at 6GBytes can hold over 6 hours of MPEG2 and 12+ hours of MPEG1. Thats a breakthrough. I believe this must be taken seriously. Cable Cos want to take the $25/month you spend for your ISP and the $25/month you spent for a second phone line, and use that money for cable modem service. This is clearly working. The next question is can they also talk you into also renting a STB for $20/month and charge you for movies at $6/pop? That's potentially less compelling if a multitude of equal quality video is available via the cable modem service. If however the Cable cos can block internet video somehow (which I'd argue could be illegal) then perhaps they will be able to deploy IVOD Head-end servers profitably. It is very possible today for me to email you a 2 hour mpeg of my child's school play and you'd get it within minutes via a cable modem. If files such as these are blocked by a cable cos monopoly then we have a serious problem. I should be able to populate my website with our entire family library of videos and have you or anyone access it right ? Is it right for a cable cos to block access to this material ?? It is this delemna that is one of the many reasons mass deployment of head-end VOD is stalled. The cable cos have yet to run VOD trials and by the time these complete, the cable modem revolution and expansion of internet video sources might allow them to avoid the risk and the cost of deploying VOD and force them to rethink the whole concept. It will be an interesting year.