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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (9264)	5/8/1999 8:35:00 AM
From: Michael P. Michaud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

<<<T is a shareholder. Therefore they have no more conflict of interest than you do if you're a shareholder. What do you mean?>>> I'll take a stab at what he means. Should T decide to rent a portion the wire that was acquired from UMG and TCI to an independent service provider (e.g., AOL), T gets access revenues and the ISP gets content revenue. Why does T have to share the access revenue with ATHM? Even if the deal includes some exchange for backbone equipment, T benefits the most because it bolsters T's infrastructure. Sure ATHM gains some benefit, as the system as a whole gets upgraded, but T wins both ways: pipe rental and more customers for their "package deal". T could sell a lot more bundles if broadband AOL was included with that bundle.

To: ahhaha who wrote (9264)	5/8/1999 2:42:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

"T is a shareholder. Therefore they have no more conflict of interest than you do if you're a shareholder. What do you mean?" I think he means that T could potentially elect to do an _end run_ around the consortium, like others are apt to do if they have a mind to, and deal directly with AOL and other SPs who want entry. That would eliminate the need for revenue sharing with the other 20 or so partners in ATHM. They can do this through the use of alternate channel allocations, and sidestepping the route that connects to ATHM's intranet-like backbone. In so doing, they would have to bridge the RF portion to a different cable router, or set up partitions in the existing cable router, as it's called, to the upstream providers, as a means of achieving what I said would be difficult to do, otherwise. But this in itself is a departure from using the constructs available in ATHM's infrastructure and overall delivery scheme. True, it does step outside the norm and allows to take place what I have said would be difficult to do, but it doesn't remedy the more overwhelming problem over time, and that is the paucity of bandwidth that would eventually manifest itself on the HFC. And to do this for AOL and others would be to remove ATHM's own options for future utilization of those channel resources, something they will inevitably come to require themselves, over time, prior to, or when, the 'end game' penetration numbers are where they need to be (whenever that is...). There are very likely some covenants in place, I would imagine, in the by-laws of the partnership precluding this sort of thing from happening, but I am not sure. Anyone?