MESSAGE
| DATE | 2006-11-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] [Fwd: SuitWatch - November 14]
|
-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: SuitWatch
To: suitwatch-at-ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - November 14
Date: Tue, 14 November 2006 14:02:00 -0600
SuitWatch -- November 14, 2006
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Will ISPs save the Net?
We're thinking about buying a big screen: one of those door-sized "HD" jobs
that's actually a 1920 x 1080 computer display. I'm tempted to make the move
right now, because I'm at a friend's house, where his big screen does
double-duty as computer display and what we still call "TV". From his easy
chair he controls the computer screen with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
When he wants to watch TV, he picks up the remote control, changes the
screen input and watches HD cable.
On election nigh, he switched back and forth between computer and TV inputs,
illustrating the stark contrast between the infinite choices in the
computer/network world and the finite choices from the old TV system. This
difference becomes critical as we look forward to the growth of the Net.
The HD programs carried by a handful of TV channels are far better than
anything we got from the old 540-line NTSC system. Sports, music videos and
nature footage are especially compelling. But the rest of the selection is
mostly the Same Old Stuff we've been fed by cable for decades, with marginal
interactive improvements. Flaws in low-resolution NTSC images are vastly
enlarged. Especially annoying are MPEG compression artifacts that make every
frame look like a bad photo saved at the lowest JPEG quality - only worse. I
don't think you can save a JPEG in a way that makes it look this bad:
"folds" in aliasing, quilting, blocking, mosquito noise... all over the
place
Movies from DVDs or downloaded by BitTorrent look good, though not as good
as the best HD source material. Fact is, the best HD you'll see on your big
screen is probably what you shoot yourself on your own 1080i (or soon,
1080p) camcorder. But how about sharing that video? Your DSL or cable
Internet carrier doesn't have that kind of capacity provisioned for your
house. Even if you have Verizon's FiOS service, the company would rather
sell you HD television. That's why they pull the fiber to your house in the
first place. (If you're in one of the lucky handful of communities that have
it. Chances are you're not.)
See, even though the telcos and cablecos are talking optimistic trash about
improving Internet service to homes and businesses, they can't see past
their legacy applications. On the cable side, their most optimistic visions
are about "content distribution". One-way, few-to-many stuff. Same-old, only
bigger and prettier.
They don't understand that the Net supports an infinitude of services and
applications, and that the biggest benefit of incumbency is helping
yesterday's consumers become tomorrow's producers. There is far more money
in that than there ever was in couch potato fertilizer.
The consumer electronics revolution is over. The producer electronics
revolution is just beginning.
It's clear by now that the incumbent carriers will never understand this on
their own. There may be a few glimmers here and there. (J.P. Rangaswami
http://confusedofcalcutta.com/ going to British Telecom is especially
encouraging.) But the shining lights will have to come from somewhere else.
I nominate ISPs.
More than any other industry, ISPs were responsible for the early successes
of Linux in the marketplace, and for mainstreaming free software and open
source building materials. ISPs like The Little Garden, Panix, Earthlink and
Netcom gave ordinary citizens their first tastes of the wide open Internet.
While ISPs have been dependent on carriers, and while carriers have
undermined the ISP business from below (helped in summer of 2005 by the
Supreme Court's Brand X decision
http://news.com.com/Cable+wins+Supreme+Court+battle/2100-1036_3-5764120.h
tml), there is nothing to stop ISPs from providing an endless variety of
services to customers that the carriers would never bother with.
This opportunity was the subject of Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?
(http://www.ispcon.com/conference/keynotes.php)- an on-stage
conversational keynote by Elliot Noss and myself at ISPcon in Santa Clara on
Wednesday. Elliot is the CEO of Tucows, a company that wholesales or
back-ends services for ISPs to re-sell. These include domain name services,
digital certificates, email, managed DNS and web publishing tools. Elliot's
main point, however, was that the portfolio of ISP service offerings is
infinite. And that this infinitude only becomes clear when everybody
concerned separates services from network. Even when one of the services is
providing network installation and support.
It became clear to me, through the day I spent at ISPcon, that the leading
edge of network deployment isn't what the carriers are doing nationwide, but
what independent organizations are doing on their own by pulling fiber and
putting up wireless (mostly wi-fi) networks. These organizations include
companies, municipalities, schools and citizen groups. While some of them
are offering services on top of raw network bandwidth and connectivity, they
way they offer it makes the distinction between network and services
increasingly clear. "Oh yes, we do offer some services if you want them", a
guy from one wireless network company told me. This was after he stopped me
because he saw Linux Journal on my badge and wanted to tell me about how
they built their systems on top of Linux.
Our conversational keynote was well-received. But I think what we need is a
one or more ISPs to pioneer a killer service that addresses the need for
home-produced video distribution. Sometime in the next few years, somebody
is going to produce a must-see home-produced high-def movie, completely
outside the vertical silos that run from Hollywood to theaters and living
rooms through the usual channels. And somebody is going to figure out how to
get that movie paid for without blunt coercion of Digital Rights Management
(DRM).
There is a much better chance that those somebodies will come from the among
thousands of ISPs than from among a handful of network carriers.
Meanwhile at our house we're holding off on the big screen until we can buy
the camcorder and the production gear to go with it. And when we get all
that stuff, it will be far more native to the Net than to the old
distribution silos. ISPs should know that there are millions more like us,
and that together we comprise a very attractive market.
-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University.
_________________________________________________________________
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