Welcome to my old blog, which I no longer maintain.

For details of my current professional services and activities see www.martingeddes.com.

April 18, 2006

Netflux

Thought for the day...

Why hasn't anyone yet got a business model of shipping out high-capacity USB hard drives on loan with encrypted content, and then selling you the decryption keys for the content you want to view? Can easily get 100+ movies onto one drive these days. Bored of that selection? Swap it out for another 100, custom-burned for you in advance.

Doesn't anyone else see the Netflix-style shipping of DVDs that cost cents to press as somewhat peverse? That you put a $0.25 piece of media in a $0.20 shipping carton and pay $0.50 to send it back across the country? That you can't get the content you want when you want because the bits got affixed to a supply-constrained, fixed set of polycarbonate discs?

That said, given that storage technology continues to outpace transmission and processing power, their "high-latency mail-powered broadband" model looks like it'll have some serious longevity. Just hope they don't get too stuck in a "scarcity" rather than "abundance" mindset, ekeing out movies one at a time.

Brough Turner points to some slimey ways in which housing developers can keep their tenants hostage to their own private data utilities. You kind of wonder whether apartment complex owners will soon be getting into the business of putting a few racks down in the basement and installing a rack of hard drives every week, bypassing the telco and cablecos entirelty.

Telcos bearing IPTV offerings, beware! You've got competition, and you're the cost model ever more on their side every day -- they can put the storage nearer the user.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 5:14 PM
Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/696