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 05:14 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/696.
"never underestiimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes" (attributed to dmr, but in common use from the mid 70s) is still true for asynchronous communications.
Some of the file sharing (mostly divx and mp3) I'm aware of on campus is done by passing around portable drives. 60 GB iPods are just dandy for this
Posted by: at April 18, 2006 06:20 PMWell, a harddisc with content is not going to be able to compete with a real TV service.
Most people will not want to view their TV on a computer and have no really easy way to get the content on their TV.
Either Mediacenters and the likes need to get really popular or the harddisc to include a TV compatible output, putting cost up, for this to get popular.
Posted by: at April 18, 2006 06:53 PMMr. Geddes, it's good that you have people like Mr. Schultz above to keep you in line, otherwise we'd all start thinking that terascale sneakernet would be much more reasonable than digging a hole in the ground to lay fiber.
And, no, I don't think adding a patch cable would change the model that much.
Posted by: at April 20, 2006 03:19 AMUm I was thinking it could also be down to the fact that posting DVDs actually stops the customer from consuming too many films per month too quickly? If your selection was loaded onto a USB key then there would be no period between viewings and users would be able to view far too many films to make these services profitable.
Posted by: at April 20, 2006 11:41 AMHey Martin I asked my Jupiter Research colleagues David Card and Todd Chanko about this and they said (I paraphrase -- errors my fault, brilliance their inspiration):
1) Security experts will tell you that when you hand over a device, it is no longer secure. Given time and resources, it can be cracked.
2) As mentioned earlier in the comments, people want this on their TV, not their PC (tho I talked to a Dartmouth student who said they watch movies and TV on their PCs all the time, as a group experience, so this may be generational, and you and I are already old).
3) Some set top box manufs (Sci Atlanta?) are adding USB ports but they're not yet enabled because the cableco customers don't yet have a use for them.
4) Licensing. You cannot start up this company today if the content providers won't let you sell anything, and the content providers won't license the content until you can solve issue 1), turning this comment nicely around like that legendary snake circling the world.
Posted by: at April 21, 2006 04:54 PMIssue raised by Martin is not that significant. If you can ship content on 200GB harddisks, then it's just as easy to kick a simple and affordable VGA-to-TV converter into the first shipment -- as a welcome gift, sold or rented item.
Alex's point #1 is not a real concern either. The user's physical access to the disk does not affect the security of encrypted content stored there -- provided that you used reasonably strong encryption AND that you don't ship the decryption keys on the same disk.
Of course, if all customers would get identical disks, then the first one of them to get the keys could easily post the keys on the net -- so you would have to use a larger set of keys, and keep a record which customer got which movie encrypted with which key. But this is something that you can pretty easily automate.
Posted by: at April 22, 2006 10:48 PM