This piece at Business Week.com takes a look at the high level of poor quality of service for VoIP. The well-written piece by Olga Kharif documents what those of us who have VoIP already know: calls get dropped, sound quality is variable and sometimes it’s just better to use a cell phone.
The complaints don’t stop with service outages. On average, VoIP call quality is worse than cellular, according to research by Internet performance consultancy Keynote. Audio delay (the time between when you speak and the listener can hear you) is often unacceptably long, leading to overlapping conversations.
But not all VoIP providers are the same, and cable operators may just be right when they argue that their higher priced, but higher quality, VoIP options will trump low-cost or free IP voice service.
For now, however, low-cost is the big draw and with it comes the fuzzy sounds and cut-off conversations. Even some of the non-quality of service advantages of VoIP look sketchy to me at times. My Vonage business line, which has substantially improved in terms of QoS over the past nine months, is a pain when it comes to online voice mail retrieval, a much-touted convergence benefit of the new voice option. At times voice mail is simply not retrievable and at other times, it takes forever for the audio file to download.
Still, VoIP is the fastest growing segment of the voice market, and despite these early growing pains, I doubt if growth will slow.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
As technology evolves in ever-shortening cycles, lawmakers and judges are hard-pressed to effectively keep up with the changes. Recent case in point: Australian Justice Murray Wilcox ordered the owner of P2P file-sharing service Kazaa, Sharman Networks, to block a list of search terms, mostly artists’ names and song titles supplied by record companies, from its service.
As Techdirt points out, this is the same prohibition that was applied to Napster in 2001, to no effect. All that keyword blocking did with Napster was force users to misspell artist and song names and the trading continued unabated.
The judge has also ordered Sharman to release a new Kazaa software platform that includes a non-optional keyword filter to weed out the blocked terms. But there’s another hitch: only users that download the new Kazaa software will have the built-in filter and the press is already warning folks not to download the new filter.
But the judge already thought of that. Here’s techdirt’s take:
The judge’s solution? Sharman is expected “to place maximum pressure on KMD [Kazaa Media Desktop] users to obtain the updated release.” Yes, that’s right. To convince people to download the crippled versions of Kazaa, Kazaa is supposed to “place maximum pressure” on current users (i.e., trick them) to download the crippled version, replacing the fully functional version.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Tivo, faced with oblivion due to native DVR technology embedded in cable and satellite set-tops, is on a tear. First, the company announced last week that its devices would support the transfer of recorded programs to Apple iPods or Sony PSPs. This move raised the hackles of at least one network, NBC, which vaguely threatened to pursue litigation against the personal recording company (ironic grumbling given that Tivo’s CEO Tom Rogers was a long-time top NBC exec.)
This latest development prompted David Wilkerson at MarketWatch to speculate whether Tivo was moving too fast to save itself.
Now Tivo has announced that it will offer searchable commercials. The theory behind the move is that viewers aren’t necessarily interested in the commercials served to them automatically, so why not tailor the fit and let viewers search out commercials that might interest them.
The new Tivo set-up will allow viewers to establish a profile of products they are interested in, and Tivo will download commercials that fit the profile. Advertisers will be able to pick the viewers’ keywords in order to associate themselves with the profiles.
Tivo is working with three media buying outfits — Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Interpublic Media, Omnicom Group Inc.’s OMD and Publicis Groupe SA’s Starcom MediaVest Group — as well as with independent Dallas ad agency Richards Group and Comcast Corp.’s Comcast Spotlight ad-sales division.
On the whole it’s a relatively silly idea. I doubt few Tivo customers actually want to watch commercials even when they like the product (a BMW, for example) and any viewer profile data must be updated regularly to be of any true value to advertisers, a chore added on top of keeping track of programs that need to be recorded. Om Malik has a similar, although more optimistic take, regarding the concept.
From an advertiser perspective, this is not such a bad option - you have a much higher chance of getting your ad viewed. It is yet another nail in the coffin of the network television, that already looks like an aging rockstar with too many piercings already. However, if you are a paying customer of TiVo, you should have a problem with that. Unlike Google, TiVo charges a subscription service, and the main reason people are happy to pay is “time shifting television” and skipping through ads. And Google doesn’t make you buy a device. Make the service free and then TiVo and its customers are on equal footing.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:11 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Not only does cable have a bandwidth advantage over telcos, it has a two-way connectivity superiority over satellite, a technological conundrum for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. This Business Week piece highlights how New Corp. fought to buy DirecTV only to find out that cable’s interactivity puts satellite at a competitive disadvantage.
The problem at the heart of DIRECTV’s model is that it can’t yet offer the two-way technologies that are so hot now — from Voice over Internet Protocol to VOD. Satellite’s one-way feed can send shows to TVs, but there’s no path back to the satellite, making its pay-per-view offerings much less popular since they start at scheduled times. Plus, cable is a more attractive platform for ads because it can target spots to specific neighborhoods.
But no one is counting News Corp. out, not by a long stretch. DirecTV has already developed its own answer to VOD and News Corp. is on the hunt for companies that fill the high-speed Internet and VoIP holes.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:45 AM | Print | Comments (0)Yesterday’s New York Times piece by Lorne Manly and Ken Belson on the threat to cable posed by phone companies received a lot of play in the blogosphere. The thrust of the article is that the phone companies are between a rock and a hard place and are pushing into video to save their hides, an effort that is an uphill struggle for the narrowband, non-entertainment-oriented telephone companies. (My favorite quote from the piece comes from Todd Dagres at Spark Capital: he said that the telcos “see their land-line business as an ice cube melting in the sun right now, so they need to become a purveyor of content.”)
This fits right into my analysis of the competitive landscape, but one point missing from the piece is how the cable companies and phone companies face weirdly parallel dynamics. (For more on this, see today’s issue of IP Media Monitor.) Both industries are experiencing losses in their core video customer bases, and both industries can count on high-speed data services for growth.
As the chart on the left depicts (click on thumbnail), the top cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Adelphia, Cablevision, Mediacom and Insight) lost around 400,000 basic cable customers from Q3 03 to Q3 05, with even stalwarts such as Cox experiencing a drop in core video customers. At the same time, however, as the chart also shows, cable’s real growth story is high-speed data, with the top operators increasing their collective broadband subscriber counts from 14.2 at the end of Q3 03 to 22.7 at the end of Q3 05.
The same holds true for the telcos. As the chart on the right shows, from Q3 03 to Q3 05, the top telcos —AT&T (formerly SBC) BellSouth, Verizon and Qwest — lost over 15 million access lines. At the same time, the number of DSL customers climbed from 7.2 million to 15.0 million, providing one of the few true growth areas for the phone companies.
Despite these parallels, the NYT’s piece is on the mark — cable has the upper hand becaused of its bandwidth, which has allowed the industry to swoop into the voice business while telcos are still figuring out the video business.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:45 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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