Somehow I missed this piece in Variety that reveals Netflix’s plan to launch an Internet-enabled, proprietary set-top box that allows its customers to receive downloadable movies overnight. But thanks to Brian Ward at The Deal’s TechEffect blog, I’m on the case now.
And it’s a pretty lame case. Why Netflix thinks yet another specialized add-on set-top box will ever fly is beyond me. Haven’t they heard of MovieBeam, the Disney-founded over-the-air subscription film service that requires customers to install a $99 set-top box to receive premium movies?
Brian raises a series of skeptical questions about the snail-mail movie company’s attempt to transform itself into a broadband-powered, set-top based distributor. The most important one of which is:
Will this move make Netflix a direct competitor to on-demand services the cable companies offer?
Um, yeah, you think? A Netflix box would be a direct (although laughably ineffective) assault on the dominant video providers. For that reason you can bet that cable operators and satellite providers would throw up as many technical barriers as possible to make the Netflix box a totally crappy, troublesome and just-not-worth-it piece of electronics.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager turned author, has a provocative piece in the Weekly Standard. Based on left-right stereotypes, you might expect him to be against net neutrality regulation. And you’d be right, but that’s not all he’s got to say:
[T]he answer is not regulations imposing net neutrality. You can already smell the mandates and the loopholes once Congress gets involved…We all know that regulations beget more lobbyists. I’d rather let the market sort these things out.
But what market? Phone lines, cable, and cellular—i.e., the means of Internet access—are all regulated; their operators are quasi-monopolies. Even if you end the monopolies, the incumbents have the advantage of a huge head start. Broadcasters own valuable spectrum and feed us cretinous shows like Wife Swap and The Bachelor. Cable has a lock on our homes via local franchise bribes, er, fees, so we get Lifetime and Animal Planet that no one watches. Satellite TV is content to charge just a hair under cable’s pricing umbrella. For phone companies, too much Internet bandwidth would threaten their bread and butter—overpriced $25 per month (it’s worth no more than $1) phone service and hot innovations like call waiting.
So how do we fix this? Are we stuck in telco hell? Silicon Valley can ignite a political arms race and spend more on lobbyists, but why play an old man’s game? Instead, these webbies should get creative, change the rules…Take the telcos and cable companies out at the knees.
I have to admit, Kessler’s proposed strategy caught me by surprise. Referring to the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. City of New London ruling, he suggests that eminent domain may have a place in the current telecom policy debate.
Surely there exists some clever Silicon Valley counsel to twist the wording of the [Kelo v. City of New London] precedent…[S]tart with this line: “Economic underdevelopment and stagnation are also threats to the public sufficient to make their removal cognizable as a public purpose.”…Sure, property rights are important, but that doesn’t mean we can’t shake a cattle prod at our stagnant monopolists and say “update or get out of the way.”
…I know, I know. This sounds wrong. These are privately owned wires hanging on poles. But so what? The government-mandated owners have been neglecting them for years—we are left with slums in need of redevelopment. Horse-drawn trolleys ruled cities, too, but had to be destroyed to make way for progress. How do we rip the telco’s trolley tracks out and enable something modern and real competition?
Forget the argument that telcos need to be guaranteed a return on investment or they won’t upgrade our bandwidth. No one guarantees Intel a return before they spend billions in R&D on their next Pentium chip to beat their competitors at AMD. No one guarantees Cisco a return on their investment before they deploy their next router to beat Juniper.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:16 PM | Print | Comments (1)
The Washington Post ran a series of articles yesterday on what it calls “ten Internet years,” or ten years during which the Post specifically, and the newspaper industry more broadly, has been grappling with the enormous changes wrought by the Web. The first is a piece by PressThink’s Jay Rosen, which focuses on how newspapers evolved their web strategies from “repurposing” print content to empowering readers.
It’s a long way from “Excuse us, just re-purposing,” to, “Oh my God, there’s been a power shift.” But since 2004, mainstream providers have shown signs of learning to swing with the Web. They supported blogs. They encouraged interactivity. They began to re-draw their picture of their audience.
The Post’s Patricia Sullivan has this piece that documents the decline of traditional media and how newspapers, in particular, are trying to cope with this massive sea-change.
There’s no question that the Internet has changed the news industry in the past decade. Old media has learned that simply shoveling content from one medium to the Web doesn’t work, any more than reading a newspaper into a TV camera capitalizes on the strength of that medium.
Technology has driven behavioral changes, as reporters, producers, photographers and editors learn that interactivity in the form of e-mail, blogs, polls, hyperlinks, Videologs, podcasts and news delivered via cell phones can open their work up to a newer and bigger audience, for better or worse. It’s far easier for a reader to find a reporter now than it was in the past; it’s also easier for a story published overseas or in a local or regional outlet to have a bigger impact. No longer are readers or viewers bound by network broadcast schedules, the delivery of a newspaper or magazine or the top-of-the-hour radio headlines.
Finally, the Post’s Steve Fox has documented the history of how the Post’s, and Washington Post Newsweek Interactive’s, web strategies have evolved from their beginnings in a 1992 memo by then-managing editor Bob Kaiser.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:47 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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