[IP] Here Come the Giants
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 13, 2005 12:20:08 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Here Come the Giants
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[Note: Blog entry from 'Participatory Culture', the developers of
DTV, the Internet TV application. Worth reading! DLH]
Here Come the Giants
<http://participatoryculture.org/blog/2005/10/here-come-the-giants/>
There was lots of thunder this week as giant corporations make moves
to capture the online video ‘market’. Apple, which dominates digital
music, just introduced an iPod that plays video and an iTunes video
store. They don’t have a ton of content right now, but they have some
exclusive TV shows, beautiful electronics, and enormous momentum.
Earlier in the week, Microsoft and Real announced that they will work
together to promote a music store that will likely grow to include a
video store. Microsoft will, of course, aggressively push this on
Windows users. And don’t doubt Microsoft’s ability to push mediocre
services– Alexa ranks 3 Microsoft web sites in the 10 ten most
popular english language sites: MSN at #2, passport.net at #4, and
microsoft.com at #6. Those sites don’t really attract visitors as
much as they get visitors delivered to them by the Windows monopoly.
The same could easily happen for video, despite Apple’s big headstart.
Yahoo and Google are also in the battle and so are electronic
companies like Sony, movie studios like Sony, and video rental
companies like Blockbuster and Netflix. Online video looks like a
multi-industry convergence point / competitive explosion. Everyone
knows video will be a big pie. Probably the big pie.
But let’s step back for a second. Imagine if 25 years ago the US
government licensed some key internet technologies to companies and
what we call the ‘internet’ developed into a private, expensive
research and telecommunications network. It’s not a far-fetched a
scenario, it could have made a lot of sense at the time. A few years
later AOL would have come along and built their exciting, high tech,
‘online’ service with simplicity and good features at a price that
individuals could afford (this is exactly what AOL did, actually).
Without the internet to compete, AOL would have grown and grown until
Microsoft eventually builds a competing, service called ‘MSN’ that,
like AOL, would give users a nice batch of tools and services to dial
in to. Both AOL and MSN would have had chat rooms and celebrity
photos and auctions and then music and video too. And they would, of
course, be distinct and incompatible, vying for marketshare and
making exclusive deals with different news services and entertainment
companies– perfect competitors. Everything would have seemed fine.
Better than fine, in fact; both services would have represented an
amazing new use of technology, connecting people instantly in ways
previously imagined by science fiction. Who could complain?
But instead of closed online services we got the internet. Thank God.
AOL’s private enclave, where companies had to pay giant amounts of
money just to get a ‘keyword’, eventually succumbed to the torrential
force of wild, wonderful internet openness. What’s scary is how
easily we could have been happily trapped in a world of crappy online
services– the scenario above sounds great if you’ve never seen the
internet. But now that we’ve all lived with the internet for a few
years, it’s obvious to everyone what a disaster it would have been if
‘online’ meant connecting to a closed corporate service.
[snip]
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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