Author: Jesse Monroy, Jr.
Date: March 6, 2001
Currently technology companies are bent on an All
or Nothing Strategy. This failing strategy is frustrating producers and
viewers alike. In both cases, not only are sales and marketing peddling this
destructive process, but architecture and engineering are also working in
concert.
One such example is Xing Technologies. They
exhibited this arrogance in 1995 when they force producers and viewers alike,
to switch from their v1.x to v2.x technology. This move cost them the market.
At the time, Xing had the dominant product on the market with all the hooks
necessary to take a command position. Instead of following with their previous
plan, they decided that v1.x software would not be compatible with v2.x. In
short, this meant that viewers with the v1.x software could not view the new
cybercasts by the 2.x servers. This meant the viewers needed to upgrade their
software. As a result, the viewer stops whatever they were doing , then
downloads, installs and sets up new software. Since this action was called for,
the viewer had equal incentive to download the competitors software and try it.
In the end, no company had a superior
downloadable package for viewing cybercasts over the Internet. However, other
companies offered ancillary services, such as viewing guides - where viewers
could find content, and thereby beat the chicken and egg syndrome. And since,
Xing had a weak content guide by comparison, viewers move to where the content
was; even if it was of poorer quality.
In much the same way, the Internet technology
sector is making weak offerings. Traditional entertainment companies, which
have lived peacefully for years with incremental technology shifts, see the
Internet and the sector as threats. Companies, such as Microsoft have
underscored this threat, which have setup production studios and continuing to
run content venues in spite of heavy losses.
It is no wonder then that the entertainment (or content) companies are
slow to move.
The technology sectors, then, have continued to
offer All-or-Nothing technologies. This is best seen by Content
Distribution Providers, such as Akamai, iBeam and Digital Island. These
technology companies offer a distributed network of computers that replicate
(or duplicate) content. As such, this technology threatens the single largest
profit center for film industry, distribution.
Another technology with an All-or-Nothing
bend is MPEG. The technology has profited in niche' markets - namely video
transport. In this market, it works well because from end-to-end the content is
under the control of the of those destine to profit from it, in this case Cable
TV. With this system, the videotape is taken directly to digital, then sent to
a satellite, then transfered back to tape, or stored in digital format, until
ready broadcast with traditional methods. Even in the most advance systems,
MPEG is merely used as a means to reduce overhead; so more channels can be
added. To date there are are few profitable working systems, that offer VOD
(Video On Demand). And those system that do are limited to small and limited
markets with small geographic dispersion, like hotels or conference centers.
Even so, many vendors have arrived with new MPEG
systems. However, even in those systems that work with computers, and not
specialized equipment, they rely on traditional data transport methods - or
very expensive elaborate systems that sit close to the final delivery point. In
few of these cases the systems are incapable of handling thousands of users -
even with latest equipment. And even in those case, ancillary services, such as
increment pay-per-view, flat-rate systems or use-monitoring, are non-existant.
The end result is that these system require extensive system expertise, or a
system that locks producers and/or viewers into a single system.
Companies the have already lost their shirts
with MPEG over IP include, Huerris-Pulizter, Xing, Sony, Microsoft and
Phillips.
MPEG as a video system, in itself, has problems.
The problems include:
·
The
need for special video encoding hardware.
·
The
need for special video decoding software.
·
The
need for special transport (delivery) systems.
·
The
lack of decent audio codecs designed for Internet.
·
And
lastly, it typically requires lots of bandwidth.
Specifically, MPEG is just a defined standard -
with many possible implementations and many methods by which to tackle a common
problem. That said, even if MPEG issues could be oviated, the larger problem is
the transport system. In telephony or cable television technology, the problem
is known as the "last mile" problem.
The telephone company solves this problem by
creating COs (Central Offices), where all signals are transported to a central
location and then broken out in wire strands to each and every business or
home. In short, every single business or home has two (2) copper wires that connect
it to the CO. In turn, each CO is
connected to one or more COs. From a certain perspective, the system looks like
stars layered on top of stars. The system is complex, in some nature, but is
organized and has redundancy to re-route signals.
The cable-tv company has a slightly easier
problem. Rather than transporting an unknown number of random signals, which
could be thousand - or hundreds of thousands, from one point to another, it
transports a fixed number of signals to a fixed number of locations. On this
system there are no unknowns; traffic moves (mostly) in one directions and it
is not expected to move in the opposite direction.
Satelite systems work much the same way as
cable-tv, with the exception that they do not use copper wires in the final
mile, they use a radio link.
While all these problems have reasonable
solutions, it is clear that the technology people are clueless as to how to
solve this. This part of the problems stems from "Startup" and/or
"Corporate" thinking.
To conclude, Streaming Internet Content is years
away. Aside from technical issues that would require a few million in research
and development, the current business structures - via public corporations - is
inpractible for a system that requires easily replicatable and easily
operatible systems.