.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

clouds and concrete, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I think we can all relate to this....

MediaMemo reports that Apple has quietly begun to talk to some TV networks about making all their content available on the iTunes Store for $30/month. This might not sound like a good deal for the TV networks, but in fact, it is very bad news for the cable TV and satellite providers. With an economy in the doldrums and millions of households looking for ways to save money, a $30/month Netflix-style subscription for most popular TV content might look very good compared to $50-$60 per month for 500 channels of blah.

When thse schemes come up for discussion, someone always brings up network news and the cable news channels. But who watches that stuff? Not anyone under 30, and even other demographic market groups now often turn to the Web first, rather than TV.

TV on demand is coming, and the cable TV providers are going to be the big losers.

An interesting fight is brewing between the movie studios and the movie rental outfits. And as usual, it is upstarts like Netflix and other Internet movies on demand outfits that are causing the problem.

For the movie studios, selling DVDs is extremely profitable. Renting, not so much, because they sell a few copies to a Blockbuster or a Netflix, and the rental company gets all the rental revenue. Until Netflix got a toehold, the studios were not too worried about the rental business because video stores also sold a lot of DVDs. Who has bought a DVD from Netflix? Answer: nobody. And the whole movies on demand via the Internet is making things worse.

Why spend $20 to buy a DVD you might only watch two or three times over the next year? If you can pay Netflix one monthly flat fee and watch the movie on demand as many times as you want at no extra charge, why buy? And that's the rub. The Internet is killing the DVD business. Movies are not much like music. The iTunes store sells millions of songs every day, because a) you can listen to music while doing something else, and b) most of us will listen to a song many times. Movies require a dedicated block of time, and there are few movies anybody wants to watch more than once.

The traditional movie and TV business is collapsing under the weight of an obsolete business model. The studios and content owners, instead of adjusting their business models to fit the new dynamic, are engaged in an ultimately futile attempt to hold back the tide. Their answer to sagging DVD sales? "We won't let you rent movies--we're going to force you to buy them." The plan is to not allow movie rentals for at least a month or two after the DVD is released for sale, on the theory that people just can't wait, and will buy it. There may be a few movie fans that will go for that, but the rest of us will just wait.

We've been telling our clients for over a year that they need a plan for a pandemic in which people are told to stay away from the office and work from home. But the Internet was never designed for that--at least not the cheesy "entertainment" Internet that most of us have at home. I put the word "entertainment" in quotes because once when I was working at home and was having Internet problems, my Internet provider told me their home Internet service was strictly for "entertainment" and they could care less about my inability to get any work done.

And there is the whole flu pandemic/work from home problem in a nutshell. DSL and cable modem Internet services were never designed to support business class work. Cable modem service, while typically faster than DSL, is a shared service, so in peak load times, your cable modem connection can quickly slow down to dial up speeds. And the asymmetric bandwidth (very small upload capacity) means you can forget about trying to upload business documents of any size from home.

If we all have to stay home for two weeks because of a major flu outbreak this winter, don't expect to get much work done. The Intertubes will be as clogged up as our nasal passages.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

That Pic Sure Makes Your Email Scam More Believable, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just got this email in my in box. It's obvious scam mail, of course, but I love how they've added a stock photo of global office workers to make it more convincing that a "British finance security company" needs my assistance in processing $35.5 million.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has proposed to the FCC that $5 to $10 billion be spent getting fiber to anchor institutions like schools, libraries, and health care facilities in communities. It's a worthy idea, but as policy, the unintended negative impact will be to make it more difficult to get fiber to homes and businesses in those communities.

The Gates plan is dis-aggregation of demand, and what we want is aggregation of demand. The Gates Foundation will take the biggest spenders for broadband in a community and remove them from the buying pool. When this happens, costs for everyone else go up, or don't go down.

What very few people and policymakers understand is that true community broadband networks are very different from the command and control institutional networks that have been the mainstay of telecom for the past forty years. Policymakers in Washington and groups like the Gates Foundation are talking to senior telecom folks with no experience designing and managing community broadband networks that have a goal of getting everyone connected. When you talk to someone who has been building centralized, top down, single provider networks for thirty years, guess what you get? You get another centralized, top down, single provider network.

It really isn't a technology issue, it is a business model issue. Command and control, centralized networks (think the phone company, the cable company, any wide area institutional network) have a business model that does not work--if those models worked, we'd all have fast fiber connections today. So the Gates Foundation, with the best of intentions, certainly, is proposing something that will be an economic catastrophe for communities, businesses, and economic development.

Video I shot today of the Swedish royal ship Vasa, which sunk off Stockholm during its maiden voyage in 1628. It was salvaged in 1961 and was processed for years using water and preservative chemicals until it was given a new home at Stockholm's Vasa Museum. It's the best preserved 17th century ships in the world, and one of my all-time favorite museums.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Was this children's book inspired by the Twitter fail whale?, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I was at a bookstore in Pittsburgh a few days ago and saw a book called Billy Twitters And His Blue Whale Problem in the children's section. Given that Twitter shows a picture of a whale being lifted up by birds - The Fail Whale - whenever it crashes, I wonder if this book was inspired by that art. The book was published in June 2009, well after the Fail Whale was well established as an Internet meme. Anyone got the scoop on this one? Alas, I was too busy chasing Kayleigh up and down the aisles to get her to sit down and read it with me. :-)

Making traditional POTS more sexy. The Wall Street Journal brings news this weekend of an AT&T plan to launch a cordless landline phone that allows users to make free calls over the Internet, though they still pay for calls over traditional copper. Like Verizon's Iobi, which ties bro..

Will the whole debate even matter in a decade?. "I think it kills the whole business model," says Rupert Murdoch of the push to allow customers to pick their own TV programs (a la carte pricing). The Associated Press discusses where the push for "a la carte" pricing currently stands&#46 Of cours..

36% of households not on-line, and most don't care to be. A significant portion of the U.S. households that are not on-line have little interest in the Internet, indicating that Internet usage penetration has stalled, reports Information Week. About 36% of households are not on-line, and only 2% intend to ..

Council opts for private over city owned. The Star Tribune reports that the Minneapolis City Council approved a plan Friday for a public-private citywide Minneapolis Wi-Fi network, ending a drive by opponents who wanted the city to own the network instead. Under the plan that the council app..

New content for Fios & portal visitors. Verizon has expanded its channel lineup for its Fios Fiber-TV service by striking an extended deal with Disney corporation. The new deal means Verizon can now air programming from ABC News, Disney Online, ESPN, and Movies.com on both its broadband p..

Vyatta tries to topple networking goliath. CNN/Money is running an article on Vyatta, a router company that is trying to break Cisco's strangle-hold on the four billion dollar networking market via open-source&#46 Set to be released this summer, the hardware is expected to cost one-fifth tha..

Films to be available, for free.... Google today announced they'd be digitizing film content from the National Archives, and making it available for free via Google Video. You can check out the pilot program and view some videos here. Also see the national archives press release. Th..

911 is a joke in your town.... One of the things that got states suing, and Uncle Sam interested in legislating quality of VoIP 911, was a series of stories that emerged last year about the dangers of the service. These stories often blamed the VoIP providers for the resulting 91..

A quarter of the state can't get broadband. According to president of AT&T Arkansas, between 20 and 25 percent of Arkansas households have no access to broadband, lower than FCC estimates. The state is exploring broadband over powerline (BPL) technology as one solution, reports the Arkansas N..

An interesting police report from Woburn. User Vonslatt sends in an interesting police report from Woburn, Massachusetts that details just how heated the competition between Verizon and some cable operators may be&#46 3 p.m., a Pierce Promotions employee working on behalf of Verizon reporte..