How wired will we be in 2005?

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Here's my February comments (blockquoted) with Joshua O'Keefe's November responses:

How wired will we be in 2005? Agree or disagree with the following semi-uninformed guesses:

- Most US households will have cable modems that can receive streaming HDTV.

Cable and HDTV will remain mutually incompatible. Cable companies will continue to generate more income by stuffing the largest value of N channels down the pipe, as opposed to improving the technical or artistic quality of programming.

The bandwidth will be there, though. It'll just manifest itself as 20,000 SDTV channels with mixed-down mono audio and as many dropped frames (they're already missing... look harder at your cable channels) as possible before generating greater than a 10% complaint rate.

- The standard home Internet box will also host the family website.

Nope. It will continue to be more practical for hosting to reside closer to the backbone. However, the Internet box will be a gateway to several other household-run services (scheduling, directory service, mail and messaging)

- The cable will handle voice and video telephony as well.

Doubtless. Voice telephony over cable is here today, and video telephony is probably close by. Cable providers, however, don't culturally inherit the leftover 70s videotelephone dreams that telcos do. It may not become a priority to offer it as a marketed service.

- Outbound bandwidth will support a limited personal radio or video channel (increased capacity fairly cheap).

Wide use of multicast techniques will support reasonably unlimited personal audio or video channels -- they will most likely become the basis for a certain percentage of cable TV content for passive viewers. Most likely, cable systems will place limits on propagation, since they will be gaining commercial advantage from content created on their networks.

- Standard HD will be one terabyte.

By 2005 we will be encroaching on this limit, with multi-TB storage common in business use.

- Standard OS will be Linux-derivative with friendly GUI.

"Friendly GUI" will be redefined to mean what consumer electronics manufacturers want us to think it means. The box itself and 80% of its capabilities will be a big, honkin' mystery to most users. The OS itself will be relatively transparent to the user, a vast majority of whom will use a cursor-key type remote to pick from among an enormous array of passive channels.

- Micropayments will be smoothly integrated, so creative content can be efficiently rewarded.

I'm projecting, here, so forgive me: Micropayment will be considered a colossally failed fad a la "push."

- Your home webserver will offer "Caller IP" options (comparable to Caller-ID, but vastly extended) that allow different levels of access to known visitors (including videophone, etc).

My home network does this now, based on IP as well as real authentication.

- It will be trivially easy, after viewing an item of content, to publish your review to the whole web or to a select subgroup, and you'll automatically earn commissions on the micropayments of viewers you refer to each site. (This is an extension of the 'weblog' model-- see the url in my sig below for my no-commissions-yet weblog.)

This functionality will be among the earlier third party developments for the One True Set Top Box that gains a cable-system sanctioned foothold in the marketplace.

- This 'commissions-for-recommendations' model will replace ordinary paid advertising for the most part.

Product placement, dodgy editorial objectivity, and pervasive branding will replace outright advertising for the most part.

- The best-connected reviewers will earn huge commissions by this route, simply drawing attention to what's new and cool.

- Free content (text, video, audio, etc) will also be available, and competitive in quality for many purposes.

Free content will be widespread, but production values will continue to be disappointingly low. (There's already a low barrier for entry into web "publishing", and lookit my very own Indirection for an example of the immense crapulence with which amateurs will approach their work.)

- For other purposes, a very low micropayment rate will allow significantly higher quality content. These domains will have two or three dominant publishers.

- For the most desirable content, like the top live musicians, much higher micro(macro?)payments will result in huge earnings, literally overnight.

- The frictionlessness of this path-to-wealth (without the obstacles of the record industry, etc) will lead to a huge upsurge in people cultivating their creative talents.

I'm going to take a pass on the u-payment thing based on the "if you can't say anything nice" rule.



-- Jorn (jorn@mcs.com), November 10, 1999

Answers

New questions, in response to Joshua:

- Can't cable providers send a different HDTV stream to each subscriber, simultaneously? If not, how far off is this?

- Amazon royalties are a big success. Epinions-like models should do okay when they get better known. So why are micropayments not equally reasonable, even if they require a plug-in?

- Can you efficiently exploit 'Caller-IP' on your website, if it's hosted elsewhere (not in your home)? Something about this seems impractical to me.

-- Jorn (jorn@mcs.com), November 11, 1999.


Thank you for moving this to a more suitable forum, by the way. Anyone else?

-- Joshua O'Keefe (majick@skunkworks.cx), November 10, 1999.

- The standard home Internet box will also host the family website.

Put me in the "nope" category -- service providers will continue to be paranoid about permitting outgoing services, the average family will continue to have no actual use for a website to justify the amount of effort needed to develop one, all attention will be paid to hosting services outside of the home, and lastly, hosting will become more complex as people require more from it in terms of scripting, XML, integration with other services such as email, etc.

- Outbound bandwidth will support a limited personal radio or video channel (increased capacity fairly cheap).

I desperately hope. OTOH, that sort of ability has been a long time coming and not really here yet. Furthermore, there may arrive societal changes that make it less attractive.

While the megatrend for a long time has been a demand for more channels, more choices, more diversification, the cyclical nature of history suggests that we will at some point demand fewer choices and emphasize unity and homogenization instead. Although it seems almost unthinkable today, this same shift happened between the 1920s (when, like today, whirlwind changes and technology advancements put people's heads in a spin) and the 1940s/50s (when we felt that three rigidly-controlled TV channels would be enough for anybody).

- Standard HD will be one terabyte.

Even if there is a recession, I'll wager that Moore's law and other rules of thumb of technology advancements will continue.

- Standard OS will be Linux-derivative with friendly GUI.

I side towards the network computer here, but don't go as far as Joshua's concept of a transparent OS, simply because there is so much utility in complexity for those people who can handle it. For example, a digital camera will produce images and an NC + WebTV-type box can be used to share them; but a full-fledged computer is still needed to color correct them, add captions, change brightness, sharpen, crop, etc. For the more capable there will always be more that can be done with a box that allows one more reach.

- Micropayments will be smoothly integrated, so creative content can be efficiently rewarded.

I really, really hope so because IMO this is the key that the net has needed *forever*. Like Linux, people will produce content for their own enjoyment and share it just for ego gratification or altruistic purposes. But there are too many possible slip-ups in a gift culture in information. Meanwhile, epinions has shown us how a net.startup can share its income with the people who produce its content. Epinions is micropayments and it's flying well. I hope that more models like epinions will show up. There will be increasing pressure for this sort of model as banner ads continue to not work.

- For the most desirable content, like the top live musicians, much higher micro(macro?)payments will result in huge earnings, literally overnight. - The frictionlessness of this path-to-wealth (without the obstacles of the record industry, etc) will lead to a huge upsurge in people cultivating their creative talents.

I sure hope so. I think this has a chance of working, although 2005 is a little optimistic, because of the oncoming revolution in ReplayTV and Tivo. ReplayTV, in particular, makes it possible to skip commercials with the push of a single button. You already see one of the results: commercials are getting more and more entertaining, becoming 30-second micro-dramas and micro-comedies. On some networks the commercials are more entertaining than the content. But in the long run, we know that they are just pushing product, and they cannot possibly hope to compete for our entertainment dollar.

Due to the personal digital recording and commercial bypassing, TV will be less lucrative - EXCEPT for live events. Although you can start recording your event at 8PM and start watching at 8:10, then skip 10 minutes worth of commercials, that's pretty tedious. People will continue to watch live events live, letting the commercials run. This will immediately increase the worth of sporting events. (Memo to self: buy Disney stock, since they own ESPN and ABC (home of Monday Night Football).

But as for people cultivating their own creative talents in order to get a piece of the pie, I doubt that. In order to reach the level where you'd get a large enough slice to quit working, you'd have to be damn good; in order to be damn good, you have to be driven; in prosperous times like these, nobody is driven due to hunger, they are driven by their inner need to share their creative output. A small number of good artists will be able to improve their lot by shipping their stuff with the advancements in communications, and any business oriented towards being highly profitable by keeping content or information at a slow trickle had better watch out. But I still don't see the average Joe or Joanne practicing scales because they can ask their neighbor to watch.

-- Arthur Alexander (abalone@zerodefect.net), November 11, 1999.


- Can't cable providers send a different HDTV stream to each subscriber, simultaneously? If not, how far off is this?

I'm being pedantic. Cable providers have an inbuilt loathing of HDTV itself, but not necessarily DTV as a whole. HDTV broadcasts take up more bandwidth than standard definition DTV -- and much more than analog NTSC video, which will still be their bread-and-butter in 2005. There'll still be millions of about-to-be-obsoleted (in 2006) televisions, and the cable folks will be leveraging them hard.

The average Joe doesn't really care about HDTV -- I mean, c'mon, VHS video is a multibillion dollar operation even in the face of better technology today -- and still won't in 2005. However, consumer confusion between HDTV (high resolution widescreen DTV) and DTV (any digitally transmitted TV, usually SDTV) will muddy the waters considerably.

Video-on-demand won't quite catch fire: cable companies will balk at the astronomical storage costs to hold every bit of video that might be demanded. They'll already be hurting somewhat from the conversion of legacy RF infrastructure to "digital cable": DTV and set-top-boxes. Pay per view will continue to be a more cost-effective distribution model, and will keep AT&T/TCI and Blockbuster out of each other's way.

The bandwidth'll be there, but it will be used very differently: lots'n lots of channels. If a small number of good channels were a better source of revenue than a large number of low-quality channels, I'd be able to get the Cartoon Network by now instead of 10 UHF Spanish-language drama stations. But cable operators make a ton of dough inserting local ads into the video stream. More streams = more ads.

- Amazon royalties are a big success. Epinions-like models should do okay when they get better known. So why are micropayments not equally reasonable, even if they require a plug-in?

They are a big success by today's measure. Publishers that can aggregate eyeballs are making real money from Amazon. How'll they fare directly competing with multi-thousand channel video? How 'bout the exponetially growing size of the Web? Will it even be possible for all but the most lavishly-funded publishers to promote themselves enough to drum up today's traffic levels?

u-payment is a whole 'nother issue: it plays on the assumption that consumers don't really care about the difference between free and fractional-penny values. But as soon as people have to start thinking "If I click this, I am spending real money" readers are going to stay away in droves unless the boss is paying.

I have several other notions about u-payment, but that's the central one, and the one I can best express in language appropriate for polite company. =)

- Can you efficiently exploit 'Caller-IP' on your website, if it's hosted elsewhere (not in your home)? Something about this seems impractical to me.

Sure, why not? You define a set of ACLs that apply to your "domain" and tell that to the site provider. Assuming a protocol arises to define and exhange these ACLs -- which is needed to make this a consumer feature anyways, wherever the hosting might be -- you just tell your host about your preferences in the same way you'd tell your scheduler or videophone or cell phone or PDA or...

Perhaps I don't grasp the definition of what you term "Caller IP", or I misunderstand what you find impractical about it.

-- Joshua O'Keefe (majick@skunkworks.cx), November 12, 1999.


>>But as soon as people have to start thinking "If I click this, I am spending real money" readers are going to stay away in droves unless the boss is paying.

What if there are different models involved? What if it's not pay-by-click, but rather a membership model, where a whole set of sites give you additional or early access to information or articles if you're a $100 member of the "elite browser" set? What if you pay for a subscription system using a proprietary browser in order to browse things that are not actually on the public web?

-- Arthur Alexander (abalone@zerodefect.net), November 12, 1999.



> What if there are different models involved?

I'm all for making money, don't get me wrong. Some models are more appealing than others. Banner ads, for example, are quite appealing to me as a consumer: they get munched by my filtrs while my traffic adds to the read site's CPM. Of course, that's a shell game, essentially helping a site bilk advertisers out of money for ads I never see.

>What if it's not pay-by-click, but rather a membership model, where a

[I'm going to try to be funny first, ...] Remember Slate?

[... then I'll be serious.] Marketed the right way, this is probably viable for high-end information sources like encyclopedias. Err... okay, maybe not.

>What if you pay for a subscription system using a proprietary >browser in order to browse things that are not actually on the >public web?

Oh! Like CompuServe, Prodigy, and Delphi marketed themselves lo those many years ago as the internet blew right past them? At the time it didn't save them, but history rarely prevents folks from trying.

Of course, there is a successful counterexample, too. AOL has (well, had... I doubt it does today) quite a collection of non-Web content visible from a proprietary browser. From what I've heard lately, they're nearly capable of operating at a profit now.

Maybe it's my limited thinking, but I find it hard to conceive of ways to offer content online at a profit unless that content is porn. To be completely honest, though, I haven't investigated the latest u-payment schemes. I'm reacting entirely on the basis of what I heard and read about a few years ago when micropayment for online content was a new idea.

Oh, and by the way, I'm really nowhere near as negative and cranky as all this makes me out to be. I'm just better skilled at expressing my opinions of things I have an aversion to.

-- Joshua O'Keefe (majick@skunkworks.cx), November 12, 1999.


OK, time to add my relatively uninformed two cents!

- Most US households will have cable modems that can receive streaming HDTV.

Yes, for most urban households, but not for rural ones. The common misconception on the internet is that everyone lives in a city. I'm holding out for a wireless solution, either via satellite or using long duration aircraft to relay signals (should be cheaper).

- The standard home Internet box will also host the family website.

It will be technically possible, but that doesn't mean that everyone will take advantage of it.

- The cable will handle voice and video telephony as well.

Yes

- Outbound bandwidth will support a limited personal radio or video channel (increased capacity fairly cheap).

This can be done today provided that you have enough bandwidth (though most of us are still stuck with dial up connections). Everyone with a fast connection will broadcast their own material, if they so desire (much as how people use personal webpages today).

- Standard HD will be one terabyte

Seems reasonable. I don't know what the physical limits to hard drive storage are, but given how much cost per megabyte storage has dropped in the past few years. . .

- Standard OS will be Linux-derivative with friendly GUI

My guess is that something will come along to replace Linux and Windows in another five years. Who knows?

- Micropayments will be smoothly integrated, so creative content can be efficiently rewarded.

No chance in hell. Who is going to pay for the content? Most consumers won't want to and big corporations certainly won't. The technology may change, but people won't!

- Your home webserver will offer "Caller IP" options (comparable to Caller-ID, but vastly extended)that allow different levels of access to known visitors (including videophone, etc).

Yes.

- It will be trivially easy, after viewing an item of content, to publish your review to the whole web or to a select subgroup, and you'll automatically earn commissions on the micropayments of viewers you refer to each site. (This is an extension of the 'weblog' model-- see the url in my sig below for my no-commissions-yet weblog.)

Can be done today, but its not "trivially easy". I doubt that any commissions will be worth cashing in. Everyone will express their own opinion, but only a miniscule handful of people will get paid for it.

- This 'commissions-for-recommendations' model will replace ordinary paid advertising for the most part.

No chance. Traditional advertising is not going to go away.

- The best-connected reviewers will earn huge commissions by this route, simply drawing attention to what's new and cool.

A miniscule number of people might be able to make a living this way, but not a well paid one for the most part. - Free content (text, video, audio, etc) will also be available, and competitive in quality for many purposes.

Most free content will still suck, just as it does today.

- For other purposes, a very low micropayment rate will allow significantly higher quality content.

I doubt it. Seems to me that now people do good webpages because they enjoy what they are doing, not for financial gain.

-These domains will have two or three dominant publishers.

If they exist at all.

-For the most desirable content, like the top live musicians, much higher micro(macro?)payments will result in huge earnings, literally overnight.

Probability zero. People aren't going to pay for what they can get for free somewhere else. Someone will always give it away for free, even if the quality is lower, most consumers just won't care.

- The frictionlessness of this path-to-wealth (without the obstacles of the record industry, etc) will lead to a huge upsurge in people cultivating their creative talents.

People will still largely cultivate their creative talents because they enjoy doing so, not because of a large financial payoff. The traditional media outlets will be just as powerful as they are now and will continue to make huge amounts of money. As an example, lets suppose that everyone on earth had their own radio station, if this was the case how many people could possibly be listening so that you could make money off it?

Of course, I could be completely wrong. That is the great thing about the future; most predictions turn out to be completely rediculous!



-- Oxnard (astroman@hickory.net), November 13, 1999.


I vote for astroman.

-- russ conner (carcomp@uswest.net), May 31, 2000.

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