Channeling Broadband
By Dale Dougherty
The essence of surfing is that there are no transitions. I see a lot of things happening in broadband but I have to make up my own connections among many different streams.
I attended a Sonoma County (CA) seminar called Telecom Valley 2000. This area boasts new telecompanies such as Cerent, recently bought by Cisco for $6.9 billion, and the former Diamond Lane Communication, makers of DSL equipment, now known as the Nokia High Speed Access Products Division. A speaker remarked that DSL was originally developed for video-on-demand -- it remains the only technological survivor of a broadcaster's dream that died in the light of the Internet.
I've been contemplating buying a ReplayTV or TiVo set-top box. This next-generation VCR is essentially a hard disk that can be used to "save" TV programs for viewing on your own schedule. In a certain way, these devices are the video equivalent of MP3 players. Saving a program to disk is a lot like ripping a CD -- you end up with MPEG files. While the current generation of these boxes doesn't let you transfer such files, that capability can be easily imagined, giving us access to video files that can be stored on media or distributed rather easily. This is taking TV programs out of the TV box. This will impact broadcasters, just as print publishers have had to deal with the distribution of text outside the physical container of a book or magazine.
I recently had lunch with the executive director of our local PBS affiliate. HDTV is looming and stations are under pressure from the FCC to make use of it in the next couple of years.
