Technology Futures

The AP reports that the just completed worldwide Live Aid concert broke all records for live streaming. An arrangement with AOL allowed the concert organizers to stream all ten concert venues live over the Internet. It smashed every existing streaming broadcast record, and AOL reported that they have more than 150,000 simultanteos viewers.

The MTV broadcast was reported a complete dud by comparison. While AOL was able to provide all ten concert venues simultaneously, which let the viewer choose what they wanted to watch, MTV had to constantly switch from one location to another--an artifact of the old, analog-based channel system. MTV also apparently had as much ad time as concert viewing, another weakness of the old TV system. With a Internet-based, Web-enabled viewing mechanism, it's possible to view the content and ads simultaneously in the same window--a win-win situation in which the viewer has more control but the advertiser still gets the put the ad in front of them.

What is also interesting is that the technology to do video streaming is mature enough to do large, multi-site programs like the concert and support 100,000+ simultaneous viewers. And this was done on an Internet infrastructure that was not even designed to support this sort of thing. Ten years from now, this will be commonplace.

Who won? Content providers, advertisers, and viewers. Who lost? Hollywood and the old TV conglomerates have lost, and lost big.

I'll be on vacation this week, and posting will be light. Have a great week, and I'll be back the first week of July.

Best regards,

Andrew Cohill

I just had to upload a small ad to a magazine ftp site. The file was about 5 megabytes, which is very small for this sort of thing; a photo heavy full page ad could easily run 100 megabytes or more.

On my "fast" cable modem connection, I had to sit and watch it grind away for nearly three minutes because Adelphia, like all the "broadband" DSL and cable providers, cripples upload speeds. My upload speed is only about 20% as fast as my download speed. These artificial constraints limit the ability of businesses to do client videoconferencing, transfer large files to other workers and clients, prevents medical professionals from looking at X-rays from home, and a host of other business functions that are now routine.

Meanwhile, in the February, 2005 issue of Broadband Properties, Marilyn O'Connor, the Verizon Senior VP for Broadband, stated that copper systems are "fine" and that it "serves what the market needs are."

Verizon is sadly out of touch.

The City of Orlando has pulled the plug on its ambitious free WiFi program. It was costing the city almost $2000/month, and only an average of 27 people a day were using the system. There are several things we can learn from this.

• As I've been saying for a long time, start small and make sure something works before pouring a lot of money into it. Orlando should have tried a few hotspots and kept the cost down to a few hundred dollars. If they had done this and monitored usage, it would have been a clue that usage was not what they expected.
• IT folks love big projects because it allows them to justify bigger budgets and more staff. Higher level managers (read elected officials, in this case) often allow themselves to get railroaded by their IT staff as IT folks throw around a lot of buzzwords and make everyone feel ignorant and behind the times. I don't know if this happened in this case, but think about the Philadelphia project, led by the city's IT director, that wanted to build a massive, multi-million dollar citywide WiFi system. It never made much sense to me--I don't ever recommend spending that much money in advance of understanding the market direction. And the market direction for WiFi has always been muddy.
• Beware of vendors promising big benefits. Vendors love muni projects because they can usually get muni IT staffs excited about buying a lot of stuff, and it is usually then easy to wow city leaders who are feeling some pressure to "do something about broadband." WiFi is only part of a comprehensive approach to broadband. Despite what vendors say, it does not solve the broadband "problem."

So what should communities be doing about WiFi? I think that muni WiFi makes sense only when you understand what the bigger community goals are. Are you trying to get tourists to pull off the interstate and visit your community? Then a free WiFi hotspot at the tourist center makes a lot of sense, and is easily justified.

Are you trying to help with Digital Divide issues in your community? Then offering WiFi at the library, where people can bring a laptop and work quietly may make sense. Are you trying to attract more youth and foot traffic downtown? Then a few public hotspots with convenient outdoor access (e.g. a downtown park) may make sense.

There may be neighborhoods and communities where a WiFi blanket over a larger area is justified, but you need to know what you want to accomplish first, and be able to place the technology investment in a larger context, like a Technology Master Plan.