Technology Futures

A short note on the Google blog indicates that the community to be selected for the Google fiber opportunity won't be announced until "early 2011."

Apple shareholders are going to have a Merry Christmas if the holiday gift buying polls are correct. All most kids want under the tree is an iPad (31%) or an iPod Touch (29%). That 31% figure for the iPad beats every other device on in the poll, including Microsoft's Xbox 360, which is a measly 12%. But wait, there's more coal for PC makers, who are being told that the iPad and other tablet devices are depressing computer sales; overall, sales are still increasing, but at a lower rate as tablets cannibalize PC sales. Apple is largely exempt from this, because it's market share for computers (laptops and desktops) continues to expand at the expense of PC makers.

The iPad is probably the most significant innovation since the rise of the Internet in 1994. It's breaking every sales record on the books, and it is likely to single-handedly save the newspaper (now the "newspad") and the magazine. It will change the way kids learn (good-bye to the textbook), and it will continue to throw gasoline on the raging bandwidth fire that is creating grief for the cable and phone companies. And while there are some good Android-based tablets that will give the iPad much-needed competition, right now, Apple is selling 75% of the tablet devices.

Comcast and Level 3 are having a public fight. Level 3 is a long haul network provider; the company owns thousands of miles of inter-city fiber and hauls all kinds of data traffic, including Internet traffic, for a wide variety of customers. But Comcast is groaning under the weight of Netflix and other video traffic, and the cable company wants Level 3 to pay more to drop traffic onto the Comcast network for delivery.

Comcast execs must be scared out of their wits. Cable TV subscribers are canceling their subscriptions, and its not just because of the poor economy. Cable TV and its fabled "500 channels" does not deliver much value any more. Worse, video on demand ventures like Netflix are hugely popular and are using enormous amounts of bandwidth--Netflix customers are using 20% of the total U.S. bandwidth in the evening. And Comcast, which has been making a nice profit on their broadband service for years, is all of sudden facing a flood of demand for their data service which is killing their old-fashioned HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) networks. The cable companies guessed wrong ten years ago. They guessed that this Internet thing would never really catch on, and that they could do some tinkering with their existing copper-based network to deliver both TV and Internet, and they went off and borrowed billions to be able to deliver digital content over a fifty year old network design.

They have not paid that money back yet, not entirely, but the billions in upgrades have already run out of steam. The only answer is to build fiber all the way to the home, but they don't have the money to do that. And worse, their customers have decided that they don't really need the TV service if the Internet works okay. Except all of a sudden, the Internet is slowing down for cable TV subscribers, just when everyone wants more--a lot more.

If you are even slightly tempted to feel sorry for the cable companies, the big incumbent phone companies are in worse shape, as they thought they could string their customers along with 100 year old copper twisted pair networks, and the DSL services are running out of steam even faster than the cable networks.

Short story: Telecom in the U.S. is a horrible mess and will be getting much much worse very quickly. Unless you live in a community where there is a community-owned fiber network (think Chattanooga; Powell, Wyoming; Jackson, Mississippi; much of Utah; parts of Virginia, and a few other places).

Netflix has announced an increase in the price of monthly subscriptions, which is no surprise, given the popularity of the firm's video on demand service. With Netflix subscribers using 20% of the nation's bandwidth every evening, Netflix needs some way to pay for all that bandwidth. The company has also added a $7.99/month streaming only subscriptions--you can't get any DVDs.

That might be fine with some folks. Since we started using the streaming service, the number of DVDs we watch has fallen dramatically. Watch next for big changes from the content owners, who have been making a fortune on DVDs for the last fifteen years, but the DVD era is just about over. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth by the TV and movie studios, but in the end, they will make a lot more money by aggressively licensing everything they own for streaming. The truly awful new copyright law is a last ditch attempt by the RIAA and other big copyright advocates to prevent intellectual property theft (e.g. illegal file sharing). But the new law gives the Federal government the ability to shut down ANY Web site arbitrarily simply if an accusation of copyright infringement is made--in other words, without due process. This will inevitably lead to abuse.

I've maintained for many years that the supposed cost of pirated material is overblown by the industry. People that steal music and video recordings, for the most part, would never have actually paid for them in the first place, so the inflated loss of revenue reports are just that--inflated. It's easy to find someone bragging about all the music they have acquired illegally, but they never would have bought it all. And most people are honest; if a product or service is fairly priced, most people prefer to pay for it. The idea of an entire industry starting from the premise that "all are customers, every single one of them, is a crook" has struck me as a bit strange. It's much like the current approach to airport screening: the TSA starts from the assumption that everyone, including the elderly, the infirm, and three year olds, are terrorists. Surely we can do better. And in fact, the huge success of online digital media services like the iTunes store proves that a lot of people are happy to pay fair prices for digital media.