Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The cost is very high for anything other than very low volume niche shorts.
Any mass market offering needs a MASSIVE amount of distributed VOD servers and cooperation of all the main ISPs in target markets. Literally tens of thousands of times more expensive than a Satellite TV channel for a mass market. It's massively more expensive than broadcast cable.
Then there is the cost of decent content.
IBM's Watson was maybe right about the world only needing five computers, if you substitute the so called Cloud (just multi-processor servers).
Where are all the encyclopedias? Wikipedia. Even MS cited Wikipedia as the reason to stop.
Social Media is down to Twitter, Linkedin and Faceborg empire in the West.
Amazon has 90% of online english ebook sales.
eBay and Amazon have most of online classified and small business in the West.
We are down to a handful of real search engines.
Translations?
Maps?
User Videos?
The Internet doesn't bring the democracy and diversity imagined in 1980s, (though web sites are from roughly 1992). It has positive feedback. There is one winner per category.
Streaming video is the most expensive thing since 16mm video and VHS to deliver. DVDs are cheaper. But the dreamed of things by capitalists are:
1) Franchises. The sucker managers all over the world pay the capital costs and are locked into the Franchise for supplies.
2) Subscriptions. Eventually people pay more* than simply buying the content they want.
* In 2006 approx surveys in UK and Ireland showed that 92% of viewing time of Satellite and Cable Pay TV subscribers was watching content either free on the aerial or Free to Air Satellite. Back then I worked on a hybrid broadcast and VOD pay TV proposal for an Irish ISP.
I could also write how Pay TV sport and eventually the creation of the Premier League in England and similar in other European countries aided pay TV, especially Sky and destroyed the finances of top clubs with too much money and pressure. The ESL debacle was inevitable. Of COURSE you had to take out the basic sub and add the sport.
Attempts to stop Sky having a monopoly meant simply fans had to take out 2 to 4 subs with different companies at the same price each as before.
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Moore's Law can be applied to things other than the number of transistors on microchips. Internet speeds and hardware costs tend to be less expensive over time. I think that VOD for live events verses VOD for a library of movies and TV shows are two very different use models. Here in the States, there are a number of companies who are successfully doing live sports VOD and apparently are successful at it - ESPN and MLB just to name a couple of obvious examples. It's a very different internet world than when Netflix first started.