Whenever I hear people talking about fast services that need broadband, they always seem to be talking about video, and by that they almost always seem to mean broadcast TV, as in a few producers and a few centralized distrbution points going to many consumers.

But what about podcasts, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? None of those are TV in that sense. Continue reading →

Telcos are so clever they seem to have slipped one past Doc Searls, here commenting on Robin Good’s IPTV post:

Well, here’s the first problem: Cable TV is “private delivery infrastructure”, and so is old-fashioned phone service. The mess Robin describes is not a conceptual stretch beyond Business As Usual — for telcos, cablecos or most of their customers. A few techies may know a line has been crossed, but that’s far from obvious to the rest of us.

Net losses, Doc Searls, 1 Feb 2007

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Most people won’t realize what’s the problem with what they’re getting, so they’ll buy the bundle. Continue reading →

Robin Good has a long post about how Americans are easily flummoxed by marketing into locking themselves into a telco IPTV solution at the expense of their Internet connectivity:

A telecom company, who is also a large Internet provider, needs only a little marketing campaign to convince its users and potential clients that with about $50 a month they can get the most unique offer to come around in recent times: super-high-speed Internet access, (the customer representative who called me to explain this offer and clarify any doubts said specifically 20 Mbps), home television channels with free and pay-per-view content including movies and live sports, and even a video-phone!

What they don’t tell you is that the moment you accept to do that, this is what will really happen:

IPTV And Home Television Offerings Are Telcos Best Stealth Solution To Bypass Any Net Neutrality Resistance: Wake Up Robin Good, 29 January 2007

Since Americans don’t know that real fast Internet means 50Mbps or 100Mbps in countries such as Japan or Korea that actually have it, they sell out for still slow 20Mbps.

Robin Good enumerates some gotchas in that “super-high-speed Internet access” offer. Continue reading →