Broadband Failure
from the convergence-ain't-what-it-used-to-be dept
The Economist has an article about the failure of people to flock to broadband in Hong Kong and Singapore as was expected. Time and time again, movies and video on demand have shown to be flawed concepts, yet companies keep trying. I suspect that sooner or later it will catch on, but it will be because of some very unexpected reason. I'm not sure of the reason, but this seems to happen often enough. Witness the recent acceptance of Advantix film, simply because there were cool cameras for it, not because of the film.
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Wire the home not the device
The HK and Singapore services both focused on delivering broadband to a particular device in the home, TV or PC. This is a doomed strategy. The PC isn't great for video and the TV isn't great for email/web.
My suggestion is simple. The pipe comes to the house and is accessable by PCs and the TVs. PCs access the email/web and TVs access video. You can also have PCs access video and TVs with email/web, but only as supplementry services, not as their main function. Granted that this is hard because is requires that the house has multiple ports for coax/ethernet. But cable companies have to do this now anyways, right?
Broadband services should focus on networking the house, not just individual devices in the home.
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