Kim Warren on Strategy
Strategy insights and living business models
IT/communications technology
Just come back from a great talk by Brian Levy, HP’s Chief Technology Office for Communications & Media. Amongst many useful insights he offered were
- there is a very real possibility that current growth in video-based internet traffic will cripple internet capacity [driven e.g. by bit-torrent and similar, as used by BBC iPlayer – basically uses loads of our PCs to help supply content on to others, I think]
- … and it’s not clear who will get paid how for resolving this – ISPs are being pushed into adding capacity at their own cost, with little or no revenue increase to pay for it
- very much web-based stuff just doesn’t work very well, relative to ‘acceptable quality levels’ – everyone is pretty tolerant, but things like MMS messaging, VOIP, video-streaming, mobile web-browsing are just not reliable enough
- … which is because too many things, from too many providers, all have to work perfectly, and usually one of them will let you down [personally, I find the amount of super-clever things that do work is just amazing!]
- we are very close indeed to an integrated ‘3-box’ solution, in which the cell-phone, TV and PC become completely integrated … which makes all kinds of even more clever solutions possible [He gave lots of examples, but just one is advertising content in programming downloaded to cell-phones of iPhone screen quality that are sensitive to both where the user is, and what time it is.
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