Comcast’s ambitions attempt to create a network-view model at the earliest possible point in movie distribution, the same time a film is in theaters, has apparently been pulled back under a protest from studios. The thought was to set the price high enough that people would have easily been able to get a better deal in the theater, but I’m told that the movie industry was very concerned that the erosion in theater viewing could hurt the box-office numbers so critical to public perception of the success of a new film.
All of this demonstrates the classical “channel conflict” problem with streaming video. We tend to think that this is all about online, but of course it’s all about money, and nobody is going to upset their content monetization applecart, particularly the studios or networks who produce the stuff. You have to be very mindful of any money-flow changes with a new model, and until you can demonstrate that the new does better than the old (the industry says by 10% or more) nobody will take the plunge.
Verizon has announced its home control and monitoring service is now available over its FiOS and DSL footprint. The service is based on the home-control Z-Wave technology, and it pretty much covers the space with the current apparent exception of security monitoring. The issue there may be simply that Verizon doesn’t have the kit technology to support that as yet, or it may be a matter of installation, since it appears that Verizon at least hopes that users will be able to plug in the modules and connect things on their own.
Home control is a service application that a lot of operators have been talking about, and in essence it’s an extension of the remote light-switch stuff that’s used today in a lot of homes. With Verizon’s tools, you can do all that you’d normally do with the in-home systems plus you can access the control center remotely to change status and settings. The cost of this is about ten bucks a month but the hardware modules could run a two or three hundred dollars in addition if you go wild. The monthly charge is about as much revenue as Verizon can earn from a wireline phone, and it’s a clear revenue-mining adventure for Verizon.
Microsoft is adding to its cloud position, promising an Azure-compatible distribution of the open-source data-distributed cloud architecture Hadoop. This package, one I’ve blogged about before, is based on the notion that large data repositories of unstructured information are divided up among elements in a cloud, and when something has to be found the request is parceled out to where the data is or might be for operation. Hadoop isn’t the answer to every enterprise’s prayer because it’s really mostly about unstructured data not about the normal enterprise repositories, but it’s a powerful way to process semi-textual stuff like documents or emails. Oracle had a Hadoop tale to tell at OpenWorld, and it looks like this package will take off.
Cisco announced some virtual-desktop stuff, including a partnering with Citrix. The most interesting thing was a virtual appliance designed to offload videoconference and potentially streaming applications from the normal central-hosted process. In the new model the connection is signaled or coordinated via the host-system side of the VDE but the video session goes right to the virtual desktop appliance. This is a demonstration that there are features on the client side that could promote a data-center-cloud vision of client/server partnership; HP should take note!
Neustar is planning to buy Targus, a company that’s specialized in location/ID services for VoIP and non-traditional voice technologies. The move, I think, illustrates the value of any kind of location or identification information to services, and the value of building services from network-generated or network-related information. Targus has been expanding what it can do gradually, and Neustar may have its own plans.
In a blog, Neustar management cite the obvious symbiosis; Targus provides a caller-ID service primarily and decodes that to customer name while Neustar has LNP facilities. They’re right about the symbiosis, but the question is where they might go from here. We’re moving to not only a notion of number portability and caller ID to one where we have multiple VoIP services with multiple user names for the same person, and messaging and video to boot. Can they plan to create a communications identity service that ties the threads of all of this into a pretty ribbon.