Sinking or swimming with streaming video: as picture clears, cable faces web challenges

Cable World, Dec 11, 2000 by Richard Cole

Then there is Napster. Could the Internet produce a video equivalent, where the latest movies are swapped from one participant to another? The answer is an unequivocal yes, say many. "The American consumer always gets what he wants -- even if it's illegal," Bell says.

There's another message for cable companies in the wild interactivity preferred by many younger Net users. Users accustomed to the Net will have little patience with the "walled garden" of select services many cable companies are now offering.

"We think people are going to reject any kind of a walled garden or semi-closed environment when they have options," says Stan Woodward, VP-business services for Yahoo!. "Right now they do have options. They have cable, but they have DSL, DirecTV; they have what they get over the airwaves. We're going to keep a completely open access direction to our business, and we think other people's attempts to do differently are going to fail miserably."

Somewhere out there may be the ultimate cable bugaboo, the killer Net application that leaves MSOs behind. Almost by definition, no one knows a killer app until it's too late.

While Barry Diller was arguing onstage at The Western Show that there is no one killer app, if you'd walked by the Sorenson Technologies booth you would have seen yourself on a TV screen. Yawn. Except you could also see someone else onscreen, in a second frame, looking -- and talking -- back at you.

Sorenson has designed a chip that turns those increasingly prevalent Web-style cameras into videophones. Not only can you talk to Grandma in Michigan, you can see her baking cookies as she chats, while little Megan could show oft her latest ballet moves for grandma. All this interactivity is free, except for the cameras, all over the Internet.

Dave Perkes, Sorenson's VP-engineering, says that for the Western Show demonstration the company used a Motorola DCT5000, but says it runs on the DCT2000 as well. Sorenson says it hopes to market the videophone through cable companies. Perkes adds they are considering giving away the camera and chip and charging a subscription fee for the videophone service to push broadband connections. What's more, he says, the chip -- and the videophone -- will work equally well over DSL or satellite.

Could the videophone be the killer app that sells broadband to those late adopters who don't give a hoot about the Internet but would love to see the person they're chatting with on the phone?

Technology

As the quality of the infrastructure improves to encompass broadband, the quality of streaming video is improving in leaps and bounds.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers argued at the Western Show that streaming video is the killer app for broadband, with the picture quality bound to improve as fiber and intelligence are pushed out toward the edge of the network. Cisco is already looking at how to get 40 megabytes into homes, he added.

"Where there's a will, there's a way," says John Billock, president of HBO's U.S. Network Group. "There are too many people who have an economic interest, and the infrastructure, to transport rich assets to the consumer. If the cable industry doesn't go after it, someone else will."