[Nanog] ATT VP: Internet to hit capacity by 2010

Tue Apr 22 21:08:05 UTC 2008

> On 22 Apr 2008, at 12:47, Joe Greco wrote:
> >> You mean a computer? Like the one that runs file-sharing
> >> clients?
> >
> > Like the one that nobody really wants to watch large quantities of
> > television on?
> 
> Perhaps more like the mac mini that's plugged into the big plasma  
> screen in the living room? Or one of the many stereo-component-styled  
> "media" PCs sold for the same purpose, perhaps even running Windows  
> MCE, a commercial operating system sold precisely because people want  
> to hook their computers up to televisions?
> 
> Or the old-school hacked XBox running XBMC, pulling video over SMB  
> from the PC in the other room?
> 
> Or the XBox 360 which can play media from the home-user NAS in the  
> back room? The one with the bittorrent client on it? :-)

Pretty much.  People have a fairly clear bias against watching anything
on your conventional PC.  This probably has something to do with the way
the display ergonomics work; my best guess is that most people have their
PC's set up in a corner with a chair and a screen suitable for work at a
distance of a few feet.  As a result, there's usually a clear delineation
between devices that are used as general purpose computers, and devices
that are used as specialized media display devices. 

The "Mac Mini" may be an example of a device that can be used either way, 
but do you know of many people that use it as a computer (and do all their
normal computing tasks) while it's hooked up to a large TV?  Even Apple
acknowledged the legitimacy of this market by releasing AppleTV.

People generally do not want to hook their _computer_ up to televisions,
but rather they want to hook _a_ computer up to television so that they're
able to do things with their TV that an off-the-shelf product won't do for
them.  That's an important distinction, and all of the examples you've
provided seem to be examples of the latter, rather than the former, which
is what I was talking about originally. 

If you want to discuss the latter, then we've got to include a large field
of other devices, ironically including the TiVo, which are actually
programmable computers that have been designed for specific media tasks,
and are theoretically reprogrammable to support a wide variety of 
interesting possibilities, and there we have the entry into the avalanche
of troubling operational issues that could result from someone releasing
software that distributes large amounts of content over the Internet, and
...  oh, my bad, that brings us back to what we were talking about.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.