Internet Threat to Satellite TV
Posted on January 31, 2012
Before “cord-cutting” became a popular term we predicted almost five years ago consumers would use the Internet to bypass conventional Cable TV. Later when Wall Street dismissed the practice as an urban myth in 2009, we concluded Cable operators may ultimately divest CATV service in order to concentrate on high-speed Internet.
Download 6-minute audio narration to iPod, iPhone, and iPad here.
Presently, “cord-cutting” is the Pay TV industry’s foremost concern. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon.com are pioneering alternate ways to acquire popular programming over the Net as opposed to Cable systems. Equally important is “Long Tail” content on YouTube and other Internet video sites. “Long Tail” theory implies that while we share interest in popular content, we also have more narrowly defined interests shared with viewer-groups too small to justify mass market distribution. But the Internet shatters such limitations enabling video content to be made available for vanishingly small audiences. Arguably, cultural programming has already migrated to the Net. Read more…
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First Certified White Space Radio
Posted on January 6, 2012
Today’s sixteen minute audio interview is with William Koos, Jr. who is the Chief Executive Officer of KTS Wireless. For the past 30 years his company has been a specialty-maker of high performance radios for both military and commercial markets. Presently, KTS produces the only TV Band White Space transceiver certified by the Federal Communications Commission.
“Billy” discusses the earlier trials that KTS did with White Spaces under experimental licenses. He also shares his thoughts regarding how the White Spaces market will evolve in both the United States and abroad.
Download 16-minute audio interview to iPod, iPhone, and iPad here.
One of his conclusions is that municipal Wi-Fi markets will benefit considerably from TV Band White Spaces. He reasons that the FCC envisions White Space technology as encompassing the best of both licensed and unlicensed networks. While they will be able to provide the interference protection of licensed networks they simultaneously offer the innovative free-market access characteristic of licensed-exempt networks. Read more…
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Let’s Retire the iPhone Smartphone
Posted on December 13, 2011
The iPhone resembles a smartphone less than a BMW does a horseless carriage.
As noted five years ago in this Inside Digital Media video podcast, the device is more accurately labeled a “teleputer”. (The podcast is so old it was done in Windows Media Video). George Gilder originated the concept about twenty years ago when he envisioned a hand-held unit providing convenient wireless access to a global computer network. It was kind-of the evolutionary destination implied by a popular computer industry slogan at the time, to wit, “the network is the computer.”
Download five minute audio narration to iPhone, iPad, and iPod here.
Each day Gilder’s concept becomes increasingly obvious to a growing proportion of iPhone users. Today everyone realizes telephone conversations are only one of many useful iPhone functions. More significantly, iPhone users are progressively learning that computer applications are becoming the unit’s raison d’etre. In short, the phone’s digital capabilities such as photography, geo-location, audio & video playback, and especially Internet access, are the defining characteristics. Applications like Skype and FaceTime portend an era when cellular telephony per se, becomes irrelevant to iPhone owners. Read more…
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Why Steve Jobs Wanted Apple’s Own National Wi-Fi Network
Posted on November 16, 2011
On Monday the Chairman of a prominent venture capital firm named Trilogy Partners disclosed that Steve Jobs initially wanted Apple to deploy its own national Wi-Fi network to service the iPhone.
The reasons are precisely those discussed in our blog post six months ago entitled, “Should Apple Become a Wireless ISP?”
Download three-minute audio to iPod, iPhone, or iPad here.
According to Trilogy’s John Stanton who spent a lot of time with Jobs during iPhone gestation, “(Jobs) wanted to replace carriers. He and I spent a lot of time examining whether a new carrier could be created synthetically with a national Wi-Fi network using unlicensed spectrum.”
Jobs eventually partnered with AT&T, partly because the carrier agreed to subsidize the cost of an iPhone for subscribers. Nonetheless, Stanton concluded, “If I were a carrier, I’d be concerned about the dramatic shift in power that occurred.” Read more…
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Mad Men: Old-to-New-Media Recursive
Posted on October 4, 2011
During each of the past four years AMC’s Mad Men won the outstanding drama series Emmy, which the TV industry’s version of “Best Picture” Oscar.
Mad Men is set in the 1960s at a fictional Manhattan advertising agency. Viewers appear to be attracted by the cultural representations as well as the drama per se. Era-specific news and events are plotted into episodes. Realism is aided by using era-specific media records to exhibit such events. One example is the unexpected murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on live monochrome television. Another is a movie clip from Bye Bye Birdie featuring a youthful Ann Margret at her voluptuous best. Popular books, novels, and rock-music from the 1960s are often included.
Download four minute audio narration to iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
For those old enough to remember the sixties such media integration creates a feeling of déjà-vu. It draws us into the show with a powerful gravitational-like attraction to which our consciously unaware. For such viewers Mad Men becomes a recursive experience — like looking at images reflected in two parallel mirrors.
Let me explain. Read more…
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Virtual Immortality
Posted on July 29, 2011
One-hundred-and-fifty years ago this month, the first major battle of the American Civil War was fought about 25 miles west of Washington, D.C. The armies clashed along a slow-moving country stream known as Bull Run. A bridge across the brook is pictured at the left in a photo taken shortly after the fight.
Download four minute audio narration to iPhone, iPad, or iPod here.
A recent New York Times article explains the battle, and the ensuing war, was the first to be extensively documented with photography which was an emerging technology at the time. A dozen years earlier a few photos had been taken of the Mexican War. A few years after that, a British photographer took over three hundred of the Crimean War. Among them was a bogus picture of the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” made famous in the 19th century by Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” and in the 20th by Errol Flynn. Read more…
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New IPO in Wireless ISP Industry
Posted on June 29, 2011
A maker of radio transceivers and related hardware for the Wireless ISP industry recently filed papers with the Securities & Exchange Commission seeking authorization to sell stock to the public. Silicon Valley based Ubiquiti Networks plans to offer $200 million worth of stock. Some of the shares will be sold by existing shareholders which includes a venture capital firm as well as members of management. The venture firm has held the shares less than 18 months. As yet, there is no indication of the price at which public shares will be sold.
To download three minute audio narration now click here.
We have no opinion on the merits – or demerits – of the Ubiquiti Networks stock offering.
As the table below illustrates, revenues have grown rapidly. The company’s fiscal year ends tomorrow. From Fiscal 2008 to Fiscal 2010 sales grew from $22 million to $137 million. For the first three-quarters of Fiscal 2011 sales were up 34% from $97 million to $130 million.
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Wireless ISPs Echo Radio Common Carriers
Posted on June 21, 2011
Prior to the advent of cellular telephony about thirty years ago, a limited form of mobile telephone service was provided by two categories of FCC-authorized common carriers. First, and most familiar, were the telephone companies dominated by Bell. But there was a second class – almost forgotten today – termed Radio Common Carrier (RCC).
To download seven minute audio narration to iPhone, iPad, or iPod, click here.
RCCs were small operators who were not permitted to offer landline service. Typically the businesses evolved as a branch of even older family-owned companies involved in telephone answering or two-way radio dispatch services. At the dawn of cellular telephony radio paging was their main revenue source because the available frequencies could accommodate thousands of paging units, but each channel could handle only a single simultaneous telephone conversation. In the pre-cellular era, mobile telephone service was much like the party-lines common in rural areas during the 1930s and 40s. Read more…
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