Nick May wrote:
>
> With leap@gol.com's comments about vid-dating in mind:
> Anyone who thinks that low bandwidth video is a non-starter should think
> back a little to cu-seeme....
>
I feel compeled to comment, as this particular "sad-bastard" story
strikes a little too close to home for my personal, retrospective
comfort level. Anyone who's left in disbelief, STFW using the keywords
"porn drives technology innovation"... Gamming is a close second.
cu-seeme *almost* became a critical, killer app. for certain ISPs.
I remember being courted by varous sales folks to purchase the US$8k
reflector that white pine software was hawking... as I poked around
the traffic flows, I latched on to a significant subset of folks who
spent their time at cu-seeme refelector sites. I even managed to
"lurk" on some of the "group-sex" reflectors... I can't really say
that it became a habit, but self-assesment is never recomended.
Eventually, Netmeeting came along and I realized that you can't
really can't advertise things like "group sex chat" (at least not in
the market I was operating at the time).
I think streaming video from cell phones will be a similar "near miss".
I don't think that it will keep cell phone growth curve exponential...
it might keep it steep-linear, but one of the question you need to ask
yourself is: "are the people comming off of contract going to switch
carriers based on cell phone features?" That question might not
exactly be 100% relivant in the Japanese market, but it is exceedingly
relivant in other markets.
my personal opinion of streaming video from the handset is that it
needs a method for party to party payment to become 100% pervasive
(at least among early adoptors). There are too many non-video phones
out there for streaming video to reach critical mass and without a
reliable, unmediated payment mechanism to drive adoption, the full
potential of the current leading edge mobile network to internet
revolution will go unrealized.
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Fri Jul 20 14:22:18 2001