Chapter 3: Bitcasting

Computers are becoming more and more video-enabled, equipped to process and display video as a data type. For teleconferencing, multimedia publications, and a host of simulation applications, video is becoming part of it all, not just many, computers. This is happening so fast that the snail’s pace of television development, albeit digital, will be eclipsed by the personal computer.

Chapter 3: Bitcasting

The growth of personal computers is happening so rapidly that the future open-architecture television is the PC, period. The set-top box will be a credit-card-size insert that turns your PC into an electronic gateway for cable, telephone, or satellite. In other words, there is no TV-set industry in the future. It is nothing more or less than a computer industry: displays filled with tons of memory and lots of processing power.

Chapter 3: Bitcasting

The word box, as in “set-top box,” carries all the wrong connotations, but here’s the theory. Our insatiable appetite for bandwidth puts cable television currently in the lead position as the broadband provider of information and entertainment services. Cable services today include set-top boxes because only a fraction of TV receivers are cable-ready … In the lucrative sport of making digital television, the computer has so far been seriously “out-boxed” in the first round. But its comeback will be triumphant.

Chapter 2: Debunking Bandwidth

The real question in understanding the economics of bandwidth is: Are some bits worth more than others? The answer is clearly yes. Yet a more complex question is, Should the value of a bit vary not only in accordance with its essential character (i.e., a movie bit, a conversation bit, or a pacemaking bit) but also in accordance with who is using it? or when? or how? … bits not only have a different value, but that value varies in accordance with who is using them and how. There are suddenly welfare bits, minority bits, and handicapped bits. Congress will have to be very creative in working out a framework for an equitable system.

Chapter 2: Debunking Bandwidth

There is a growing and ill-advised dogma that says we should use high bandwidth just because we have it. There should really be some natural laws of bandwidth that suggests that squirting more bits at somebody is no more sensible or logical than turning up a radio’s volume to get more information … It’s hard to come up with a use for more than 6 million bps per person to deliver very new and imaginative services, if we have them. New information and entertainment services are not waiting on fiber to the home; they are waiting on imagination.

Chapter 2: Debunking Bandwidth

Like dogs in heat, broadband pundits are sniffing all the political opportunities for high-bandwidth networks as if doing so were a national imperative or civil right. In fact, unlimited bandwidth can have the paradoxical and negative effect of swamping people with too many bits and of allowing machines at the periphery to be needlessly dumb. Unlimited bandwidth is hardly wrong or bad to have, but like free sex, it is not necessarily good either. Do we really want or need all those bits?

Chapter 1: The DNA of Information

Better and more efficient delivery of what already exists is what most media executives think and talk about in the context of being digital. But like the Trojan horse, the consequence of this gift will be surprising. Wholly new content will emerge from being digital, as will new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of information and entertainment providers.