Comments on: Hulu Bad For the Net, Video Still Not Clogging It

By: David Mullings

David Mullings — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:45:49 +0000

@Allen

Unfortunately you seem to have confused “Revenues” with “Profits” because that is the only way that “costs” would matter.

I quote: “those telecom revenues are still over 70% based on voice”

He did not say “profits” and thus my assertion stands – If I sell $200 pairs of jeans, you sell $50 pairs and we both sell 1000 units for the month, I can now claim to have “more revenues” than you do.

Apples to Oranges

By: Ajay

Ajay — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 06:05:59 +0000

It is because of morons like this guy Odlyzko and the people that actually bother listening to him that the internet is not farther along today. He is the sort of idiot who would have said in 2001 that there is no market for search engines as nobody makes money off of them. The only reason people pay for voice and texting is that they are forced to by the 2-4 wired or wireless companies that offer service in their area on proprietary devices. Twitter offers connectivity but doesn’t make money either on the open web. There are plenty of people willing to pay for content. They just don’t want to keep paying the old inflated prices for bundles they don’t want and they want it all to be dead-simple to use. That clearly hasn’t been done yet, though iTunes is the closest and makes a fair amount of money as a result.

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:39:39 +0000

@David: “It is easy to have much higher revenues of something that costs more money per unit”

You seem to be assuming that the revenues are proportional to cost. False assumption. The incremental costs to support messaging over an infrastructure that is already there are tiny. And the infrastruture needs to be there to support the voice. The cost of a single base station is small compared to wiring and serving each individual dwelling in the same area with upgraded broadband.

I actually think it illustrates why they are so ready to spend on wireless while instead trying to suppress traffic on wired broadband.

By: glu

glu — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:52:52 +0000

@David Mullings, you are right that it’s apples to oranges. look at the thousands of content creators versus the handful of voice/data providers.

the internet needs to get clogged before it will get upgraded. Until consumers are inhibited from consuming they will not give net neutrality and internet architecture the attention required to make such a substantial overhaul.

By: David Mullings

David Mullings — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:51:19 +0000

Is it that Twitter can’t find a business model or just doesn’t want t start charging people? The model is staring at them.

As for the meat of the post – people don’t pay for content, they pay for connectivity and he justifies that with revenue numbers?

Talk about apples to oranges. It is easy to have much higher revenues of something that costs more money per unit.

If people didn’t pay for content, cable subscriptions would be decreasing, HBO would not exist, pay-per-view would vanish and movies would no longer be made.

By: Streams Won’t Pay for Themselves « NewTeeVee

Streams Won’t Pay for Themselves « NewTeeVee — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:42:26 +0000

[...] Neutrality (PDF). Odlyzko argues that video is a low-margin business (a point my colleague Stacey nicely recaps over at GigaOM) and that faster-than-real-time progressive downloads are preferable to real-time [...]