Metavibes

Friday, June 23, 2006

Cringely to local TV stations: Connect to your customers directly from local telcos ...

Here is something that can greatly benefit India.

Just some time back, my house had 100mbps fibre connectivity via a local ISP provider. However, the business model of this provider was not strong. And he had to take the fibre over the existing housing societies, running into problems with cable providers. Also, there was no easy solution to provide power at different points which needed bridging. Ultimately, that provider closed down.

What I had suggested to him at that time was to install a set of services involving audio/video from the free content available from internet, and to use local advertisements effectively. Essentially make the service sufficiently sticky. But they just couldn't do it. This big amount of bandwidth - connecting some 2-3000 houses - could have also been used in P2P manner. But then it would have required something else altogether.


Similar model is in essence the summary of Cringely's suggestions in (PBS | I, Cringely . June 8, 2006 - Local Heroes). He suggests that local TV companies can make use of this approach - by keeping their servers at each of the DSL/Cable provider's network room.

In contrast, centralized, web-based approach to serving video / broadband data to end-users is very costly. In India, you can today afford 256kbps at reasonable costs. Nothing more. So Cringely's model is a very interesting hope - provided our policy makers take note. (Rather, a hoping that they don't interfere, if such a model boots up.)

This is surely a model that can be kicked off with purely local relations (as Cringely points out). In India, we still don't have concepts of local TV stations. Local cable companies do show movies and (sometimes live) footage of local events. And the biggest benefitiary would be the education sector which enables eLearning on a wide scale. (Folks at Project Ekalavya, take note!).

Reliance already is already testing IPTV with its 100mbps network. (And I have seen it, and it is simply fabulous - you can access any archived TV program, choose any movie at any time, or listen to songs.) I am not sure of other players, but Cringely's model doesn't require centralized approach, it all depends on whether they can inflence BSNL (key player in DSL segment) and several other ISPs in India. Clearly an opportunity for a new business model - if someone has right contacts.

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