noirExtreme

Still on the topic of TelcoTV alternatives, Endgadget have a piece on a service called Rent my DVR:

Rent my DVR is an online marketplace for buying and selling TV programming. Buyers can scan online listings of available shows and download them via a proprietary P2P application for about 25 cents a pop. Providers in turn receive a 25 cent payment for delivering shows.

I feel a little less on my own than yesterday as it looks like other people are thinking that real-time video delivery of broadcast content over an IP network (TelcoTV in short) is not the ultimate in video entertainment.

A major new strategic management report warns that broadband video services will eventually displace broadcast distribution, but telecommunications providers may not be the ultimate winners of the network television revolution.

[...] The report, IPTV: Broadband meets broadcast--The network television revolution, concludes:

• Within a decade, video services delivered over broadband networks will be firmly established as an alternative platform to digital satellite, terrestrial and cable transmission.

Lyra Research surveyed 1,000 people, who expressed interest in switching to television provided by the phone company. The survey examined consumer usage of advanced digital-video services, broadband-Internet access, and cellular and landline telephones; interest in new features enabled by triple-play integration; and attitudes toward existing and potential television-service providers.

"Our survey findings support that telco's best strategy for breaking into video and establishing initial market share will be to undercut cable's triple-play pricing," says Steve Hoffenberg, principal analyst for the DTV View report series and Lyra's director of electronic media research.

The problem is that Telco's are considering video as a value-added product to generate additional revenues and profits, and not as a teaser product to offer at or below cost. There's a major investment required to distribute streaming video over IP networks and someone's got to pay for it...

New content distribution business models emerge and these 2 look similar:

• Weedshare —The system rewards people who share DRM protected files (Weed Files). Files can be shared using any method such as download, peer-to-peer, CD/DVD or even email. Any file can be listened to 3 times for free then the user has to pay to continue playing it. Once purchased the use of the file is unlimited on up to three PCs. The most interesting part is this one: all users are encouraged to share files further and if someone purchases the file from them, they get 20% of the sales price.
• Bitmunk —Here the process is a little more complex. Files are not necessarily DRM protected but they are ditributed on the Bitmunk p2p network and are digitally watermarked to be able to trace back to the person who leaked the file should they appear on another network. A buyer selects a seller for a piece of content based on the price using Bitmunk's p2p software. The buyer can download the files but they will receive the digital key to unlock the content only once their payment has been received and verified by Bitmunk.

Both models are interesting because they reverse the current logic in the industry: "instead of punishing people for sharing illegally, reward them for sharing legally".

As this interesting debate between Bill Roselblatt of DRM Watch and the CEO/President of Digital Bazaar, Manu Sporny shows, these business models have a long way to go to prove that they really work.

Last Monday I had a long eye-opening phone conversation with Robert Young, strategic advisor to WeedShare, that I thought I had to blog about (WeedShare is a system that rewards file sharers for distributing and selling legal digital content).
Then on Wednesday Robert posted a really good summary piece on the Broadband Blog and made my task a lot easier.

The part to which I dedicated quite a bit of my own processing power since our chat is summarised by the following:

Starting next year (2006), millions of people will begin to equip themselves with computers and portable devices capable of swapping files at a speed of 100Mbps, all wirelessly (WiFi/802.11n and UWB). Think about that… 100Mbps!! That’s about a hundred times faster than what the average broadband user in the U.S. is accustomed to today.

More specifically, what I’m talking about here is short-range computer2computer, device2device connectivity directly between people in close proximity of one another.

[...] To make the picture more complete, let’s also include the next generation of mobile phones that will be capable of direct phone2phone connections via lower-bandwidth Bluetooth, as well as wireless home networks and consumer electronics (e.g. UWB-enabled plasma TVs) that are coming to market that allow people to easily transfer any digital media directly from one device to another.

This perspective on things made me realise that what is coming up here is the potential development of new user behaviour where ad-hoc peer to peer connections or even mesh networks are estalished beyond the edge of the traditional network for sharing specific information or content and then are dissolved as quickly as they were formed.

1. Such an evolution will undoubtedly give a lot more power to device manufacturers in the battle for the control of the consumers' digital experience. Think of a dating application where mobile phones or PDAs send your profile and look for a matching profile within the range of the integrated Bluetooth radio for example. Devices actually deliver services and networking is handled by the end users themselves. No service provider is required for this to work.
2. If file swapping starts taking place off the Internet in any major volume, content owners are going to be under a lot more pressure still as they will lose all control on what people do with their intellectual property.

Get your popcorn and sit down comfortably, this show is going to be entertaining...

I found out about Damaka yesterday thanks to Eurovoip and despite tomtom's doubts I couldn't help thinking "aha! finally a competitor to Skype based on open standard!s", something I consider critical for a healthy the voip market.

Based on the information available on their web site I concluded that they were addressing the problem from the right angle: that of simplification of user experience. Setting up a SIP client is excrutiatingly difficult —even for experts— compared to the 2 click setup of Skype. Bringing that kind of simplicity to SIP is the single biggest element that will contribute to making the playing field more level and encourage standards based offerings to flourish. And we do want a wild diversity of SIP product and services to be available because that is the mechanism by which standards based solutions beat proprietary ones.

Then I installed and briefly tested this VoIP software yesterday night.
One think I didn't realise before was that Damaka is a actually a walled garden and does not offer interop with other SIP-based VoIP providers. In this perspective, I am a lot less enthusiastic about it and I rejoin tomtom's opinion that this one is unlikely to catch up as end-users don't care what underlying technology is used. With Damaka they get less features than with Skype and about 50 million less people to connect with.

So my recommendation to the Damaka people is to:

1. push further the open standards logic that you claim to follow and open up your peer-to-peer network to as may SIP providers as possible (FWD, SIPtel, etc. Check voip-info.org for complete list. Yes, I added you to the list...). This will provide you a critical mass of reachable users to build the necessary momentum to start growing;
2. adopt XMPP standard protocol (RFC3920-RFC3921) for messaging. XMPP is converging with SIP and is likely to be your strongest ally to build cool presence features. Besides doing this will enable you to open up and connect with the XMPP users base and gain critical mass more quickly.
3. Provide very quickly an API to enable enthusiast to develop add-ons to your basic architecture and integration with other applications and devices.

Damaka done right could become the strongest contestant to Skype. It has the potential to federate the fragmented SIP world around a paradigm established by Skype (dead easy p2p telephony client) and to challenge them thanks to the combined efforts of a community of developers behind a standard as opposed to a handful of (very talented) guys with a proprietary product.