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Technology Events Introduction |
Chapter 1: Three Generations of Entertainment The first chapter of the book is an overview of the book so covers all of the chapters briefly. This chapter is so goo, that I'll give it away to you for free. I'm sure that enough of you will like it, that you'll take the next step and purchase the book. If you want a free copy, e-mail info@broadent.com. Here are the contents of the chapter: Chapter 1: Three Generations of Entertainment ........................................2 The chapter starts with a story about an old man who listens to records and a kid who shovels his driveway while listening to his iPod. This story reflects the Generations of Users who typically use their generation of Generations of Entertainment. Kids are comfortable with gaming while most adults won't invest the time to learn. There are many ways to live your life and there are many kinds of entertainment. Broadband Entertainment reveals the various types of entertainment so that you know the possibilities. Here is a table from Chapter 1 that shows the evolution of entertainment quality. Table 1: Generations of Entertainment Technology
The quality of the content is often dependent on the delivery mechanism. Three generations of entertainment distribution technology is also discussed in Chapter 1. Here's the second table in the book: Table 1: Generations of Distribution Technology
The heart of the broadband home is the entertainment server that is covered in more detail in chapters 2 and 3. The entertertainment server combines the functionality of the set-top box, personal video recorder, high-speed modem, Surround Sound receiver, FM transmitter/receiver and gaming console. The next section of the book is about the Content Boom. Consumers have so many varieties of content to choose from that its silly. The most common broadband networks, cable and satellite, broadcast gigabits of digital content to almost every home. Broadband Internet access delivers up to a Mbps of bandwidth. Over a 24-hour period, that's equivalent to 10 GB of data. DVD-by-mail is delivering much more data to the world than the total Internet. Video-on-Demand and digital TV broadcasts are other ways that content is delivered efficiently. The content boom is only going to increase as we start using the entertainment server to dowload specialized content with the latest compression technology. MPEG-4 is the latest video compression technology that squeezes over 50% of the data out of standard MPEG-2 compression. The second figure of the chapter shows how MPEG-4 encoders can deliver television quality video at less than 1 Mbps - below the bandwidth of most cable modems. This would allow most homes to stream video from the Internet - the dream that sent all of those Internet stocks to record levels. Unfortunately this is still a dream. Streaming megabit streams to millions of homes is still not practical in the US. While the networks and servers could be upgraded to support it, companies are not investing in this infrastructure so plan on downloading content for a few more years instead of streaming.
The chapter continues by exploring the availability of online content. Decades of content could be made available. The BBC is a leader in this space and is trying to deliver their entire archive of footage over the Internet. It's a significant challenge and a great experiment. The drem of broadband entertainment is that networks like NBC and content creators like MGM will let consumers download and pay for content. The users want this content, so why don't the businesses deliver it? They're afraid of the Internet pirates. Once a file is in a P2P network, it's very difficult to remove because of international concerns and crafty pirates. The entertainment industry needs to concede the battle to pirates and deliver the content to normal consumers who are willing to pay. After the entertainment industry makes this mental shift and makes the content available for download, their revenue will climb like Apples iTunes. What we'll have is the broadband entertainment paradise. The broadband entertainment paradise will exist when we can download any movie ever made, any song ever sung, and any game ever played. Of course their will be an economic limit to what could be made available, but it could be much wider than it is now. The entertainment server with its cable modem installed and big disk drive, could download the content and play it at the user's whim. Downloading is the interim step to streaming that is inevitable but not available for a few more years. The technology to deliver the networked nirvana exists, the hurdles to getting there are more business concerns than technical. Businesses need to be created that offer this service and make a profit. Secure systems need to be deployed that will ensure safety and allow average people to enjoy a wide variety of high-quality content. |
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