Blackhacker

Coming off a disaterious IPO, Vonage must now defend itself in a Patent suit from Verizon.

This seems to jive with what Bobby X, has talked about in is latest column, where he feels that the whole Net neutrality debate, at least from the Telecoms POV is all about VOIP. I would tend to agree, that for the moment, the Telecoms, appose Net Neutrality because they they want to protect their businesses from these VOIP upstarts, and the success of VOIP really depends on the amount and quality of consistent bandwidth. I also believe that if not stopped hear the Telecoms won’t stop. The next logical service to hijack would be VOD.

PS:
That Bobby X link also has his thoughts on Bill Gates stepping down from duties at Microsoft. A good read for anyone who wishes to understand the inner working of Microsoft.

This weeks pulpit Bob Cringely, thinks that he’s solved the technical & fiscal challenges of IPTV. His idea is for each of the local PBS stations get a server at one of their local broadband ISPs and deliver content from there:

PBS | I, Cringely . June 8, 2006 - Local Heroes
Though you might not always know it from reading this column, PBS is a television network. And as a TV network, PBS is facing the same sort of technical challenges as its more commercial competitors. At this moment, that includes deciding how to play in the emerging world of digital downloads and IPTV. But there is an aspect of this that most people don’t think about, and that’s the difference between national and local strategies, between how the network might want to run IPTV versus how local station managers see the opportunity. Up until now, IPTV has seemed to appeal more to the network than to its affiliates, but that’s just because people aren’t thinking clearly. IPTV might, in fact, lead to a renaissance in local television.

Like the title of the post says, their is only one problem. The same technical model will work without the PBS affiliates. Assuming broadband companies can get the servers to the local data centers, they could approach content providers directly to get the content on the local servers. PBS would be relegated to another content provider. Or if you are cable company pirate content that that TV producers have to send you anyway.

I am sure that the IPS have already thought of this, which is why they want to kill any government enforced net neutrality, they wish to be the center of the content distrobution universe. I would even agree as long as communication between any two nodes on a subnet, not just content providers who rent boxes in the data center, are given the benefit of greater bandwidth that exist within the ISP intranet. But of course we all no that is not what they want to do, but I digress.

I think the BEST solution would be an enhanced bittorrent solution where the clients can prioritize its peers based on what network they are on. The TV producers would simply put a server, on each segment of each the ISPs network voila instant TV distribution. ISP’s could rent the boxes. TV producers sell ads, and we the public watch for FREE, or at least for a LOT less that what we pay for cable and satellite these days. unfortunately this leaves PBS stations out in the cold just like all of the local affiliates, not totally. They would not have to run entire stations, just produce content a to be delivered to the various ISPs.

Bob X Cringely has launched his weekly interview show, NerdTV which is only available on the Internet and downloadable. Copying and sharing is encouraged. The inaugural ep features an interview with Andy Hertzfeld, the original Macintosh systems programmer.