My own opinions and observations are mixed here with some observations from a Web site. An interesting new Web site about cable TV is Multichannel News, at http://www.multichannel.com. While it has a lot of news that's of interest only to cable company staff, some of it is definitely relevant to us. Here are a few interesting things I learned. Leslie Ellis, who wrote many of the articles, sees cable modems as an important up-and-coming technology. These let you connect to the Internet (or your job, or anything else that requires a digital connection) over your cable, and promises high speeds. Downloads will be several megabytes a second, an you can also send out data at several thousand bytes a second. Lots of cable companies are interested, and customer surveys show that a lot of people are eager for them. I think it's a good sign that so many people want bidirectional connections--they are not satisfied with what they currently get on TV. On the other hand, the reason cited for most people's interest is telecommuting. Maybe that's not so healthy, if speed-up and job stress are making lots of middle-class professionals work at home. Finally, a little note on TV spectrum. This was the hotly-contested commodity that got left out of the Telecom bill. The government was just about set to give away a big chunk of spectrum to existing TV companies. Then a bunch of public interest groups complained that it should either be sold or be given in exchange for promises to provide public-interest programming. For background, see the Benton Foundation site: http://www.benton.org/cgi-bin/lite/TV/broadcastspectrum.html http://www.benton.org/cgi-bin/lite/Catalog/Working13/working13.html Anyway, Senator Pressler has just said that nothing will be done with the spectrum for a year. I can forward the interesting articles to people without access to the Web. (The articles are long, though.) Andy ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR) Cyber-Rights: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/ ftp://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/Library/ CyberJournal: (WWW or FTP) --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore Materials may be reposted in their _entirety_ for non-commercial use. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
