On Jan 20, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
the question to me is whether isps and end user borders (universities, large enterprises, ...) will learn to embrace this as opposed to fighting it; i.e. find a business model that embraces delivering what the customer wants as opposed to winging and warring against it.
I believe that it will end up becoming the norm, as it's a form of cost-shifting from content providers to NSPs and end-users - but for it to really take off, the tension between content-providers and their customers (i.e., crippling DRM) needs to be resolved. There have been some experiments in U.S. universities over the last couple of years in which private music-sharing services have been run by the universities themselves, and the students pay a fee for access to said music. I haven't seen any studies which provide a clue as to whether or not these experiments have been successful (for some value of 'successful'); my suspicion is that crippling DRM combined with a lack of variety may have been 'features' of these systems, which is not a good test. OTOH, emusic.com seem to be going great guns with non-DRMed .mp3s and a subscription model; perhaps (an official) P2P distribution might be a logical next step for a service of this type. I think it would be a very interesting experiment. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@cisco.com> // 408.527.6376 voice Technology is legislation. -- Karl Schroeder