*Watching magazines cry about the existential threat to movies is like watching zombies mourning vampires. There must be a sad movie about unemployable journalists someplace. Actually, what would be really cool would be a big-budget movie where journalists, musicians, graphic artists, game designers, novelists, architects and formerly sane Republican white-shoe country-club real-estate guys all gather in a favela bar somewhere to guzzle cheap rum and reminisce about business models.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1972540,00.html
Cisco's CRS-3 router made a bit of a splash when it was announced on March 9, but the power of this new device hasn't yet sunk in. Consider: The CRS-3, a network routing system, is able to stream every film ever made, from Hollywood to Bombay, in under four minutes. That's right — the whole universe of films digested in less time than it takes to boil an egg. That may sound like good news for consumers, but it could be the business equivalent of an earthquake for the likes of Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures.
(((You still have to figure out where to put all that stuff and how to index it, but I reckon that's what Google is for. As they said at the new-print panel at SXSW, "we broke your business and now we're here for your machines.")))
Most people are familiar with routers, or desktop boxes used to provide connectivity between PCs, laptops and printers in a home or small office. These are tiny geckos compared with the T. rexes used by telcos such as Verizon and AT&T to distribute data among computer networks and provide Internet connectivity to millions of homes and wireless subscribers.
As it turns out, these megarouters sitting inside data centers of major telcos and cablecos are among the biggest bottlenecks of the Internet, because as bandwidth speed to end users has shot up in recent years, router technology has not kept up, resulting in traffic jams that can slow or freeze downloads.
Cisco's superrouter is expected to turn what is now the equivalent of a country road into an eight-late superhighway for Internet data traffic, including 3-D video, university lectures and feature films such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. (((Forget the money: just the idea of YouTube wallpapers continually streaming old movies that have no commercial potential at all is quite interesting. The fact that movies are a commercial market at all has tremendously limited their usefulness. This is likely true of all markets: demonetized plenty is vastly more disruptive than scarcity. What would people do in a world of infinite free movies? Of course they'd all be aging movies. because nobody could ever finance a new one, but they could get atemporally mashed-up with new editing tools, the shambling Frankensteins of an undead medium.)))
"Video is the big driver behind all this," says analyst Akshay Sharma of technology-research company Gartner Inc., noting that voice and texting will soon be overtaken by richer multimedia content and applications. ((("Video" no longer exists in this scenario. It's all metamedia at that speed. And of course most of the Internet is swiftly obliterated, because who the heck would want a static web-page or a weepy, creaky old AJAX web 2.0 site?)))
While it's already possible to stream a feature film in real time, in the best-case scenario it takes about two hours to download to a personal film archive, at home or on a mobile device, for repeat viewing. With the predictable slowdowns and interruptions now so common, the process can eat up four hours or more of computer time — to say nothing of time lost managing the process. (((This is like patting your faithful horses because it takes so long to crank up a car.)))
But routers are not the only cause of bottlenecks, and Cisco is not alone in working to maximize the Internet's full potential. Google is also concerned about the speed limitations imposed by wires that run to the home. Last month, Google, best known for its search engine, announced plans to test ultra-high-speed broadband networks that would deliver Internet content to residential subscribers at speeds of 1 gigabit per second — 100 times as fast as the top speed available today. This would allow consumers to complete a PC download of a Hollywood blockbuster like Avatar in about 72 seconds....
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1972540,00.html#ixzz0iSP2NA26
