I was just daydreaming because I didn’t have much interesting to post about. Hope you didn’t take it personally in anyway. The whole post is half-baked. I was unaware of the syndication rev share, but it makes sense now that I think about it. Clearly I’m not that familiar with Revver, though I am certainly a fan (otherwise I would have chosen a competitor to talk about).

Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the blogosphere.

I like your notion of abstract data ownership. I imagine it will take quite a leap of faith though for people to move completely away from physical data storage. There’s a lot of comfort in knowing my media is backed up on a drive at my house.

Bandwidth (via cable modem) is a contention based system. If your entire neighborhood is using bandwidth at the same time you’ll get no where near 1.5 mb/sec. Taking the next steps in raising bandwidth require a rebuilding if the hybrid fiber/coax cable plants so that each node passes fewer houses. The cable node loop has about 30 mb/sec of bandwidth, a fiber node passes anywhere between 200 and 2000 homes. Rebuilding cable plants to have smaller nodes will be very expensive. Getting order of magnitude increases in bandwidth will require fiber to the home.

In the early 90s you could get a 1 gig HD for the same price as a 500gig HD today. (rough estimate)

Similarly, the average house in the early 90s was greatful for a 28.8kbs connection for ~$40 on Compuserv or AOL. Now broadband 1.5mb pipes are ubiquitous at around the ~$40 price point. (again, rough estimate)

In a similar time span, we saw a 500x increase in storage/price ratio and ~52x increase in bandwidth/price ratio. You’re absolutely right that cost of storage is approaching zero much faster than the cost of bandwidth, but both are heading to zero very quickly.

In a steady state world infinite local storage makes perfect sense. But we’re not in a steady state world, thus limited bandwidth still plays a factor. I’m not sure what I think yet, but the equation includes:

Speed of propogation of new media to remote servers.

Shape of the value vs time graph of the media.

Amount of bandwidth required to get the media to remote storage.

For example, no one should ever stream Casablanca or the Godfather, no one should ever stream anything from the Beatles catalog. They both have essentially infinite shelf life and fairly steady value over time.

But if you have a blob of media (say from American Idol), and it takes 3 days to propogate to infinite storage iPods on the edge of the network, and the shelf life of said media is a week until the next show, then streaming makes sense.

The ideal situation would be a hybrid. The network knows what I like and that alters the delivery order to match my usage patterns. So if my niece is an American Idol fan, AI shows up on her iPod right away, her value v. time graph peaks early, very high and trails off quickly. But me, it can show up 3 weeks later and it won’t really matter, my value v time graph is essentially flat (and low).