Will ISPs save the Net?

We've been thinking about buying a big 1080p screen: one of those door-sized "HD" jobs that's actually a 1920 x 1080 computer screen optimzed for television. I'm especially tempted right now, because I'm at a friend's house, where his Sony KDL-46XBR2 Bravia* does double-duty as computer display and as what we still call a "TV". From his easy chair he controls the screen with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. When he wants to watch TV, he picks up the remote control, changes the screen input and manipulates HD cable with a remote control.

The difference between the two modes is stark. Live TV still has advantages — especially for watching live events. But the file-based computer On election night or for live sports events, it's hard to beat live TV. But for everything else, why even bother with live broadcast? It's a huge constant-bandwidth hog, and nobody ever watches everything at once. This difference becomes critical as we look forward to the growth of the Net.

The programs carried by a handful of HD TV channels are far better than anything we got from the 540-line NTSC system, which has been with us since the 1940s. Sports, music videos and nature footage are especially compelling. But the rest of the selection is mostly the Same Old Stuff we've been fed by cable for decades, with marginal interactive improvements. Flaws in low-resolution NTSC images are vastly enlarged. Especially annoying are MPEG compression artifacts that make every frame look like a bad photo saved at the lowest JPEG quality — only worse. You see "folds" in aliasing, plus quilting, blocking and mosquito noise all over the place.

Movies from DVDs or downloaded through BitTorrent look good, though not as good as the best HD source material. Fact is, the best HD you'll see on your big screen is probably what you shoot yourself on your own 1080i (or soon, 1080p) camcorder. But how about sharing that video? Your DSL or cable Internet carrier doesn't have that kind of capacity provisioned for your house. Even if you have Verizon's FiOS service, the company would rather sell you HD TV than internet service. That's why they pull the fiber to your house in the first place. (If you're in one of the lucky handful of communities that have it. Chances are you're not.)

See, even though the telcos and cablecos are talking optimistic trash about improving Internet service to homes and businesses, they can't see past their legacy applications. On the cable side, their most optimistic visions are about "content distribution". One-way, few-to-many stuff. Same-old, only bigger and prettier.

They don't understand that the Net supports an infinitude of services and applications, and that the biggest benefit of incumbency is helping yesterday's consumers become tomorrow's producers. There is far more money in that than there ever was in couch potato fertilizer. The big difference is that the money won't all go to the fertilizer producers and distributors.

Bottom line: The consumer electronics revolution is over. The producer electronics revolution is just beginning.

It's clear by now that the incumbent carriers will never understand this on their own. There may be a few glimmers here and there. (J.P. Rangaswami going to British Telecom is especially encouraging.) But the shining lights will have to come from somewhere else. I nominate ISPs.

More than any other industry, ISPs were responsible for the early successes of Linux in the marketplace, and for mainstreaming free software and open source building materials. ISPs like The Little Garden, Panix, Earthlink and Netcom gave ordinary citizens their first tastes of the wide open Internet. While ISPs have been dependent on carriers, and while carriers have undermined the ISP business from below (helped in summer of 2005 by the Supreme Court's Brand X decision), there is nothing to stop ISPs from providing an endless variety of services to customers that the carriers would never bother with.

This opportunity was the subject of Internet Service: The Fifth Utility? — an on-stage conversational keynote by Elliot Noss and myself at ISPcon in Santa Clara on Wednesday. Elliot is the CEO of Tucows, a company that wholesales or back-ends services for ISPs to re-sell. These include domain name services, digital certificates, email, managed DNS and web publishing tools. Elliot's main point, however, was that the portfolio of ISP service offerings is infinite. And that this infinitude only becomes clear when everybody concerned separates services from network. Even when one of the services is providing network installation and support.

It became clear to me, through the day I spent at ISPcon, that the leading edge of network deployment isn't what the carriers are doing nationwide, but what independent organizations are doing on their own by pulling fiber and putting up wireless (mostly wi-fi) networks. These organizations include companies, municipalities, schools and citizen groups. While some of them are offering services on top of raw network bandwidth and connectivity, they way they offer it makes the distinction between network and services increasingly clear. "Oh yes, we do offer some services if you want them", a guy from one wireless network company told me. This was after he stopped me because he saw Linux Journal on my badge and wanted to tell me about how they built their systems on top of Linux.

Our conversational keynote was well-received. But I think what we need is a one or more ISPs to pioneer a killer service that addresses the need for home-produced video distribution. Sometime in the next few years, somebody is going to produce a must-see home-produced high-def movie, completely outside the vertical silos that run from Hollywood to theaters and living rooms through the usual channels. And somebody is going to figure out how to get that movie paid for without blunt coercion of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

There is a much better chance that those somebodies will come from the among thousands of ISPs than from among a handful of network carriers.

Meanwhile at our house we're holding off on the big screen until we can buy the camcorder and the production gear to go with it. And when we get all that stuff, it will be far more native to the Net than to the old distribution silos. ISPs should know that there are millions more like us, and that together we comprise a very attractive market.

* I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I do know it's a 46" Sony 1080p.