Will ISPs save the Net?

At the Consumer Electronics Show early last year all the TV manufacturers I spoke to made one fact clear: the new "TV" would be a 1920 x 1080 screen like the ones we use for computers, but optimized for television with HDMI and component video connections and tuners for cable and over-the-air digital signals. Picture scanning would be progressive rather than interlaced. "1080p" is also the terminal resolution anticipated by the high definition (HD) TV standards developed in the 1990s. While computer screen resolutions would go much higher, these manufacturers told me, we could expect TV screen manufacture to stabilize at the 1080p level in 2006 and to continue improving at that resolution.

Specifically, they predicted that 1080p screens would be available at Costco for under $2000 by the end of the year, and that 1080i camcorders would be down around $1000. Full 1080p camcorders would start showing up in professional gear, but would take longer to come down in price.

Because of predictions like those, the flat-screen bracket over the fireplace in our new house remained empty for almost two years. That changed last November when we bought a new 40" Sony KDL-40XBR2 Bravia screen from Amazon for $2299. No tax, no shipping charges. A few places charged less, but I'd never heard of them, and my experience with Amazon (which runs nearly everything on Linux) has been excellent over the years.

I decided to take the plunge after spending a couple nights at the house of a friend whose 46" version of the same screen also doubles as a computer display. 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*From his easy chair he controls the screen with either a remote control or a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I'm not that fancy yet at our house, but I have hooked a computer up to the screen, and the results are startling.

The difference between the two sources is stark. Photographs and other computer graphics are more beautiful than anything coming from cable or satellite TV, mostly because the resolutions are higher to begin with, and the images are far less compressed. TV still has advantages, of course. The main one is that we still like what only (or mostly) comes from TV stations and networks: movies, sports, and programs of varioius kinds. That's why we continue to suffer with the 540-line NTSC and 576-line PAL systems, which have been with us for the duration -- even though their low resolutions are amplified on big flat screens. It's also why some viewers call HD "life-changing". Some forms of programming -- notably sports, music videos and nature footage --can be especially compelling. But they are still afflicted by MPEG compression artifacts. These can make every frame look like a photo saved at the lowest JPEG quality — only worse. You see "folds" in aliasing, plus quilting, blocking and mosquito noise all over the place. Here satellite TV has a big advantage over cable. Satellite is all-digital, and compresses its signals far less than cable does. An HBO movie from Dish Network on my Sony 1080p screen looks much better than the same movie from Comcast looks on my buddy's Sony 1080p screen. This will change when we get fiber to the home (FTTH), but most of us won't get that for a long time.

Meanwhile there

My buddy, however, is also a heavy user of BitTorrent. And some of his BitTorrented programs look pretty good. Which brings me to the subject at hand: distribution.

Let's say you produce a good high-def movie at your house, and you want to share it. In fact, let's go one more step and say you might even want to sell it at some point. What are your distribution choices? Your video might be as much as two

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 HD 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.