Fast Services?

Whenever I hear people talking about fast services that need broadband, they always seem to be talking about video, and by that they almost always seem to mean broadcast TV, as in a few producers and a few centralized distrbution points going to many consumers.

But what about podcasts, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? None of those are TV in that sense.

Here's a table of some thoughts on some kinds of fast services, some with video, some not:

Fast Services?	Asynchronous	Interactive
1-n (broadcast)	TV, Internet radio	training, lectures
1-1 (pairs)	IM slide editing picture sharing pet cam security cam	VoIP video telephony directed picture taking pet video interaction burglar frightener
n-n (groups)	YouTube google video podcasting local sports and activities	distributed meetings (business, clubs, family reunions, political) video chats (schoolgirls, grandma and day care, nerds) MMORPG: massively multiplayer online role-playing games; EverQuest, World of Warcraft, etc.
n-1 (input)	BitTorrent	talk video

I'm sure there are lots of other possibilities, not to mention some existing examples I didn't include, but this table should be enough to make the point that broadcast TV isn't the only thing that's going to use and need fast bandwidth. The more broadband becomes available, the more such services will pop up. MMORPG is a proof of that concept: I think I've heard World of Warcraft alone has more than six million players, and that's after only a few years. And of course YouTube, which didn't exist a few years ago, and already sold for gigabucks. Group-forming services (Reed's Law, 2N), whether interactive or not, tend to grow much faster than broadcast (Sarnoff's Law, N) or pairwise (Metcalfe's Law, N²) applications.

Some of these services may or may not exist yet. I already have a webcam watching my dog, and I automatically make a movie every day to see what she's been up to. I'd like to make that interactive, by having a screen where she could see and hear me. This same kind of technology could be used by remote security services to watch for and scare off burglars. Why leave that kind of application to Big Brother? Buy it yourself and turn it to your advantage.

Imagine schoolgirls, BFF (Best Friends Forever), going off to different colleges, yet meeting up every evening via interactive video conference. Not just schoolgrils; imagine grandma and grandpa interacting with grandchild in day care, and her teachers.

What is BitTorrent in this scheme? You could argue it's interactive, because while you get movies down, you're also sending pieces of movies up, so it's both up and down. It's different from the average interactive service in that the users aren't themselves interacting in real time. The BitTorrent software is interacting, but even that is not with the kind of back-and-forth fast and erratic behavior typical of interactive services.

So I've put BitTorrent in as its own row of n-1 services, playing on its most distinctive feature, of drawing input from many sources, going to a single sink. This leads to a speculation as to what an interactive n-1 service might be. Talk video? Like talk radio, but with people sending in videos from all across the Internet?

Stay tuned for sports.

-jsq