It’s just packets
I work in the Voice 2.0 industry. And one of the common themes is that voice is just packets (as voice connections start to use the Internet as opposed to traditional phone lines). What I think that means is that it’s not the actual delivery of the call that matters anymore. AT&T forever was selling phone lines and charging you for every minute you were on a call. Well look here – you can get better features than what more carriers are providing for $1.66 a month. The cost of calling is dropping to zero. Now in order to survive, companies in this space need to deliver better value, not just a phone call. They need to deliver applications, features, ease of use that will win in this market. That’s pretty clear at this point.
But it’s not just about telephones. This packet revolution is all about us. Think about what the music industry was 10 years ago. You bought all your music on a plastic disc that was made by a monopoly (heavily marked up), pressed, packaged, shipped, displayed and then sold. Now? You buy it on iTunes. The costs associated with those discs are gone. The delivery of the product is super cheap. And as artists figure out how to make money without the labels getting involved, the price of music will go down and down.
Want to watch a movie? With pay per view, Hulu, Netflix, and any number of other sites, you can get the content delivered via the Internet. TV shows are almost always available on the Internet one way or another. So the cost of delivering the content to you is lower. There is no middle man of DirecTV or Comcast that needs to take a cut.
In all these industries, the exciting companies are the ones adding value to the content. My company, Ifbyphone, for example, adds applications for businesses to use with their existing phone lines – be they VOIP or traditional land lines. Companies like Pandora and HypeMachine add value to your listening experience. In the video arena, the company I’m most excited about is Boxee. They understand that the concept of a channel is dying. It is about delivering good content when you want it how you want it. TV stations don’t do that. They can’t do that. They don’t control the delivery to the audience. They have to go through cable companies or satellite companies or AT&T, who *could* do that, but don’t.
I cannot wait for Boxee’s big Beta announcement next week. I have a feeling they are going to really shake things up. Hopefully that shake up includes a cheap desktop box that can share media from a local network source reliably.
But mark your calendars. This is a huge shift in the most basic ways we live. We live in exciting times.
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