[LINK] Weekend Magazine - The Future of Australian Television - Taxation, Licensing, Advertising or Criminalization?

Steven Clark steven.clark at internode.on.net
Mon Nov 16 21:12:38 AEDT 2009


Tom Koltai wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: David Boxall 
>>
>> On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 at 14:18:59 +1100 Tom Koltai wrote:
>>     
>>> ...
>>> Standard Definition TV picture @ 400 MB per hour.
>>>       
>> In my experience, H.264 video encoded at much less than 1800 
>> kilobytes/sec (with AAC audio at 160 kilobytes/sec: a little 
>> less than 1 gigabyte/hour) yields poor quality. Perceptions differ, of 
>> course, but adopting too low a standard risks alienating the market.
>>     
>
> Actually David, the market (most file sharing users) still prefer the
> lower SD resolution versions.
>   
this would most likely be because (a) HD/widescreen is still relatively 
new, but probably more importantly (b) smaller files are quicker to DL 
*and* take smaller chunks out of data quotas.

we pay-per-volume for access to the internet. if the HD file is several 
times larger than the SD version, and i just want to see the episode, 
why would i bother with the larger file?

though just because people 'prefer' SD now, that's not a good reason to 
lock that in for the future. [no one will ever need more than 640Kb ...]

> Therefore for the moment at least, Bandwidth is still a concern and
> Standard Definition is the predominant meme.
>   
that's data quota/volume, not bandwidth.

*sigh* SD is not a meme. it's a data display format. i can't get SD into 
your head by talking about it or showing it to you. i might be able to 
get the *idea* of SD or SD v HD across, but I can't convey the data 
format to you that way.

the notion of a 'meme' is a unit of cultural ideas/symbols/practices 
that are transferred from mind to mind through communication that can be 
imitated by the receiver.

> My calculation of the cost of one Gigabyte of American based content
> delivered to a user in Darwin (being the most expensive terrestrial
> connection we have in Australia) for example equals approximately
> $0.637294 cents.
>
> (Before you all scream, "Wow how did you get that number?" I should
> explain that is calculated on the basis of the Gigabyte taking 30.452
> days to get from "a" to "b". As in one months billing cycle.)
> N.B. it includes ISP on costs for example a monthly autobill percentage
> of the EFTPOS fee that an ISP incurs on auto-rebill of a debit card.
>   
this doesn't explain how you calculated the figure, only one of your 
assumptions. not sure why you've assumed a decimal month to deliver 1Gb. 
what figures have you used, and what were your sources?

> Conversely, the same Gigabyte delivered via P2P from mainly Australian
> peers equals only $0.15294 cents per GB.  
>
> (Is it any wonder I am proponent of local caching, ubiquitous peering
> and P2P technologies?)
>   
what figures have you used, and what were your sources?

> The problem is not actually the FTA offerings. The problem is being able
> to program the viewing preferences of each family member according to
> their desires and interests, and not what is available via the rather
> limited appointment TV or Video on Demand offerings.
>   
this can be done in a variety of ways.

it's interesting to reflect on how quickly things that only recently 
were not possible suddenly become 'problems' that need to be resolved. 
create the means, and the demand follows?

> My argument that an economical user pays licence fee eliminates the
> file-sharing controversy and allows everyone to have the best of all
> worlds.
> Those that use the net to download "free" content pay more for usage
> than those that don't.
>   
in what sense?

(a) they pay more because they use more data volume? or
(b) the volume they pay for is somehow more expensive-per-unit?

> Excluding VOIP utilisation, my entire Net activity per month fits into
> less than 1 GB of bandwidth. (And that includes a pile of Youtube.)
>   
do you mean you use less than one gigabyte of data per month, or that 
you manage all this via a gigabyte-per-second link?

data quota and bandwidth are not synonymous. that'd be like confusing 
the width of a road with the volume of traffic it carries.

> Yeah well, for work related reasons, my MS Word is set to American
> spelling.
>
> MS Word doesn't yet allow you to use style sheets for Document Template
> specific spelling options. Or if it does, my version doesn't. (Office
> 2003).
>   
it's not Word that /decides/ how *you* spell, surely?


-- 
Steven R Clark, BSc(Hons) LLB/LP(Hons) /Flinders/, MACS, Barrister and 
Solicitor
PhD Candidate, Centre for Regulation and Market Analysis
School of Commerce, City West Campus, University of South Australia

/Finding a Balance between Privacy and National Security in Australia's 
ePassport System/

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