Last month I came across my mother's stash of "we're having a be-in party" stationary, left over from the early 1970s. Those cards were a carry over from the 1940s and 1950s when my mother grew up. The formal etiquette of mailing and invite and RSVPing became kitsch before it became corny then classic then retro. 

danah boyd: what i mean when i say "email is dead" in reference to teens.

"I'm part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i'm stuck dealing with email. Today's teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There's another transition going on which is why there's no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground."

Young people are more flexible in learning, and older people more easily adopt the tools and norms that feel familiar from their youth. There's more than one reason why computers have QWERTY keyboards; they made transferring skills from typewriters to computers feel familiar.

People also follow their cohort's lead when it comes to building social capital. Aren't most of your friends around your age? That's just the way social networks usually expand. So you're going to use the conversation and social coordination tools that dominate your social network, and your cohort.

Skype is riding this wave, of course. So it's interesting to watch Skype's founders stick a toe into another wave, social video, with The Venice Project. Are you too old to ride it?

How does Skype fit into the mix of other social media? If you recall, Lilia Efimova started using the ULRTMT - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator this summer. Lilia and her online friend Andrea Ben Lassoued wrote "Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative" and it's being included as a chapter in a new textbook.

Their essay documents their professional relationship's evolution. The chart, at left, has three columns: Lilia's blog on the left, Andrea's blog on the right, and mutual territory in middle. The top of the chart is 2003 and the bottom is April 2006. They discovered each other in the blogosphere, reading each others' posts. After a while, they commented on each others' blogs, bookmarked each others' posts on del.icio.us, and swapped the occasional email. After a few months of more intense intercourse, they escalated to Skype conversations.

It is a solid ethnographic case study by professional social scientists. It spans a long time and covers multiple media channels (how we really interact with each other online). In this case, discovery and low level interaction earned (banked) a small amount of trust.

I'd love to see this analysis of online relationship-building extended to other groups and situations. How do entrepreneurs find each other? How do job seekers discover potential employers and choose media during job search? How do new project teams negotiate the fit of modes to communication tasks? How long do some patterns persist, and do people repeat them across different relationships? How effective is shifting into work/task mode before fully establishing lower levels of trust?

I'd also like to see the end of a relationship. Can you salvage a fading relationship by experimenting with other communication channels? What are the textual or other early warnings indicators that a person is fading from "friend" to "former friend" or "contact"? How much asymetric communication can most people tollerate?

Which behaviors affecting user adoption and migration: What factors affect the success rate in dragging your (family, friends, work colleagues) into new channels? Are social network hubs more able to migrate their networks? Or do hubs who switch lose their power and start from scratch?

The ability to create great experiences comes from deep understanding of human nature. If you'd like to fund a more exhaustive study, let me know. I'm organizing research proposals.

One of the "joys" of being a US-controlled public company is that SEC requires the breakout of International from domestic sales. So today's 3rd quarter report from eBay provides some information that allows us to look at Skype registrations coming from the U.S.

With over double the registrations from two quarters ago, it certainly demonstrates that the free SkypeOut within North America is probably helping to build some traction but Skype remains essentially a non-US business with over 84% of registrants outside the US. This is corroborated when you compare the % revenue increase with the % user increase; certainly some of the difference can be attributed to absence of revenue for SkypeOut calls within US/Canada.

The results are even more impressive when you consider there has been very limited marketing of Skype within North America - Phil has noticed some media ads in the Bay Area; there are some Skype ads on the eBay website.

These results also reveal some other interesting information:

continue reading.....

I have just been asked to moderate a Round Table at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa next Monday; Topic: the Future Visions for Telecom. Recently there have appeared three posts that provide a foundation for discussion of the subject:

First, James Enck, a highly respected telecom analyst and blogger, based in London, posted details of his keynote presentation last week, Ten Things I Hate About You, at Telco 2.0 in London  James has developed a strategic framework around which he sees the future of telecom:

• Telcos have lost control of their core product
• Voice is becoming a feature, not a service
• Telcos can't grasp that consumers may not want what they're being sold
• Telcos thrive on scarcity - future value will be built around abundance
• Command and control culture is dead, open API's rule
• Telco DNA is fundamentally unsuited to the current dynamics of content
• Telcos expand their footprints physically, not virtually
• Telcos can't innovate
• Telcos shouldn't try to innovate
• Maybe the entire foundation is wrong

Definitely a landmark post. So what should the foundation of telecom become? Alec Saunders presents a first anniversary update on his Voice 2.0 Manifesto:

The customer experience predicted by the Voice 2.0 Manifesto is not of a single carrier, but rather of three classes of entities - access, directory, and applications.  As a customer, you'll pay to be part of the network, you may pay for an identity (and this is an idea who's time will come, although it's hard to see today), and you'll pay for applications that that help you communicate in a diverse number of ways.  This is a very different model from the traditional, vertically integrated, communications network.

continue reading.....

Jordanians have been using Skype without problems for years. Until now. For example, JRBT wrote "My ISP is Batelco and it does appear to be blocked. I am unable to gain credit for skype out from Jordan I have to get a friend in uk to get it for me."

Researcher David DeBartolo confirms that Batelco blocks Skype as directed by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission. Presumably for "security." Here's the letter from DeBartolo and the fax from the ISP.

Dear Philip,

My name is David DeBartolo, and I am an American working in Amman, Jordan. I am the chair of a nonprofit organization with colleagues in Washington, London, and Cairo. I have been using Skype to keep in touch with all of them, and it has been tremendously useful -- until two weeks ago.

At that time, I started to have severe interruptions to my Skype service here in Jordan. It is forbidden to access the Skype website, and I have even been unable to make regular Skype-to-Skype or SkypeOut calls. Other colleagues of mine in Jordan have reported similar problems. The problems abated for the last week, but have now returned.

I inquired with our ISP in Jordan, named "Batelco," and they claim that the Jordanian Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has required them to ban access to Skype's website and to its authentication server. As proof they sent me the attached fax that they received.

I called the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, and they confirmed that they had ordered it banned, for "security reasons" responding to concerns of the government of Jordan. Most folks here don't believe this ridiculous justification; they believe that the state communications companies are upset about losing long-distance customers to Skype.

I've been told that complaints should be directed to the director of regulatory department of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, Dr. Al-Ansari. His email address is alansari.almashagbah@trc.gov.jo. The contact information for the commission is on the attached fax; Dr. Al-Ansari's extension is 2300.

I wanted to let you know about this issue because I am furious at the Jordanian government's self-serving decision. I hope that you will get a good blog post out of this, and that you may be able to mobilize Skype executives to officially protest the commission's decision. Jordan has a very close relationship to the US, and if they believe that Americans are upset at the decision, or that international investment will be jeopardized, they may be persuaded to change course. I also hope that you may be able to get Skype technicians working to counter whatever obstacles they have created to using Skype in Jordan.

Thank you for your time and please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any additional information.

Sincerely,

David M. DeBartolo
Fulbright Researcher, Jordan, 2006-2007
Binational Fulbright Commission
Amman, 11185
Jordan

Are you having difficulty with Skype and your ISP? Do you believe the "security" reason for blocking Skype.com?

During Canada's Centennial Year (1967) I was host for a student exchange with Finnish students; we have kept up contact over the past 39 years. Last week I asked one of them if s/he could translate the actual Helsingin Sanomat article reporting on their interview with Niklas Zennström (registration required) or at least give me the gist of it. Below (with minimal editorial correction of spelling and grammar)  is what my friend calls her/his "amateur translation".

The interview certainly goes well beyond the content of the Reuters summary report. (On the other hand there is nothing there that is going to impact eBay's stock price!) Note that, while my friend has been using English in both personal and business activities all these years, Skype Journal is not responsible for any mistranslation.

Of note in Niklas' comments:

• Niklas sees the future for wireless as being in WiFi (and WiMax) networks once they become more ubiquitous and more easily accessible. (reinforcing Ted Wallingford's recent comments on WiFi as the primary VoIP wireless medium)
• The issues with developing Skype for GSM or other wireless mobile phones relate to both processing power and memory issues (which translate into latency issues discussed in a post last weekend).
• He sees current rates for calls to wired lines as being the lowest we will see as someone has to pay for at least the connection.
• He only sees an explosion of mobile VoIP only once there are unlimited use fixed rate data plans available.
• The path to Skype as a ubiquitous mobile platform may be through "rebel" or "challenger" mobile operators who want to challenge the larger legacy service providers. But this is along the lines of what Andy was concluding in his recent "Being on the Inside" post.

A summary translation paragraph by paragraph goes as follows:

continue reading.....

You invite some friends to a party at your home. While at the party, they sublet your home to strangers. You learn this after the strangers are throwing their own parties in your home and moving in, eating your food, dating your wife.

Although the plot is straight out of Madhouse (1990), I'm really talking about San José State University's network managers facing the reality of Skype adoption. In this metaphor:

• the student Skypers are the friends,

• the sublease is the Skype EULA,

• the strangers are the members of the Skype network,

• and side effects are:

  • a new thing to support without any planned budget,

  • unanticipated use of your networks,

  • unknown exposure to various risks on your master list.

This gets trickier when Skype's architecture (a blend of p2p and centralized services) isn't well understood beforehand.

Don Baker and Bob Neal are resisting proven defensive instincts. Before tossing out the scoundrels and locking the doors, they're inviting comment from campus stakeholders and building expertise by bringing an eBay/Skype person to a closed briefing on Tuesday. All the public attention doesn't make it easier to take a measured approach, so these SJSU University Computing and Telecom (UCAT) execs are showing great discipline.

If you want to learn more, and share your thoughts, Steve Sloan is hosting a discussion, open to the public, on Skype in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC). We'll be Skypecasting it too. I'll see you there.

Jean Mercier is our Skype Numerologist.

Skype was - in the past - proud of its viral growth. But business is business, and they try to attract people by gifts and promotions, hoping to generate more revenue through SkypeOut, SkypeIn and Skype certified products. The last two promotions in September were:

1. Free SkypeOut for France in France
2. September Giveaway for USA and Canada

For the time being this has been unsuccessful IMHO! See the graph below:

Even if MuppetMaster pretends downloads isn't a measure of the growth of Skype (and I partially agree with this), the number of downloads should have shown some acceleration if these Skype Marketing campaigns mentioned above had been successful. Indeed, a bunch of new users downloading Skype should show a change in pattern in the download curve, as it was some months ago when they launched the free SkypeOut in Canada and the USA. It doesn't: almost straight line growth since several months.

September Giveaway was targeting mainly students, and this (probably) proves again that the Skype Users are mainly adult professional users.

Skype Users seem to be also quite often small businesses. But French small business mainly have their customers in France (France is a big country), and phone calls inside France are not free but quite cheap. Belgian small business (as an example), because of the tiny size of the country, do more business abroad (in France for instance), therefore they are more interested in reducing their phone call bills.

So? Why trying to force Viral Growth? Let it grow the usual way, by improving mainly quality, reliability and services.

One of my new "Skype Customers" told me: Skype to Skype has a fantastic quality, but SkypeOut isn't that good, but it is much cheaper indeed! She phones to her family in Algeria, and lives in Belgium! Improving quality will attract more Small Businesses!

Guest blog by Steve Sloan, Information Technology Consultant, San Jose State University.

UPDATE: At the moment, Skype's status remains undetermined and unblocked on the SJSU campus. A UCAT Operating Practices document describing the reasons and details for blocking Skype. (pdf)

Skype is a peer-to-peer (p2p) voice communications, instant message and file sharing program. The recent decision to pull the plug on Skype at SJSU (has it been implemented?) may be a classic example of command and control (Web 1.0 thinking) versus collaborate and communicate (Web 2.0) technologies and principles. According to one person I spoke with in the networking department of the university's computer center, "the issue that caused the decision to kill Skype is that Skype communications are encrypted." But, other protocols like SSL, SFTP and SSH are allowed and are encrypted. These protocols could be also used to do evil things. There is no discussion I know of to block these communications and they are used a lot on our university's network. Also IPSec and Kerberos are protocols used used on the SJSU network. These protocols are also encrypted and supported by SJSU. Should we also kill them? Do we want to have to make credit card transactions in clear text?

Yes, there have been past concerns about Skype. But, these concerns may be over blown. Oxford University, which had banned Skype, in fact recently lifted its ban on Skype.

continue reading.....

Organized crime organizations suppress competition in a market. This keeps margins high on vice goods and services. Higher prices means overall crime rates fall, some people just can't afford vices at higher rates. Organized crime trys to avoid "wars" with rivals because they are expensive and bad for business. Big Crime also stifles small time rivals who expand the market by bidding down monopolist pricing.

In theory, police would cooperate with mafiya to keep the streets clean of petty crimes that interfere with the mafiya's business. Total crime falls because monopolists will maximize profits in a smaller market at higher prices. General law and order benefits those holding monopolies on drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other steady businesses.

But there's a greater problem. Monopolies concentrate wealth and power. This leads to corrupt government.

So we write special laws that hurt organized crime. We add penalties for large quantities of drugs. We legalize big gambling to bring it out of the underground economy, producing tax income instead of fueling crime lords. We mandate property forfeiture and allow mobster surveillance. In short, we make it more expensive to do big crime and we level the playing field. You never do away with crime altogether, but you cut the concentrated cash flow that corrupts.

Which brings me to net neutrality.

Our Martin Geddes thinks little of laws and regulations supporting net neutrality.

I've said it many times before, but Network Neutrality is a treatment for the symptoms, not the causes - and it's an ineffective anti-consumer folk remedy at that. Good intentions aren't enough. ... Picking at one tiny part of the anti-competitive edifice isn't the way forward. Better to have power over suppliers through your wallet than via politicians.

I agree. In a perfect world.

But the markets are imperfect, power is already concentrated. We see the corrupting power of the largest lobbyists in Washington D.C. and other centers of political power. We see their astroturfing and other bad acts.

So we must act.

We must effect change.

We must out-innovate and out-market.

We must organize as consumers.

We must organize as citizens. We need to educate this generation's Judge Greens, the judge who broke up Ma Bell and made the mobile revolution possible.

We must lead our society to define unmediated access to the Internet as a human right, a civil right. And to react with anger and purpose to anyone who tries to tamper with that access.    

We must find allies, if not friends, in other industries. Companies that need their bits to go untrammeled. That need an Internet without gatekeepers. Companies that know how to lobby.

Like the mafia, yakuza, or bratva, the concentrated power of the telcos will fight back.

They won't fall to any one measure. So we need a theme that All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
 -- Edmund Burkedrives many measures, new ones over time, each driving the monsters toward acceptable societal norms. Perhaps the theme is liberty and freedom?

I agree with Martin that fighting the telcos with laws is hard. Maybe impossible. And not without risk.

But doing nothing is not an option. The societal consequences of giving absolute control over public assembly, public speech, over our new libraries, encyclopedias and news sources, over our civic participation and education - this is tantamount to creating a new branch of government, one without oversight, without checks, balances or accountability.

Martin, we don't have dozens or hundreds of viable suppliers in the United States. We don't have efficient markets for Internet access. And we have damning evidence of the foul intentions of these monopolists to subvert civic freedoms and rights.

So, instead of waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to restore rights seized by phone and cable companies, what do you think should we do? 

P.S. Dr. Magaddino, my old economics professor, challenged me to consider crime, applying supply and demand theory to social evils instead of goods.

I've been looking through the VON Boston program and don't see Skypenomics on the agenda. Nobody is talking about how Skype and its cousins continue to change the rules.

1. Skype is building Click-to-Call advertising. Online advertising is the only ad sector that continues to grow. Skype, eBay and Google are diving in to get their share. Click-to-Call isn't new, but the marketing might of Google and eBay, and their far reaching ecosystems, suggest they can deploy to millions on the web, and eventually on mobiles.
2. Skype hardware partnerships are extending Skype's brand and customer reach. Hardware is part of Skype's strategy for earning brand acceptance. Hardware is also crucial to putting Skype into homes and home offices.
3. China. Skype's biggest userbase is in China, the fastest growing broadband market, a place where more people speak English than in the United States. How many telcos and cablecos are as active globally as Skype? How many have become household brands outside their native markets?
4. Yellow Pages. PC-based search is a direct competitor to directory assistance services. This year Skype added business search to their browser toolbars and promised to add it to the Skype user directory. Their business development team continues to build alliances, country by country, with yellow page database providers. Watch browser-centric phone apps like Skype erode directory assistance revenue as Skype migrates to mobiles.
5. Payments. Skype will add person-to-person PayPal payment to its client, as shown in our banner this week and the graphic above. Skype is going to get its share of the remittance market. Again, Skype wraps conversation in commerce.

In short, Skype is

• Amplifying network effects. It's not just more is more. You can do more things with your Skype buddy list, create more social capital, than in other networks.
• Surrounding calls with value-added services. Revenue, for starters. Loyalty builders, too.

In a time of large dinosaurs everyone else is either quick or dead. Right now, Skype looks quick.

Bill Campbell's post about Wall Street is baloney, of course. Kent says it well.

You state "Wall Street frowns on the eBay/Skype side of the partnership according to the New York Times." I read the article you linked ... it makes absolutely NO mention of the market's (i.e. Wall Street's) view of the Google/eBay/Skype collaboration.

The share prices are "factually" listed at the end of the article (without comment) ... as is customary. As for "doing the math," Google shares rose 2.0% and eBay shares rose 1.9%. The difference is statistically insignificant.

There may be a story here, but this article, and yesterday's share movement for Google and eBay, isn't it.

Investors didn't even notice the Skype side of the deal. Why would they? Any benefits won't affect eBay Inc. cash flow for years. Meanwhile, they had lots of other news to consider. For example, the advertising part of the deal, extending Google Inc.'s ad distribution onto eBay sites mirroring the previous Yahoo!-eBay arrangement, and the Google Office Suite that positions Google more clearly in opposition to Microsoft. Both bits of news would clearly have more immediate effect on valuation of the business.

As for the Click-to-Call service, there is both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is to create a form of paid advertising with greater merit than page views or even click throughs. Web advertisers find page views a less relevant metric than ever. But someone actually talking to a sales person, well, I have a pretty good chance of converting that lead into a customer. It's the difference between driving by a car dealership and walking in the door to speak to a hungry rep.

The risks are equally huge. Click-to-Call assumes:

1. Potential eBay and Google customers have compatible smartphone software or hardware. eBay is now rolling out Skype to its buyers and sellers, starting back in June at the eBay Live conference. But uptake by the U.S. and Canadian public is very slow. Meanwhile Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, AT&T, Earthlink, Comcast and others are promoting their own VoIP enabled messaging clients, fragmenting the market.
2. They are willing to use PCs to talk. This is a new behavior. You can't assume customers will change their behavior in ways you approve. What percent of Skype users try voice once and never use it again?
3. Sellers are able to buy the right leads. Talk isn't cheap and margins are thin. eBay started by sheltering sellers from buyers; transactions just happened. Now sellers compete for buyers, augmenting eBay's natural traffic with their own off-eBay advertising and promotional strategies. For c2c, sellers must segment online prospects by interest in specific products. They must also decide which prospects are worth talking to. This is an auction-by-auction calculation and so far there is too little information to make an informed choice, especially for high volume sellers.
4. Sellers are able to answer callers. Most sellers aren't ready to talk to dozens or hundreds of callers a week. Some will need to set up phone-oriented CRM software, hire people or a service, and develop new call center management skills. They will learn to be agreeable and available at their callers' convenience instead of their own. These are new competencies, not lightly adopted and prone to misstep.

These are not fast, sure, or cheap to fix. But they can be managed. eBay and Skype know the problems and have started to address them. Skype education programs for eBay buyers and sellers is a start.

eBay's click-to-call service is FUDware today, the variation of vaporware that spreads fear, uncertainty and doubt among potential rivals. Nothing new for those who follow eBay financial conference calls. To get a payoff on c2c, eBay and Google will need to execute on branding Skype in the US and making the unnatural act of using your PC as a phone an everyday affair.

Watching blogpulse's chart of Skype's blogshare, I can't help noticing how closely the line of the term "VoIP" follows the incidence of Skype-related terms. It's almost as if VoIP is mostly getting mentioned as an explanation or echo of Skype. Has VoIP become redundant as a consumer marketing term? If you're a rival, are you better off saying your product is "like Skype" than "a VoIP tool"? If you're Skype, why would you even mention the term to consumers?

So if Skype is driving the public perception of VoIP, how much is Vonage affecting the "VoIP meme" with their massive US ad campaigns?

Skype is more than VoIP, of course, and the company has a real chance to define its brand on its own terms, and not just on this last-millenium bit of jargon. Careful framing may put all the traditional VoIP people at a disadvantage. For example, Skype adds value with secure phone calls; does your VoIP do that? Since "free" isn't enough to justify North American mass adoption, Skype marcom will explore all the other offers it can make. Its choice of offers may not only redefine VoIP, but set expectations (privacy, presence, collaboration, picture sharing, voice quality, ease of use, video, it just works) competitors may find challenging to match.

Recently a couple of posts discussing VoIP Quality:

Om Malik reports on a Brix Networks study, based on data collected on Acceptable Call Quality via their TestYourVoIP.com site.  Note that Brix also announces the availability of this service as a Google Gadget (for Google Desktop) providing ongoing measurement of the quality of your connection for voice and video activities. The study reports an ongoing decline in VoIP Acceptable Call Quality from 84% to about 80% over the period December 2004 to May 2006.

Andy at VoIP Watch found  MyVoIPSpeed Internet Connection Test and was using it as a tool to measure the connection speeds and QoS at the hotel he was staying at. I checked out my own home office connection and got this report:

Om talks in his post about degrading quality of calls received from callers using Vonage. I have been a Packet8 subscriber for almost three years and have found the quality to consistently improve over time to the point where I have minimal problems. I also find I am getting a high quality level with my Skype and SkypeOut calling with one exception: SkypeOut calls to some wireless phone services.  Too much compression/decomprssion going on? first via VoIP, then at the wireless end?

I also ran the Brix TestYourVoIP and got a MOS score of 4.2, close to the MyVoIPSpeed result shown above of 4.0. The tests appear to have some level of consistency across the tests and do appear to reflect the quality of calls that I am experiencing.

Powered by Qumana

BusinessWeek broke the story of Skype's founders launching a TV net distribution biz as a venture separate from Skype. Not known if it will be in the eBay family, but Zennstrom and Friis will remain 100% and 80% at Skype, respectively. It is code named "The Venice Project," not likely related to a 1999 time travel movie about the arts of that name (Lauren Bacall, Dennis Hopper, and a large cast split between modern Venice, California, and an earlier Venice, Italy.) Om Malik says "we told you so." So do we. Skype Journal wrote in January that Skype's ringtone relationships would lead to music, television, and movie distribution. Then with Warner Music, now with EMI Music Publishing.

This isn't good for eBay. The way they are organizing The Venice Project, as a separate venture, may conflict with eBay's strategy to use Skype as a platform to make markets for intangibles. We live in a service economy but eBay makes its living making markets for atoms. One SkypeBayPal vision extends their community and market-making excellence to paid live and time-shifted conversation. Not just video files and streams, but one-to-one education, consulting, information services, and entertainment. And eBay's budding alliance with Hollywood loving Yahoo! could easily fuel an eBay entertainment distribution channel with alliances and content. While the Venice Project could build on Skype and eBay, it doesn't look like there will be direct business or technical connections to the mother ship. eBay's loss.

Meg won the fight for Skype's soul: Skype will be an eBay enabler (as opposed to revolutionizing conversation, work, and entertainment as we know it). Skype's new management is building Skype's community and eBay's sales in 2006 and 2007. Given that direction, could The Venice Project be an outlet for the founders' broader vision? Or just a simple thrust at a gobsmackingly huge market? Either way, it's almost always faster to build your skunkworks outside the behemoth.

Rafat Ali says N & J should talk with Masayoshi Son about his plans in this space. Ars Technica's Anders Bylund points to the founders' bizdev power as key to partnering with TV studios and producers. Mathew Ingram thinks TV execs must be ready to dive in since they are living with industry disruption. Not to mention the worst ratings ever.

Two years's from now? Imagine TVP launches in January, gets 100 million people in 2007 who want to watch TV on their PCs and mobiles. Brings a little long-tail to the game, so you can always find something to watch and an audience for nearly anything. Restores social elements to watching television on your PC (think Skypecasts for sporting events). If effective, it could easily add one more nail into advertising-based TV's ratings, stealing attention from cable and satellite delivered television. Who loses? Other television distribution channels, like cable and satellite. What kind of content and viewer lock-in can TVP secure against the Comcasts who will surely copy TVP's business models?