An MP3 digital music player, such as the RioPort, can store 400 hours of compressed music. Within five years, the same $400 player will be capable of storing 12,000 hours of music — enough capacity to take an entire music collection with you in your car, at the gym or to work. “Everybody’s going to have these things. People are going to pay $400 to get thousands of hours of storage,” said [Marc] Andreessen.
And there are execs in the music and video industry who still believe that they can hold on to the model of pay-per-view? {shakes head} Pay-per-view may make sense when content is scarce and difficult to obtain or distribute, but with plentiful content and distribution bandwidth, the all-you-can-eat model is a powerful one and appeals to a lot of people — even those who don’t plan to use the service regularly. This is a lesson that Internet Service Providers learnt quickly, and practically no one asks for per-minute connectivity charges today. AOL learnt its lesson, when will the rest of the AOL-TW conglomerate learn?