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K.C. NEEL
Ask any of the 580 or so people who attended CTAM's conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week what broadband is, and chances are you'll get almost 580 different definitions.
Yet one thing was pretty clear among most attendees, speakers and panelists: The cable industry has the inside track over other competitors when it comes to offering broadband services to customers.
"The cable industry has the opportunity to be the broadband pipe for everyone," said venture capitalist Jeff Yang, founder of Redpoint Ventures. "DBS and DSL still have problems to work out, but cable can step up to it and take over."
Problem is, just figuring out what broadband actually is can be tricky.
To Vulcan Ventures president Bill Savoy, broadband is not a sector of the communications industry. It's a whole new platform.
"The end goal with broadband is to deliver better consumer value," he told attendees of CTAM's first conference dedicated solely to broadband issues. "Seventy-five percent of online homes want broadband if they can get it, and two-thirds of those people don't even know what it is."
Broadband to Cisco's senior marketing director Alan Cohen is not a technology. It's about speed and performance.
"Broadband is about the change in the way users access applications," he said.
Without the melding of content and distribution, though, broadband can't be fully realized, Yang said.
The general stock market has been pummeling the dot-com and broadband sectors now, but Yang still believes in the business long-term.
"You have to have an integrated vision," he said. "It's not enough to be the Internet or the TV. You must be both to succeed."
Success in the broadband sector will require the infrastructure to be tied to services available over that infrastructure, Yang said.
Most of the broadband experts at the conference all agreed the frenzy that has gripped the dot-com and broadband sectors for the past couple of years actually hurt the development and growth of the business long-term.
"It's unfortunate that the technology (to deliver broadband services) is about to come to market at the same time (Wall Street investors) are about to reject the whole sector," Vulcan's Savoy says. "We are a gold-rush society. We think the downdraft will continue for some time ... But we're still committed investors. We expect a few more public disasters, and when that happens, it becomes the right time for Vulcan to be an investor and to build real equity value."
It's this kind of environment, he said, that creates the opportunity for "real businesses with real business models to create value. The gold-rush mentality costs time and money. But it mostly costs time, which is more valuable than money right now."
Yang doesn't believe the notion that there will be a convergence of technologies, per se, as broadband begins to permeate consumers' lives.
He doesn't see the day, he says, when "everyone gathers around the television to watch Dad read his e-mail." Nor does he subscribe to the notion that the PC will become the next TV set.
"The reality is that there is a difference between a lean-back and lean-forward experience," he said. "There's going to be a market for converged consumption (of products and services), but it's going to be a spectrum of convergence."
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