Where are the True Broadband Applications?
Not to long ago Mark Cuban blogged about “What’s the next and 1st big broadband Application?” and it got me thinking. Right now all these applications that are requiring huge amounts of bandwidth are nothing more than video for the most part. There is nothing groundbreaking out there. We’ve have TV blasted to us for over 70 years and even in the more recent years High Definition is quickly becoming the norm. So if anything these applications are just trying to catchup with the other media offerings we accustom to.
With the continued improvement in broadband bandwidths we’ll see more and more content brought into and out of the home and office, but why are we building/getting them now?!?
Some comments to his posting noted concerns about not building an application because of bandwidth limitations is the common thought. I’d like to address that from a different direction…if your application or product is so groundbreaking that it becomes a necessity, users will get the bandwidth to use it. The key is to not just make a bandwidth hungry app to use the pipe, but to make it so feature rich and usable that it needs that extra bandwidth.
I would love to see/build the ability to go to CNN(or any other news station) on my TV and watch the live feed or pull up any or all of the segments that I choose right there on demand.
What about a refrigerator that provides you access to the local markets and gives you instant pricing and stock on whatever you need. Even a 3G/wireless approach like the Kindle where your grocery store picks up your wireless tab for accessing their system by closing the sales right then and there at your fridge.
Those are just some of the end user potentials. If you stepped into any corporate office and looked at their systems the opportunities are endless. The efficiency of business in this global economy can improve much beyond Teleconferencing and VoIP. Imagine building prototypes live on a Surface style PC with your marketers and engineers around the world and all the same time utilizing cloud computing to calculate product wear, market share and production costs.
One thing I believe that needs to come first or at least with more broadband applications is a more widespread secure/encrypted traffic. The net is not always friendly and for something to be truly groundbreaking the user will have to share sensitive data. Encrypting all traffic on the web would increase the overhead, but give many users the confidence to utilize the bandwidth in more groundbreaking ways.
