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Profile: Jon Goodman

Mar 19, 2001  •  Post A Comment

Title: Founder and executive director of the EC2 Incubator Project for new media, Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. EC2 sponsors research in communications, media and digital technologies. The Annenberg Center was created in 1993 through a $120 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation. Previously, she was the director of the Entrepreneur Program at USC’s Marshall School of Business.
Digital revenue: “In the short-term, there will be an attempt to supplement ad revenues with subscription income, which might involve the sale of special services to targeted groups. An example would be repurposing some of their traditional assets [for sale to third parties]. Producers haven’t even begun to tap the value of their libraries.
“Over time, producers and distributors of content will start becoming producers and distributors of the technology itself [e.g., set-top boxes or attachments]. NBC or AOL/Time Warner will have two kinds of feeds-the traditional network feed and [for example] a 3-D feed to sell or lease these boxes.
“There will also be opportunities to offer services that people will pay premium prices for-first-run movies on demand at high resolution, for example. New York City theaters are already charging $10.50 at a time when many people have stopped going to the movies because it’s too damn complicated.”
Killer apps: “The single most interesting advance so far is TiVo. For the next generation, the most important product will be a controller that totally makes the TV respond to you-a device that says to my TV, `While recording this, please record all appropriate Web information.”’
Wireless: “Way too much has been made of wireless. The European telcos are in desperate straits because they bid so much for bandwidth and no one wants these services. Even if consumers did, the wireless spectrum is finite: the ability to have everyone talking to each other and doing transactions at once is physically impossible. The proliferation of all these businesses and devices is totally out of proportion to the state of development and the existing infrastructure.”
Delay: “There are so many economic stakeholders between producers and consumers that services are difficult to negotiate, let alone implement.”
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