Monday, June 19, 2006

TRIPLE PLAY://AT&T launches the 2Wire box 1 year late


AT&T plans the launch of the new Homezone service next month, according to the Wall Street Journal. The 2Wire STB takes center stage: it needs input from the Dish (EchoStar) service for TV content, and a broadband line for movie and other content from Movielink, Akimbo Systems and Yahoo! (photos and music).

The service is exactly one year late (not half a year, as the Journal suggests)and hardly adds anything as compared with the original press release (January 3, 2005).

One can argue that it is a good interim strategy: basically offering VoD (the Wall Street Journal unjustly presents this as a walled garden section of the internet - it really is just movies, plus your own photos and music) to counter triple and quad play services from cable operators. The box is very central. From the customer point of view it really isn't relevant which cables plug into the box (except that the in-home wiring could prove a limitation). Being late however limits the pay-back period of this service, as Lightspeed steams ahead.

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