Subject: Re: Paid or Free "news" on the Internet From: dowjone!rexb (Rex Ballard) Date: Sun, 13 Mar 94 21:58:58 EST

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> Bill McQueen wrote:
> > I for one believe that the internet should be maintained for free and
> > unfettered access of the citizens. There should even be public terminals 
> > where those who can not afford a computer could have access to it.

This sounds a great deal to me like a public library.  I like public libraries.
I pay taxes for them.  They buy books.  I check the books out.  I give the
books back.  Terminals in public libraries already give access to CARL, and
other bibleographic references.  As a read-only access to WWW and other public
services, it is a good idea.  If a municipality wanted to pay the right kind of
money out of the tax coffers, I could easily set them up with Dow Jones
News Services.

> > I think that those institutions who gather and provide news, information,
> > literature and so on should not demand that their values should dominate
> > these free lands of humanity, but should humbly use our collective wisdom
> > to finance it through joint, collective and public means that does not put
> > pressure on the citizenry. The use of the internet should be a means by
> > which to revive and renew the democracy of the many geographical lands
> > so interconnected.

Information has different value to different people.  To a stock broker, knowing
the details of a merger or joint project in an industry for which he specializes,
3 seconds worth of news, delivered 15 minutes prior to announcement over general
media can be worth 20 million dollars.  To the retired gentlemen who spend
their afternoons browsing through information sources just to satiate their
curiousity, they don't care if the news is a few hours old.  They don't even
care if it's acurate.  It's worth as much as yesterdays paper.

Some of those older gentlemen would actually get more enjoyment out of alt.personals
then they would out of Professional Investor's Report.

> I agree heartily with those sentiments.  Furthermore, I would argue that 
> content providers should offer plain text for free purely for economic reasons.
> The amount of computing power and bandwidth needed to provide plain text, 
> hypertext with pictures and sounds, and full-motion video are several orders of
> magnitude apart.  If a provider is going to charge $5 to view a video, about 1c
> would be reasonable for a multimedia hypertext and plain text should cost
> around 0.01 cents.

Dow Jones has a plan that averages about 7 cents/megabyte/user.  Of course you
will have to sort through which of the 500 megabytes/month you want to read by
yourself.  We'll send you a story (about 1000 words) every 3-5 seconds on just
about anything.  If you are an Evelyn Wood P.H.D. you might be able to
read 12,000 words/minute and keep up.  

We also have a plan that lets you get on in the evenings and you can pick the
stories that you are most interested in reading.  We'll take in about 30 gigabytes
per month, and you can get your customized highlights.  That's about $1/gigabyte.

Of course, there is an issue of supply and demand.  During the day, you will
be competing with stock brokers and investors who are willing to pay for
priority service.  Since we can only service a certain number of users at
any moment, you will have to pay substantially more.

> At those costs it would surely be more cost-effective to give the plain text
> away for free as a loss leader than to maintain accounts for all those
> fractional cent charges.

As you can begin to see, there is a big difference between the economics of
text and the economics of video.  In the video market, you choose 3gigabytes
from 3 terabyte of data.  In the text market, you choose around 1 million bytes
from 3 terabytes of data.  Compressed digitized video (1930 Kbytes/second) costs
about $100/megabyte to produce.  Indexed searchable text (4 Kbytes/second) costs
about $100/megabyte to produce.  This includes the time required to script,
edit and shoot the video.  This includes the time required to enter, edit and
index the text.  It's two different markets.


> Additionally, this would ensure that the material
> reaches the widest possible exposure to everyone with whatever second-hand or
> government-funded public-access equipment they might have.

Many of the internet providers are providing public access in exchange for
space in wiring closets of universities, libraries, and schools.  This is
an example of how a symbiotic relationship can benefit both government/public
and business/private.  The cost of internet POPs includes spans, dedicated
line service, terminal servers, and firewall/security/royalty provisions.

> If anyone could do
> searches for free, the potential audience for the multimedia or full-motion
> formats would surely be greatly expanded.  I would hope that governments would 
> eventually take the same "universal service" position with text-based 
> terminals that they have with the telephone service, or with Minitel in France.

There are different classes of service.  Searching the government archives,
sifting through the 3000 -> 4000 news groups, and reading SEC filings is
possible today, at no charge.  Servers capable of storing the 60 megabytes/day
generated by news groups, SEC filings, and other public sources is expensive.
Finding articles relevant to the reader in real time is also a bit more expensive.
Even using PCs, one typically needs a 486/DX,  2gig drives, and good software to
get what YOU want to read within a reasonable time.  To support multiple users,
you need more sophisticated hardware and software.

	Rex Ballard
	Project Manager
	DowVision Joint Ventures
	Dow Jones & Company Inc.

From jvncnet!marketplace.com!owner-online-news Mon Mar 14 10:39:09 1994