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On Sun, 11 Jun 1995, Bruce Campbell wrote:

> Gosh, Rex, you must type 300 words a minute. No wonder you're on the net,
> you'd go broke doing email on prodigy.
> 
> Rex Ballard wrote (boy did he write):
> >Actually, Prodigy is getting into the Web very aggressively.  There
> >are some features, like banking that aren't ready for "the big net",
> >but Prodigy is very interested in attracting the 30-60 million web
> >users out there to come and visit.
> 
> What's in it for Prodigy? Everyone's going to drop their web accounts to
> sign up for Prodigy because it's moving to Soho or Tribeca? If I get the
> content off Prodigy without the account, who pays the rent? You gave us the
> techie scoop, any insight on the business plan?

Actually, your ISP access account only gives you the connectivity and 
bandwidth.  There is some "infrastructure" expense padding in there as 
well, but you aren't paying any royalties to any commercial servers.  
Wait until you have 200 passwords with 200 different boards (or even 20), 
and you decide you want to pay ONE guy.  You can say "Prodigy is paying"
and the server will authenticate you by passing your encrypted password 
to prodigy who will send back an encrypted authorization.  This could be 
done with NewsShare, AOL, and Compuserve as well.  They won't be alone
in this area either.  Royalty agents include New Century Network, The 
Copyright Clearance Center, and the Author's Registry.  The sprint Drums 
program is more "freelance" oriented.  Artists may want to sell via 
an AD-Hoc or bidding based system.

When dealing with several thousand servers, each nearly identical in 
terms of standard infrastructure, prodigy only has to provide source code 
compatible with that infrastructure which will enable them to track
"permissions".  You can request that the Advertiser acknowledge payment
for referrals.  You have a function you can accurately measure.

> >Prodigy is also tying content
> >and advertizing together much more effectivly than with the old NPLPS
> >interface.  Prodigy adopted NPLPS because it appeared to be an emerging
> >standard (especially in Japan).  Today, HTML and related Web standards
> >are emerging as worthy replacements.

> And a lovely standard it was. One of my continuing headaches was not being
> able to use any ASCII characters above 128. Including the british pound
> symbol, which given Playbill Online interest in London stage made life more
> complex. Similarly, the implementation of color text was pretty amusing. We
> wanted to differentiate play titles from regular text with a blue color,
> which they assured us they did all the time. And we had a lot of code for
> this, as you can imagine given the bios of the actors and directors.
> Surprise, more than three code changes per page blew the page to hell.
> Bang, no more color emphasis. ASCII all over the highway.
i
This is what comes from adopting a "Standard" based on an exclusive 
propritary technology (The TI Graphics chip used on the TI 99/4).

> >They are actually "smudging the market", giving inferior service and
> >expensive surcharges, until they can negotiate royalty and "for-pay"
> >arrangements with various content providers.  As they are able to
> >offer more "Paid for" Web content, they will be more supportive of
> >the web.  Prodigy has to make sure that they don't end up with
> >a lawsuit because 2 million P* users hit they N.Y. Times home-page.
> >Prodigy is paying NYT for feeds and data.  They don't want users
> >hammering commercial sites with their "prodigy.com" IDs and suddenly
> >get a strong-arm negotiator.
> 
> Luckily, the market drives out the inferior service and expensive
> surcharges (or it will once we get that revival tour set up). As for your
> contention about 2 million users hitting the times home-page setting up a
> situation where the times asks for a cut, that would certainly put a whole
> different complexion on the web. I shudder to think about the precedent. In
> fact, if we follow the other threads in this topic over the past month or
> so, we find that Prodigy is "caching" the Times home page, so those guys on
> 43rd street will never find out. Hah, hah, they're lucky if they get a
> prodigy hit an hour. Let em eat hot lead.

Hey, if prodigy wants to cache my "standard" pages and is willing to just get
that one little two bit by two bit gif that changes every time it is 
requested, no problem.  That gives be better performance on the big pages 
that change all day long.

> >        Rex Ballard
> >        Personal Post
> 
> personal post got sent to newsgroup so response also gets sent to
> newsgroup. Sorry to all innocent bystanders. Suggest we switch to silent
> running mode on this thread.

Well, as long as no one starts claiming that my company is taking the same
position as I do.  Even when I do know what my company's position is, I
either don't tell, or mix it in with so much other stuff of my own that
you wouldn't know which is which.

> Thank you, Rex. Were you at Cybersuds last week?

I quit drinking 15 years ago.  (Treason to a news man :-).

> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>    VCs, M&A specialists and giant media
> conglomerates are encouraged to contact:   Bruce Campbell               +
>                         by telephone at:   212.787.1264                 +
>              or send that limo round to:   201 West 92nd Street         +
>                          in the city of:   New York, New York           +
> Contracts can be sent to me care of zip:   10025                        +
>                          Let's do lunch.
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> 
> http://www.interport.net/~caledon
> 
> 
> 

	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.





From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon Jun 26 18:02:04 1995
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