Communication Breakdown?

You could argue we live in a world of communication overload.  Telephone, text messages, instant messaging, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, e-mail, postal mail, TV, radio,...did I miss anything?  Oh yeah! Tablets are here.  Can you name how many of these forms of communication is not tied to the Internet in some way? One.  Every modern form of communication is influenced by or provided by the Internet.  And there’s some big news where the Internet is concerned.  We’ll mention our top contenders.

In our number one spot goes back to the roots.  ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, was responsible for the first computer network that eventually became the Internet using a 32bit addressing system.  The current addressing system, IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), allows for over 4.2 billion addresses...and we’re running out!  Vint Cerf who was part of the ARPA project and a Vice President at Google is involved again promoting the new version 6 that will allow for hundreds of trillions of addresses.  Google along with Facebook and Yahoo! are planning on testing the newer protocol within their highly trafficked sites on June 8, 2011, proclaimed by the Internet Society as World IPv6 Day. This will be the largest scale use to date and could determine the future of the Internet, literally.  Anyone remember that webpage that said “You’ve reached the end of the Internet”?  Who’d a thunk?

Web 2.0 has been around for awhile now and video is a large part.  You can watch TV shows, movies, tutorials and public videos on the web now.  It may be transparent to most but the new standards for web documents are in process and its name is HTML5.  Well, unfortunately there continues to be no agreed upon standard for videos.  They’ve been dispersed into proprietary formats for Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media Player and more. Just when developers and users thought that a new standard would be born for the future of web video, the big players, Google, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and others can’t agree on what that should be.  So, Mozilla’s Firefox and Chrome backed by Google will support one format while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will support a different format.  The losers? You, the users who will undoubtedly carry the headache of installing plugins (and don’t forget updates) for your browser and web developers that will continue to pay for the burden of these Goliath vs. Goliath battles by creating workarounds and multiple outputs to allow the masses to view in their favorite format.

Speaking of video entertainment, federal regulators approved a merger between Comcast and NBC (who also owns majority stake in Hulu, a provider of network TV on the Internet) on January18th.  Apparently, a stipulation was that the merger support the emerging online video market and broadband accessibility rather than stifle or manipulate the market with their formidable combined content and delivery capabilities.  I’m sure they’ll be happy to comply.  Relatively sure...