Response to Classmates' Blogs for Module 5

The following are my responses to the module 5 blog assignment:

Sullus Teague

Cathy Marziali

Red Queens and Increasing Returns - Module 5

When I first went to obtain the Philip K. Dick movie, a Scanner Darkly, from my on-line NetFlix account.  I have always had a great experience just going in and watching the movies that it recommends for me.  This was the first time that I actually tried to find a movie to see if it was there to play instantly on my computer – it was not there.  I went to the only other place that I know of to rent movies on my computer, the iTunes store.  I was able to rent a Scanner Darkly with very little difficulty.  The only thing that went wrong was that my credit card information in the iTunes system was expired.  As soon as I got that solved, the movie downloaded in about 30 minutes.  I watched the movie digitally on my MacBook Pro laptop computer, which usually has very loud, and clear speakers and sound levels.  This movie must have had something wrong with it because the sound volume was very, very, very low.  I had to watch the movie with my ear almost next to the speaker in order to understand what was being said in the movie.  I didn’t really have any other options because I was staying in a hotel room far, far from home and any video store that I was familiar with – well, are there really any video stores out there anymore?  I wish I could have found the movie on video-on-demand from the hotel room television, but they only had a limited selection of current releases and adult films.

Renting DVDs or choosing Video on Demand are examples of diminishing returns.  Dr. Thornburg used the example of Betamax and VHS tapes.  They essentially did the same this using two different types of technologies.  This is the same as with DVDs and Video on Demand.  They both are technologies in which a user can watch a movie, but the way to get that movie to the person is quite different in each one.  As we have seen over the last couple of years, video on demand has been getting less expensive, better quality, and more mainstream.  I think that on-line servers like NetFlix, HuHu, Zulu, iTunes, and others are going overtake the video-on-demand market.  In my own opinion, DVDs and almost ancient history.  The cloud is coming much faster than we ever could imagine!  I think that this is also diminishing returns because DVDs and Video-on-Demand roughly came out at about the same time, but video-on-demand was first used in hotel rooms or on exclusive cable t.v. set-ups.

The tridads for these technologies could be: