SineSwiper wrote:It no longer becomes "Hardcore" when millions of people are watching it.
What? You tryin' to tell me that Gears 2, GTA4, and Halo 3 ain't made for the "hardcore" crowd? There are millions of "hardcores" out there
BTW, we should really define what "hardcore" means in the non-gaming sense. I sorta tried to allude to it before, but to me it's more of the heavy internet user. For every student or 30-something parent that spends hours of spare time at home surfing or doing stuff online you have 10 that only do it very occasionally or here and there at work on certain sites. I should probably have used the more traditional "early adopters vs mass market" analogy in this case.
And what I'm saying is all On Demand of any kind is still very much in the Early Adopter stage and, IMO, it will be a long while before it becomes the norm. There are tons of reasons too not just the insane pricing strategies currently being used by the developers/networks/film studios (the music industry has got it right BTW...). The infrastructure still isn't nearly where it needs to be for mass market IMO. Sure it's fine for the type of usage now but imagine if everyone who had a TV said "ooo, this on-demand this is cool, I want it!". The main routers would blow up. And the way the ISPs have set up their rate structure is certainly going to truncate ANY level of Internet On-Demand. You know how quickly people would fly over the 60GB cap limit Rogers and Bell are shoving down their throats here? "Just get a cable box" you say? Sure....for a ridiculous monthly charge and very limited availability (we only have movies, Treehouse, and a few others up here).
Simply put, the industry of on-demand TV is still very much in its infancy. Everything I've talked about is a traditional trait of all new industries. Heck, you think back to the early video game days and the Atari, Coleco, and all those rip-off systems were $200-300 30 years ago with $50 or $60 cartridges. Try comparing those indexed dollars today.
The link below shows the business cycles industries go through. I feel that the On-Demand industry is very much in the introduction stages still. Sure its growing fast and can be considered in the Growth phase in the strictest sense but I think it needs a little more time of good growth and increased penetration before I'd comfortably put it there. The video game industry, by comparison, is nearly the end of the Growth phase and could very well be in the beginning of the Maturity phase, although the strong year-on-year growth is still too strong for Maturity really
http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/met ... cycle.html
