Of Monopolies and the Web

Remember the great Mac ad a few years back about how Portia saved Christmas? Well, folks, this Christmas morning, Portia's family would have been mighty disappointed. Everyone opened up their brandy dandy new iPods with visions of new music dancing in their heads ... and then ... they all collectively caused the iTunes site to crash. Well, not crash exactly. It was still limping along just enough so that it would make you think that you'd get what you wanted if you were just patient enough, only to have it crap out on the third screen of the registration process. I spent about 2 hours of my Christmas day fighting with it to register my new pod, download some new music, and authorize my computer to play my husband's purchased tunes. I'd have been happier if they just put up a little "closed" sign and a message that said, "Due to the popularity of our products, we can't offer you anything this Christmas day. Please check back later... one at a time, if you please."

Similarly, the networks are now "streaming" many of their TV shows for free while they're all on hiatus over the holidays, hoping to draw in new viewers for the new eps in the new year. ABC and NBC have both been advertising this quite a lot, so last night I thought I'd sit down and watch an episode or two of Brothers & Sisters, which I've never seen. Trouble is that "streaming" must be put in scare quotes because ABC's "stream" rapidly degrades into a series of short chunks followed by frozen silence. Sometimes it works, though, so it's just enough to keep me trying. And it's during primetime, in the evenings when people would like to watch new TV while the networks show re-runs over the air, that the service just doesn't work. Is this good for business?

I don't know much about how the Internet really works, but I did enough digging to know that it's not my computer or my Internet connection that caused these problems. It's the fact that the companies offering the services cannot or have not devoted enough resources to the project to ensure that no matter how many customers log on, they can handle the load. And with a virtual monopoly on supplying these services on the web (Did you get a Zune for Christmas? Yeah, I didn't think so.) there's just not much we can do about it except wait patiently and hope that the new year brings more bandwidth or server capacity or whatever is needed here. Or maybe some real competition? Nah...