What I Think About The Future Of Pool

Here's the thing for me... I could drop 100k or a more into a venture like this, BUT, this venture would have to become my life blood and be able to support my family and I.

I think this is where the disconnect is, at least with the "pool player" side of it. I want to see this sport grow too. Am I willing to give up a nice job with relative security for this possibility, I don't know. Obviously, from the business aspect, money/profit rule.

Why take a 100k+ gamble on something like this, and not on a new local poolhall? I would love to be involved in something like this, but there just seems that there is no direction or an overwhelming driving force behind it.

I suspect that even though there are very few "sure things", most people would like to know there is going to at least be some stability.

I struggle with this daily, as I would love to be part of turning this "thing" we love around.
 
With GREAT respect and with an admission of sharing your dream, I think you have the cart before the horse.

Generally, TV channels and/or individual programs, are formed to exploit existing popularity...not to create it.

There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule...but not very many.

I fear for any resurgence in televised and/or tournament audience attendance popularity because it is a known and documented fact that even CORE FANATICS of the pool games...who play pool in hoards of tens of millions, don't care to WATCH pool.

I think the active pool playing community in the U.S. numbers around 40 million but the TV ratings...even for the majors...are typically around a half million households.

That is a ratio of 80-1 AGAINST. All the advertisers know the numbers and personally, other than the known temporary benefits of a runaway hit movie...of which there have been a total of 2 in the past 45 years...I just can't imagine what might make pool VIEWERSHIP popularity catch any meaningful gear.

The fact is that there are only 24 hours in a day and there is ENORMOUS competition for the time and attention of the American consumer.

Please take no offense. I admire the spirit of your post a great deal. But the launching of such a venture would require data that simply doesn't exits.

Regards,
Jim
 
Russ Chewning said:
Jason,

Are any of those matches online and available for streaming? I haven't got to watch any snooker since I was living in Germany...

Russ
Click to expand...

Couldn't find any after the live stream. They have some youtube links in the snooker section
 
Smorgass Bored said:
There are channels for everything, such as Court Trials, Cooking, Fishing, Cartoons, Religious Evangelists, so why not Pool & Billiards 24 hours a day.
Click to expand...

unfortunately, those all generate more interest
 
SpiderWebComm said:
The codecs are there... the technology exists. Many companies are out there with "Internet TV" intellectual property. The reason why MANY pool webcasts go south is because no one spends the money for a dedicated T1 from the delivering location.

The hotel internet (whichever it is) is no good, the casino internet is no good, the conference center internet is no good and the pool hall internet is no good. It costs a few thousand for a super-short term dedicated T circuit from a tier-1 provider to be brought into a location-- everyone tries to duck that (as they usually HAVE to because everyone is paying this out of their pocket).

If that line gets congested, EVERYONE's video will suck. For TV, 30fps video (full screen) you need about a committed 1.5 Mb/s. Now, before you say your cable line is 6 Mb/s or whatever, that's uncompressed and unaccelerated speed (raw speed). The % of retail internet lines that can handle that is small. That's why you see smaller video windows that can expand to full screen (like youtube, for example) - and they just increase the pixel size to accomplish this. Of course, it's a little blocky - but not bad.

The future of television is Internet TV, by the way. If you guys remember what it was like to first have satellite TV or HD ....you're gonna think back to this and say, "Do you remember when TV actually came through Cable or Satellite???????"

Fiber will be coming to the home, eventually, and everything will be on the internet...everything. It's coming sooner than you think, and it's coming hard.
Click to expand...

WOW! You actually believe that Internet TV will replace current mediums of delivery?

If so, who is the front runners for being successful? I may not have two thousand to spend on two days of pool lessons with Efren but I might be able to scrape together some cash for something a little more substantial than an IPO in the sky. ;)

Thanks for the heads-up.
JoeyA
 
DaveK said:
The source line and the sink line are only two links in a chain that is potentially very long. For a quick view into the issue, just open up a DOS window on your Windows XP machine and type in "tracert www.azbilliards.com". You will see a string of replies from each router between you and the server that supports AZ. My packets go through the following cities :

Edmonton AB Canada
Winnipeg MB Canada
Montreal PQ Canada
New York NY USA
Chicago Ill USA
Los Angeles CA USA
Phoenix AZ USA

This path is through 4 different carriers, via 4 peering points, using 19 routers. You can interpret the host names of these routers fairly easily.

This is not the normal path my packets take, usually they go through Vancouver to Seatle and then down to LA. All it takes is a glitch or an overload anywhere along the path and real-time data gets whacked to some extent. If it gets whacked too bad then the viewer gets fed up and quits.



Fibre to the curb has been a goal for some carriers for a long time. The trouble is that the business model does not support the infrastructure costs. The cost of fibre interfacing is 3 to 4 times the cost of copper interfacing, and I don't think that customers are keen on paying for this upgrade when there is little benefit over cable. Our phone company is in the process of spending many millions to upgrade their plant to support gigabit ethernet over copper into peoples homes so that they can deliver 2 (or is up to 3 now) simultaneous HD channels on SaskTel MAX television service. My shaw cable delivers several hundred channels, including dozens of HD channels simultaneously, as well as a fairly fast IP connection.

As you can tell I am not a big fan of real time data on best-effort systems like todays Internet. Maybe I'll change my mind when IP V6 comes along and everyone upgrades and we can get reasonable assurances of bandwidth along with consistent latency, but until then I want this 24x7 pool/billiard/snooker channel in HD on cable, please Doug, imo.

Dave
Click to expand...

When you want a demo of nice super-live video/voip with content, let me know. I deliver events nationwide, China and western Europe all the time with sub 1/2 seconds of latency. When you TRACERT to sites, you're looking at the milliseconds for the hops. That doesn't have a big play with on-demand steams or live one-way streams. Meaning, if you're watching something that happened 3 seconds ago.... how would you know if you don't have to "talk back?"

For live and interactive communications (my specialty), you really need sub 300 ms route time. Hardware/software processing takes about 200ms... so 1/2 seconds is usually the outcome with good technology. You can do better with hardware compression (Short-bus's arena of expertise).

Dave

EDIT: Fiber to the curb is coming without a doubt. Don't be naive and bet against it. It'll be there before you know it. First WiMax, then lit fiber to the curb.
 
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JoeyA said:
WOW! You actually believe that Internet TV will replace current mediums of delivery?

If so, who is the front runners for being successful? I may not have two thousand to spend on two days of pool lessons with Efren but I might be able to scrape together some cash for something a little more substantial than an IPO in the sky. ;)

Thanks for the heads-up.
JoeyA
Click to expand...

The future is clientless (i.e. Flash, no software install) video transmission. That way, your cell phone, PDA, TV and whatever else can connect to a domain and view your show. Remember TV Guide? Well, you'll be able to view any movie, any tv show ever made - whenever you want. That, paired with the new "weekly show" posted in separate menus.

Personally, I like a company called Narrowstep (Narrowstep.com).
Here's a sample of their warez:
http://www.scifi.co.uk/whats-on/feature-player-all.php?sid=34319&eid=254077

Smaller screen - but that's all bandwidth dependent. Fiber will get you full-screen at high-res. TRUST the Spiderman, go all-in on this stuff. You can't stop it, it's coming. Whether it's this company, or one just like it.
 
SpiderWebComm said:
When you want a demo of nice super-live video/voip with content, let me know. I deliver events nationwide, China and western Europe all the time with sub 1/2 seconds of latency. When you TRACERT to sites, you're looking at the milliseconds for the hops. That doesn't have a big play with on-demand steams or live one-way streams. Meaning, if you're watching something that happened 3 seconds ago.... how would you know if you don't have to "talk back?"

For live and interactive communications (my specialty), you really need sub 300 ms route time. Hardware/software processing takes about 200ms... so 1/2 seconds is usually the outcome with good technology. You can do better with hardware compression (Short-bus's arena of expertise).

Dave

EDIT: Fiber to the curb is coming without a doubt. Don't be naive and bet against it. It'll be there before you know it. First WiMax, then lit fiber to the curb.
Click to expand...

Nah, I don't have any experience whatsoever with streaming video. That other post I made was simply a "best guess" at how streaming might work in a "one to many" type application, and I was trying to explain why it doesn't take huge amounts of bandwidth to stream to a lot of people, even when the customers start getting up to the hundreds.

My main area of expertise right now is video-teleconferencing.. Either point-to-point or done through a bridge (MCU). I suppose that is where the hardware compression would be coming in the picture, but more than anything, I worry more about the audio engineering (preventing feedback with multiple open microphones), the video protocols used, in order to prevent pixellation. Even with a straight radio shot, we still have roughly a two second delay, between two sites in Baghdad.

Russ
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiderWebComm
The codecs are there... the technology exists. Many companies are out there with "Internet TV" intellectual property. The reason why MANY pool webcasts go south is because no one spends the money for a dedicated T1 from the delivering location.

The hotel internet (whichever it is) is no good, the casino internet is no good, the conference center internet is no good and the pool hall internet is no good. It costs a few thousand for a super-short term dedicated T circuit from a tier-1 provider to be brought into a location-- everyone tries to duck that (as they usually HAVE to because everyone is paying this out of their pocket).

If that line gets congested, EVERYONE's video will suck. For TV, 30fps video (full screen) you need about a committed 1.5 Mb/s. Now, before you say your cable line is 6 Mb/s or whatever, that's uncompressed and unaccelerated speed (raw speed). The % of retail internet lines that can handle that is small. That's why you see smaller video windows that can expand to full screen (like youtube, for example) - and they just increase the pixel size to accomplish this. Of course, it's a little blocky - but not bad.

The future of television is Internet TV, by the way. If you guys remember what it was like to first have satellite TV or HD ....you're gonna think back to this and say, "Do you remember when TV actually came through Cable or Satellite???????"

Fiber will be coming to the home, eventually, and everything will be on the internet...everything. It's coming sooner than you think, and it's coming hard.
____________________________________________________________

I agree with all of what you said...except the fast part.

First, the last stats I saw showed cable hook ups in "only" 65 million of the 112 million "TV Homes" in America...or a 58% cable penetration rate.

So, from the advertiser's point of view, they have to whack about 40% of the population when they consider cable only advertising.

Secondly, your are correct that Fiber to the Home is the key. However, today there are only about 3 million homes hooked up to fiber. Penetration has been doubling but if it continues to double, it will take at least 5 years to hook up the entire cable home installed base.

I doubt whether it will continue to double due to the law of large numbers and the fact that the current hook ups are coming from "early adopters" and you start to run out of those folks fairly quickly.

Longer term, I think you are SPOT ON but I've been hearing about an "exposion" in fiber proliferation for 5 years already but I haven't heard the "boom" as yet.

But the tail DOES sometimes wag the dog and if fiber installation costs drop like a stone, then things could happen more quickly.

Regards,
Jim
 
Russ Chewning said:
Nah, I don't have any experience whatsoever with streaming video. That other post I made was simply a "best guess" at how streaming might work in a "one to many" type application, and I was trying to explain why it doesn't take huge amounts of bandwidth to stream to a lot of people, even when the customers start getting up to the hundreds.

My main area of expertise right now is video-teleconferencing.. Either point-to-point or done through a bridge (MCU). I suppose that is where the hardware compression would be coming in the picture, but more than anything, I worry more about the audio engineering (preventing feedback with multiple open microphones), the video protocols used, in order to prevent pixellation. Even with a straight radio shot, we still have roughly a two second delay, between two sites in Baghdad.

Russ
Click to expand...

That's what I meant--- some of the best hardware video compression technology is in the VTC sector. Lifesize and Polycom have amazing stuff.

The fact you guys get anything to work in that environment is impressive to me - esp when bad people are shooting at you.
 
av84fun said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiderWebComm
The codecs are there... the technology exists. Many companies are out there with "Internet TV" intellectual property. The reason why MANY pool webcasts go south is because no one spends the money for a dedicated T1 from the delivering location.

The hotel internet (whichever it is) is no good, the casino internet is no good, the conference center internet is no good and the pool hall internet is no good. It costs a few thousand for a super-short term dedicated T circuit from a tier-1 provider to be brought into a location-- everyone tries to duck that (as they usually HAVE to because everyone is paying this out of their pocket).

If that line gets congested, EVERYONE's video will suck. For TV, 30fps video (full screen) you need about a committed 1.5 Mb/s. Now, before you say your cable line is 6 Mb/s or whatever, that's uncompressed and unaccelerated speed (raw speed). The % of retail internet lines that can handle that is small. That's why you see smaller video windows that can expand to full screen (like youtube, for example) - and they just increase the pixel size to accomplish this. Of course, it's a little blocky - but not bad.

The future of television is Internet TV, by the way. If you guys remember what it was like to first have satellite TV or HD ....you're gonna think back to this and say, "Do you remember when TV actually came through Cable or Satellite???????"

Fiber will be coming to the home, eventually, and everything will be on the internet...everything. It's coming sooner than you think, and it's coming hard.
____________________________________________________________

I agree with all of what you said...except the fast part.

First, the last stats I saw showed cable hook ups in "only" 65 million of the 112 million "TV Homes" in America...or a 58% cable penetration rate.

So, from the advertiser's point of view, they have to whack about 40% of the population when they consider cable only advertising.

Secondly, your are correct that Fiber to the Home is the key. However, today there are only about 3 million homes hooked up to fiber. Penetration has been doubling but if it continues to double, it will take at least 5 years to hook up the entire cable home installed base.

I doubt whether it will continue to double due to the law of large numbers and the fact that the current hook ups are coming from "early adopters" and you start to run out of those folks fairly quickly.

Longer term, I think you are SPOT ON but I've been hearing about an "exposion" in fiber proliferation for 5 years already but I haven't heard the "boom" as yet.

But the tail DOES sometimes wag the dog and if fiber installation costs drop like a stone, then things could happen more quickly.

Regards,
Jim
Click to expand...

Fast isn't tomorrow... fast to me is 1/3 the time it took to accomplish the same with the previous technology.
 
SpiderWebComm said:
The future is clientless (i.e. Flash, no software install) video transmission. That way, your cell phone, PDA, TV and whatever else can connect to a domain and view your show. Remember TV Guide? Well, you'll be able to view any movie, any tv show ever made - whenever you want. That, paired with the new "weekly show" posted in separate menus.

Personally, I like a company called Narrowstep (Narrowstep.com).
Here's a sample of their warez:
http://www.scifi.co.uk/whats-on/feature-player-all.php?sid=34319&eid=254077

Smaller screen - but that's all bandwidth dependent. Fiber will get you full-screen at high-res. TRUST the Spiderman, go all-in on this stuff. You can't stop it, it's coming. Whether it's this company, or one just like it.
Click to expand...

WOW Spidey...your word is POWERFUL. Narrowstep (NRWS) closed up TWENTY FIVE PERCENT today....from 4 cents to 5. (-:

But ya know what folks? They have real revenues...small but real...$8 million in current assets, of which $6 million is CASH...and zero long-term debt.

This stuff is my day job so I'll look further into it...but was pleasantly surprised not to find what I usually do in early stage companies....which is normally lottery tickets.

Regards,
Jim
 
"Fast" to me would be if fiber was installed in most homes within 30 years. Considering the MASSIVE effect that would have on our society, thta is a pretty good time frame.

If or when that happens, it will totally change the face of entertainment, if it can be done on an economical scale, reaching down in the the lower middle income groups.

Crappy basic cable packages, and exhorbitant addon prices to get any decent channels? All that will go away. People will have access to older programs (nostalgia), and content owners will set up all those older programs to stream to anyone who wishes to view them, and with one additional bonus:

TARGETED commericals!! When you set up all content on the web and stream it as requested, you can gather demographic information on the ages of the consumer watching from each household, so when an older person views "My Favorite Martian", they get commercials targeted for that demographic, and when a younger person tunes in to watch it to "see what Grandpa used to watch", then they will get commercials targeted to their age group.

No matter what people will tell you, they ENJOY watching commercials for products they like, or want to buy. I mean seriously.. How many of us would not want to see a commercial for game room furniture. REALLY?

Putting all available content on the internet and streaming it on demand is the Holy Grail for advertisers.

Russ
 
av84fun said:
WOW Spidey...your word is POWERFUL. Narrowstep (NRWS) closed up TWENTY FIVE PERCENT today....from 4 cents to 5. (-:

But ya know what folks? They have real revenues...small but real...$8 million in current assets, of which $6 million is CASH...and zero long-term debt.

This stuff is my day job so I'll look further into it...but was pleasantly surprised not to find what I usually do in early stage companies....which is normally lottery tickets.

Regards,
Jim
Click to expand...

Jim, I'll never forget a friend of mine told me to buy XM radio ---telling me, someday--- you'll get your radio from satellite receivers. It was a penny stock and I laughed it up. Who would listen to radio from a satellite receiver?????

Well, let's say I didn't make a penny.
 
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av84fun said:
WOW Spidey...your word is POWERFUL. Narrowstep (NRWS) closed up TWENTY FIVE PERCENT today....from 4 cents to 5. (-:

But ya know what folks? They have real revenues...small but real...$8 million in current assets, of which $6 million is CASH...and zero long-term debt.

This stuff is my day job so I'll look further into it...but was pleasantly surprised not to find what I usually do in early stage companies....which is normally lottery tickets.

Regards,
Jim
Click to expand...

:( What happened?

narrowstep.JPG

edit: If this is honestly a company that will survive, why shouldn't someone (me?) buy like 20,000 shares and wait for it take me to victory!
 
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SpiderWebComm said:
When you want a demo of nice super-live video/voip with content, let me know. I deliver events nationwide, China and western Europe all the time with sub 1/2 seconds of latency. When you TRACERT to sites, you're looking at the milliseconds for the hops. That doesn't have a big play with on-demand steams or live one-way streams. Meaning, if you're watching something that happened 3 seconds ago.... how would you know if you don't have to "talk back?"

For live and interactive communications (my specialty), you really need sub 300 ms route time. Hardware/software processing takes about 200ms... so 1/2 seconds is usually the outcome with good technology. You can do better with hardware compression (Short-bus's arena of expertise).

Dave

EDIT: Fiber to the curb is coming without a doubt. Don't be naive and bet against it. It'll be there before you know it. First WiMax, then lit fiber to the curb.
Click to expand...

You need low jitter, as you say the absolute latency is not really a problem (unless you are sending out "real time" financial quotations, then a difference in a few hundreds of ms can make a pile o' difference). You also need quaranteed bandwidth, something that our current internet has issues with. Bottom line, when compared to existing broadcast technology, the Internet is not ready for prime time, imo, and copper last-mile technology will take decades to replace, again imo.

I've been working with packet based wide area networks for about 25 years, and have heard all the hype before many times. The reality is that carriers do business cases, and there are none that support the expense of fibre based subscriber lines into single family residences at this time. <edit, of course I've been wrong before, and have not been following urban US deployments ... but there's little mention in Canada where we have outstanding cable coverage>

Dave
 
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James said:
:( What happened?

View attachment 67669

edit: If this is honestly a company that will survive, why shouldn't someone (me?) buy like 20,000 shares and wait for it take me to victory!
Click to expand...

More sellers than buyers!

I really don't know and for legal reasons, I cannot post much in the way of investment advice to the general public.

I can, and will become advised about the viability of their technology which is, of course, the core issue but guarantees nothing.

As I told Russ, I owned stock in the company that pioneered facsimile technology....and it went bankrupt!!

Why? Because at the time, a LD call from Chicago to N.Y. cost about $1.50 a minute and the page transmission time was about 3 minutes per page...do the math!

Plus there was another minor problem. For the sender to make use of his machine, the recipient had to have one too!!!

The initial equipment roll out took too long and was too expensive and the company went bust. If I recall correctly (and may not...in was LONG ago) MMM bought the technology out of the bankruptcy proceeding.

BUT...while viable technology doesn't guarantee success...the lack of it guarantees failure so I'll find out what they have and how proprietary it is...or isn't.

Stay tuned. (-:

Jim
 
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