Convenience is really what drives my part in this consumer media market. Since high school, I could stream my favorite movies and shows to my phone or laptop. I could watch highlights of recent Premier League fixtures on the go. Pandora (before Spotify took over) provided all the music that I could possibly listen to. So then was no need for cable packages or album purchases or DVD collections. Why buy a single physical copy when I could have a version that was available wherever I went?

I don’t see a way forward for broadcasting dinosaurs like ESPN. Its decline in revenue doesn’t surprise me at all because ESPN doesn’t offer anything new other than a steady supply of live sports. I can’t relate its analysis-driven and highlight reel shows which I only seem to view in sports bars these days. Compare ESPN with, say, Netflix. It started out as a Blockbuster of sorts before cornering the streaming market. And over the past few years, Netflix has grown into a supplier of its own original programming whose quality rivals and often surpasses normal series. The freedom from commercial interruptions that Netflix and other streaming services offer has become so normal that I now get annoyed by any delay to my viewing experience. In short, broadcasting has remained stagnant and hasn’t addressed the changes of the times enough to rival the burgeoning streaming services. Until some progress is made towards fixing this issue more giants will stumble.

Last Wednesday, Jeff Prince, a professor at Indiana University came to talk about the current difficulties involving the pricing of the internet and telecommunications. With technology becoming an integral part of life, service providers (such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) have changed their marketing tactics about selling internet. Professor Prince gave some much relatable examples, such as how much speed we think we need for our daily internet usage. For instance, if your primary workload on the internet involves watching videos, you would not need as much bandwidth, the amount of bits you can transfer in a second, as someone who streams live events. However, does the general public even understand what it means when providers say 10 Mbps, 20Mbps, or 150Mbps? And even if you get the top Mbps offering from your company, it does not mean that you will get the fastest internet speed. Professor Prince mentioned that the new focus is towards latency, which is the delay on the time data is transferred from servers and back to your computer. The higher the latency, the slower things load. However, much of this is not even marketed towards consumers. All companies do is market what people want to see, how much data can you transfer?

I thought that Professor Prince raised was very interesting since my parents approached me about upgrading the internet plan at home a few years ago. It seemed that despite the high bandwidth we had, our internet was still slow and it took me some digging around on speed tests and technology sites to learn that bandwidth is not the only thing that factors into your internet speed. With that in mind, the research that Professor Prince is involved in is trying to price internet speed. Since technology is ever-growing, how much are people willing to pay in order to get faster speeds? If you price the technology too high, you might not have consumers while if you price too low, you end up losing money. Interestingly enough, I do not have an expected price either. One tactic that the professor mentioned as being effective is to not let people come up with a price. You create different options of the plans and assign your own price and let the consumers decide if they want to take up that plan with that pricing. This way, researches will at least have a way of quantifying the value of internet speed and latency for consumers.

And at home, I have come to understand that bandwidth is not everything. Despite my parents falling victim to the service provider’s claims of “You’ll get 150Mbps with our plan!”, our 50Mbps plan is more than enough for the amount of usage we have at home. However, it was also nice to learn that bandwidth is not everything and it’s a sign to really research what you are buying before you set down your money. Overall, I really enjoyed this talk!

This past Wednesday, Professor Jeff Prince from Indiana University spoke to us about the difficulties of pricing the intangible: a.k.a. the Internet. He mainly spoke about two aspects that have the potential to increase internet speed: bandwidth and latency. While I had heard the term “bandwidth” prior to coming to this Rose Café, the term “latency” used in this context was completely new to me. In my heat and mass transfer course last semester, we learned about latent heat, which is the heat required to convert a solid into liquid or vapor, or convert liquid to vapor, without a change of temperature. However, I had trouble relating the term from heat transfer to internet speed.

Professor Blalock provided the analogy of a highway. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway–a greater number of lanes promotes less traffic and thus faster travel. Latency is the length of the highway–if the distance between destinations A and B could somehow decrease, the speed at which you would get from A to B would of course increase. Ideally, you want your bandwidth to be as high as possible and your latency to be as low as possible. It is my understanding now that latency is the time delay between stimulation and response. I found this talk particularly interesting because of this introduction of this completely new concept. In comparison with past Rose Cafés, this talk was definitely had more of a technical basis, which was refreshing to me.

For the final Rose Cafe of the year, we discussed how people pay for different internet services without really knowing the difference in what they are paying for. For instance, people see a higher bandwidth and believe it is reasonable to pay extra for the increased connection. However, they may not know exactly what they are paying for. There is also a factor to consider called latency. Latency is essentially a measure of the time it takes to get the message from one end of the connection to the other, whereas bandwidth is the amount of information you can send at a time. It is beneficial to be able to send larger amounts of information, but if it takes a long time to get the message through to the other end, then it may not be as worthwhile to pay higher. It made me realize that I need to be more aware of what I pay for in the future. As a student we have the luxury of being on Cornell’s WiFi, but eventually I am going to have to decide on an internet service provider on my own. I know from playing games online and streaming movies the perks of each, but I now know to be more cautious and calculated in my decision making process.

Another issue brought up in this conversation was the issue of net neutrality. Essentially this would mean that large companies such as Netflix cannot control how fast their service is distributed in comparison to other services. People have their own opinions, and both sides are very valid. On one hand, small businesses would have no chance in this market, but on the other hand a large corporation who can pay extra to have their service given priority should be allowed to pay for that advantage. My personal opinion on this subject would be to support the small business because it would hurt the market if these large companies were able to eliminate competition from the market by making it impossible to enter. Until their becomes a point where the competitive edge is a small enough advantage that it wouldn’t hurt small businesses, I believe net neutrality should be in effect. Soon enough, this will be the case as we rapidly approach the peak of what internet service we are physically capable to offer.

What with all the excitement about gig internet, one gets the impression that more bits/second clearly results in a faster internet experience.  However in reality, bandwidth is not the only major factor that goes into determining internet speed: there is also latency.  The speaker made the following analogy: if bandwidth is the number of lanes on the road, then latency is the length of the road.  Bandwidth determines how much data you can transmit at once, and latency determines how long it takes data to travel from your computer to its destination and back.  If the traffic is too heavy for the bandwidth, then speeds will be slower, but even using less bandwidth the speed is constrained by the latency.  The effects of bandwidth can be seen mostly when downloading and streaming in HD — or if there are multiple people trying stream/game/browse at the same time.  For speed of communication in activities like gaming and voice/video calls, though, the latency is much more important.

This leads to the issue at hand in the speaker’s current research: right now, there is no price on latency.  Cable companies advertise and offer plans based on bandwidth, despite the fact that bandwidth is only part of the overall picture of speed.

This leads to an interesting question: How do you price something that has never been marketed before?  You could always just ask people how much they would pay, but money in the hypothetical is never quite the same as real money.  In some scenarios, you can ask everyone to pay a certain amount beforehand, and then use a lottery system to actually buy the item for a small number of respondents and refund the rest.  This adds a sense of reality to the money in question, but unfortunately isn’t feasible when the product is an internet connection.

The other method mentioned was to try to calibrate people’s over or underestimation by also having them make choices about things for which the market prices are known.  For instance, in addition to asking about latency, you might ask how much they would pay for bandwidth and phone storage.  This definitely sounds possible, but at the same time, trying to measure how much people would pay for a thing based on measuring how much they lie sounds a like a bit of a dubious technique.  It isn’t just the money that’s intangible, but also the product.  You can describe loading times and lag to people, but you can’t actually make them experience it.  I’m not sure that you can assume that people would over/underestimate the same with regard to something they know well (like storage) and something they’ve never really thought about before, much less bought.

The speaker said that the only prices on latency so far are “just made up”.  Aren’t all prices, though?  In the end, some company is going to have to just start trying it out.  It might be a risk to go through all the effort to try to improve latency, measure it, maybe come up with tiers, and then figure out which plans people will and won’t buy, but with online gaming and things like Skype only ever becoming more popular, latency is a factor that is only going to become more important.

Given the rate at which internet use, internet business, and internet technology are growing, it’ll be interesting to be able to look back in a few of decades and remember these changes.  I’ll remember the fight for net neutrality, I’ll remember when people dropped television for internet, and I’ll even remember when we were still trying to figure out how to charge for internet plans.

Last week I attended a Rose Cafe where Jeff Prince, a professor from Indiana University, talked about cutting the cord. Cutting the cord is the phenomenon in which people cancel their cable plan in favor of internet streaming.

He talked a lot about internet speed, one of the biggest concerns in terms of product development and marketing for internet service providers. There are two major components to internet speed, bandwidth and latency. Professor Prince explained that bandwidth is the amount of data that can travel at a time, and latency is the lag between when you click something and when you get a response. Some consumers will care more about latency and some about bandwidth. For example latency is extremely important to online sellers because if a page to purchase something takes too long, the customer might change their mind.

All while Professor Prince was talking about this I couldn’t help but think about net neutrality especially as it is about to be reviewed again by the FCC. And of course it came up later in conversation. Although it was interesting to hear an anti net neutrality viewpoint, I still support net neutrality. There would be some benefits to consumer to ending net neutrality, but I don’t think it’s fair for Walmart’s pages to load faster than Etsy’s because they paid ISPs more.

I realized during his talk that I never gave much thought to internet service providers and marketing internet service products even though I use internet everyday.

Last week for the final Rose Cafe we welcomed Jeff Prince who is the Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at Indiana University to talk about the recent shift from cable to streaming services such as hulu, netflix, youtube, etc. One of the most interesting part of the talks was when we shifted to start talking about net neutrality and its implication for streaming services. I understood Prince’s description of net neutrality as meaning that internet service providers are forced to charge people on the suppliers side evenly for using their internet services. For example, Netflix doesn’t have to pay more than other people despite the fact that they are using so much data to stream video. However, Prince pointed out that we do not have net neutrality on the demand side, since customers have to pay different prices in order to get faster internet. Prince stated that he can see both the merits and detriments of net neutrality, especially so since he has made personal contact with Ajit Pai, the current chairman of the FCC who has vowed to get rid of net neutrality. I personally think that getting rid of net neutrality is really dumb, as I believe it would stifle start-up growth.

For my last Rose event of the year, I listened to Jeff Prince, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at Indiana University, talk about his research on cutting the cord. An increasing number of people are cutting cable out of their monthly bill, and using internet to satisfy their entertainment needs. A major criteria for choosing internet providers and packages is internet speed with relation to price. This is where Professor Prince’s latest research is focused. It is very difficult for internet providers to quantify the value of varying degrees of internet speed to the average consumer. Professor Prince is attempting to do so by presenting different packages to consumers and asking them which package they would prefer, and then using that information to determine an accurate value on internet speed. In addition, Professor Prince explained the different components of internet speed, which consists of bandwidth and latency. Basically, bandwidth consists of how much information can be transported at the same time, while latency concerns how fast the information gets from one place to another. For example, the number of lanes on a highway would be the bandwidth, while the speed at which a car is moving on said highway is the latency. With these components of internet speed in mind, high bandwidth or high latency may be more valuable to a particular consumer based on their specific internet habits. Personally, I was aware of bandwidth, but was not familiar with the concept of latency before this talk. In addition, now that I understand what makes up internet speed, and the ideas of the pricing behind it, I feel more comfortable choosing a plan that best suits me in the future.

This past week, Professor Jeff Prince from Indiana University discussed a topic in which we often don’t think about deeply, but we utilize in our daily lives religiously: the Internet. I thought it was interesting how Professor Prince shared his research on the development of the internet and the future growth and implications it will have on the market.

The internet is often caught in this constant debate in regards to free market and free regulation. Many argue that current regulation serves as a barrier for large companies who would take over the free market of the internet. Professor Prince talked about how moving away from net neutrality could actually serve as a benefit for both businesses and consumers by lowering prices because of increased competition.

I’ve never really thought about putting the internet in the perspective of the economy and the markets so it was interesting to hear that side of the story. I think it would be interesting if I could learn more about this topic and understand the concerns behind net neutrality as well as the benefits of ending it. Seeing how reliant we are on the internet throughout our daily lives today makes me hesitant to end net neutrality because so many parties could attempt to abuse and take advantage of it, but I think one would first have to examine the real costs and benefits of doing so first.

I’ll be honest, I assumed this Rose Cafe would be about assisted suicide based on the title. So I was very surprised when Jeff Prince started talking about cutting cable and switching to other forms of media. Probably the most interesting thing that I learned from this talk was the difference between latency and bandwidth, and when each would be most important. Professor Blalock provided the best analogy–he said you should imagine them as a highway, where bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and latency is the length of the highway. So at a certain point, high bandwidth loses its relevance because there are already enough lanes, but latency can always be reduced. I would have to agree with Professor Prince that latency is the future, and that putting your money into smaller latency would result in faster internet than higher bandwidth. I also really enjoyed Prince’s discussion of his research, because he discussed selection biases as well as difficulties with surveys. It was a reminder to always question the statistics you see day to day, because almost all data can be skewed due to some sort of bias or inaccuracy inherent in the experiment. Honestly, I didn’t think I would enjoy a talk that was so tech-y, but I was fascinated by the subject. Cornell really pushes you to specialize early and stop exploring new subjects, but this was a good reminder to keep trying to push the boundaries of what you already know interests you–because you never know what might pull you in!

This week, the Rose Scholars had the pleasure of being visited by Jeff Prince, a professor of Business Economics and Public Policy from Indiana University. He spoke to us about the difficulties of really understanding what the consumer is looking for in products. Whether it be efficiency, portability, content, the only way to really figure out what the consumer wants is to collect data and from there make deductions. When you survey someone, usually people either don’t take it seriously or they are not honest in their responses. For this reason, “free” online websites collect viewership data in order to calculate what is the best way to keep the user engaged and target their needs through computer programming. It was interesting to learn about the issues consumers face with frequency versus bandwidth. Personally, both concepts were unfamiliar to me at the time, but basically, it involves the length of time it takes for a signal to reach a satellite, bounce off, arrive at its destination, and return a response. 

A topic that is of great concern involving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nowadays is the issue of net neutrality. This principle states that Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet will treat all data the same not charging differently for any circumstances. However, if we were to eliminate this, dominant communication companies would monopolize the entire system of communications by being able to afford the fastest services to the most people. Prince spoke about the issues with this and how the new FCC has made strides in eliminating this policy. If such a policy were to be eliminated completely, then we would be forced to trust either three or four organization in informing us of the truth. Though technically people would still be able to express their opinions online, accessing this information could be costly and in some people’s opinions, impractical. 

Though it is still uncertain as to the future of online access, the fact of the matter is that people are always looking for two things, practicality, and efficiency. If you can say the message in thirty words instead of one hundred, people will choose to read the shorter article. If you can access information in two seconds instead of two minutes, people will choose that as well. Seeing as to how technology continues to innovate with each coming year, there is already talk about there being four main monopolies that govern all social media the public has access to. However, with this in mind, there are still rules in place to make sure they do not obtain too much power, which would be harmful to all everyone’s privacy and knowledge. It was really great having an experienced professor such as Prince come and speak with us, and I hope to apply to their business program in the future if possible.

The Rose Cafe featuring Indiana University economics professor Jeff Prince was my first experience with Rose Cafes and I was honestly surprised at the thought provoking nature of the discussion we had regarding internet adoption, marketing, and neutrality of the internet. Dr. Jeff Prince is an experienced economist who has had the opportunity to research and experience the growth of the internet to its current state and brought interesting case studies and insight into the future of the market. His background in marketing allowed for a more nuanced discussion concerning the popular topic of net neutrality that I highly appreciated.

When net neutrality is discussed in media, think comedy shows and magazines, the debate is pretty one sided with the opposition bringing up very valid arguments against the idea of placing the internet in a more free market environment. The common argument that has been the foundation for current regulation was the opposition towards innovation stifling by larger companies who could dominate the free-market of the internet should net neutrality end. The Rose Cafe helped discuss what proponents of ceasing net neutrality don’t often get to communicate to customers. In essence, ending net neutrality could theoretically aid everyone from business to consumers by allowing the usual benefits of the free market, which would be competition leading to better products for lower prices. The idea of ending net neutrality never really entered my mind, but when put into a market perspective, I am a supporter of competition and relaxing regulations for certain businesses and this Rose Cafe helped me see the internet more as a business waiting to flourish. It’s a lot to trust companies with serving consumers if net neutrality is ended which is why I still side with net neutrality, but there are definitely arguments to be made against that shouldn’t be overlooked just because supporting net neutrality is popular.

Also in the discussion was some good dialogue concerning certain internet terms and how exactly the internet is priced. The very necessary distinction between the supply and demand side of the internet in the net neutrality debate was also mentioned and possibly soothed some misplaced worries that some people may have had when imagining the end of net neutrality. Consuming information from the media has helped in understanding the broader details, but I definitely believe some type of internet literacy course that touches on regulations is necessary for everyone considering that this age is defined by the connectivity of the internet.