Bill Watt’s Blog

Apparently my Roku Netflix box arrives tomorrow… woo hoo! I really can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to playing with this thing.

It does make me wonder how the world thinks we’re moving to metered bandwidth. Everything is moving online. How will I know how much bandwidth everything consumes? What if I’ve moved my phone to VOIP? “Too bad” seems like a harsh answer.

I was listening to TWIT this week and Leo was going on and on about how the proposed pricing makes sense for now but will eventually bite us all in the ass. His reasoning was that the proposed caps are all well and good for what the normal person consumes and what the providers currently classify as “bandwidth hogs” but that in a short amount of time all of us will be consuming more. Natalie Del Conte (not on TWIT) pointed out that everything is connected now and none of those devices have a way to tell you when they’re connecting.

Plus- my biggest concern is that I want to get away from physical media. I want to (legally) download movies the day they come to the theater and store them on my multiple TB drives (I have but 1 TB drive now but in the dreamy future of later this year that will grow). I want these guys to encourage me to consume content in this manner and not try to stop it in the interest of their IPTV or Pay Per View schemes.

Let the content flow!

Ok… I think the job might kill me but in a good way.

When I worked for FairMarket and for eBay I was pretty removed from users. I got to do tech support (and I loved it) and I worked directly for the customers who paid us (big companies) but there was a real separation from the end user. That’s ok… our business was different and we built cool tools that the people paying us wanted to let them better work with their end users. It was just a layer removed is all.

At Current I’m not exactly close to the users… but it won’t be long. I’m talking to the community team, using the site, and working my way to the point where we’ll have a product management voice out there too. The delay is that I’m still trying to get a handle on the day to day PM duties, working on better PRD’s, getting in front of deals, and generally trying to make all the internal stakeholders happy. But I can see the day when we have that stuff firing on all cylinders and I can get out there an work with the community directly.

Anyway- what prompted this? A community member posted the item, “what happened to current.com” and generated a good amount of discussion. My assumption is that by the time I wake up tomorrow the thread will be much longer.

I want to post a thread right now asking people for feedback but until I can be prepared (time wise) to actually address the expected flurry I’d better hold off. It won’t be long… and it will be good.