Air Water International (fka AWTI)

[The Original dpb5!]

An idea for WLGS Management....

Of course it is beyond the current realm of their business plan, but as I have commented before, consolidation in the Internet Industry is going to continue for some time to come.

I used to own stock in an internet company called Infoseek.com (SEEK). Disney bought into Infoseek, and changed the name to GO.COM. Later, Disney bought GO.COM altogether and now my old SEEK/GO/DIG shares are Disney shares.

Yet Disney is still largely in the Internet Arena.

If you visit http://www.dig.com (which stands for Disney Internet Group) you will see that behind the scenes Disney has a lot going on "internet wise".

I believe that Disney has the same interest in the internet long term that Time Warner did which led up to the HUGE AOL/Time Warner Merger!!!

Obviously, Disney doesn't have an "AOL" type asset, so here is where I can see WLGS fitting in. I suggest to the management of WLGS that they contact Disney with their Business Plan. I could see a great partnership in WLGS providing Disney with the necessary High Speed Broadband that relates to the following Disney Press Release.....

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06-21 0899 Movies coming to a PC near you, but maybe not soon
By Sue Zeidler
LONG BEACH, Calif., June 21 (Reuters) - Hollywood is in the deal-making phase of its campaign to distribute movies over the Internet and showtime for the resulting ventures is still some way off, executives said on Thursday.
The biggest challenge has been drawing the studios together behind a common platform that would provide viewers access to a wide array of movies -- seen by many in the industry as a needed step if beaming movies via the Internet is to succeed.
"The negotiations are proving far more difficult than technological issues," Yair Landau, president of Sony Corp.'s
(6758) Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment told Reuters at the Streaming Media West conference, a major industry meeting.
So far the movie studios have not had to contend with a threat like Napster, which attracted nearly 17 million users to its all-you-can-swap music service at its peak in February, before a court injunction shrank its popularity.
Even so, security experts estimate that as many as 400,000 bootlegged films a day are already swapped on the Internet. The longer the studios wait to launch their own ventures, the harder it will be for them to control the final distribution channel of their movies, they said.
"There's still a lot more questions than answers regarding companies' commitments to an architecture for distribution and production," said Andrew Frank, technology officer for Viant Corp. (VIAN) , a digital media consulting firm, who said the next few months are crucial.
SONY, DISNEY IN LEAD
Sony and the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) have so far taken the lead with separate initiatives to use the Internet to distribute movies.
"We're in active discussions with other studios. Consumers have shown they want content from many studios," Sony's Landau said.
Sony Pictures had hoped to launch its own online movie service, MovieFly, this spring, according to sources. The service will rent hundreds of films from Sony, Vivendi Universal's (EAUG) Universal Studios - and possibly News Corp. Ltd. (NCP) unit Twentieth Century Fox.
The service's launch has now been pushed back to the fall, the sources said, although Landau said he was "reasonably hopeful we'll have an announcement soon."
"The films are encoded and ready to go. We're comfortable with the technology. But there are many other issues involved in trying to get a lot of studios to agree on this," he said. "MovieFly is about building an Internet protocol for movies."
Sony's video-on-demand model would allow users to download movies from its Web site to their personal computers where they can be viewed for a fee, sources have said.
Alternatively, Disney is said to be studying delivering films via the Internet on a wireless set-top box.
Disney Internet Group Executive vice president Dick Glover told an industry audience at the Streaming Media West conference that the transition from piracy to legitimacy for video on the Web would be difficult.
"When you think about the effort to convert an analog library, it is staggering and delaying. But we're not letting that daunt us," he said.
ALREADY INITIAL STEPS
Some studios have already taken initial steps with a video-on-demand service through the Internet.
In February, Universal Studios signed a multi-year deal with broadband network Intertainer to deliver films like Robert De Niro's hit "Meet the Parents" over the company's digital cable platform. Miramax Films also announced a deal with SightSound Technologies to release 12 films for download over the Internet.
Intertainer is one of several smaller companies releasing movie content using Microsoft's video compression technology. At the conference, Microsoft said it is working with several major studios on bigger initiatives.
"We're working closely with studios to provide video and (digital rights management) technology to distribute movies on the Internet," said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for the digital media division at Microsoft.
"The technology is ready today to deliver downloadable movies," he said, noting that more than 18 million movies have been distributed already using Windows Media technology.
Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is also "talking to movie studios about distributing their movies online," Yahoo's general manager of entertainment David Mandelbrot told Reuters.
While the studio initiatives have yet to come to market, many attending the conference had no doubt that the threat of losing control of the emerging market would keep them focused.
"There isn't a Napster for movies that we know of, but the big studios are being very aggressive and they want to keep the situation under their control," said Jonathan Edwards, chairman of VO24 Inc, a streaming consulting firm.
As the studios move ahead in these efforts, some of the stumbling blocks are how to manage relationships with cable companies, pay-per-view channels and video chains, major revenue streams that may wind up competing with the Internet.
Studios also need higher penetration of broadband, or high speed Internet connections like cable modem or DSL phone lines to make downloading films more bearable, experts said.
REUTERS
Rtr 21:22 06-21-01 Copyright 2001, Reuters News Service
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