Posted By:
John,
08 October 2009
Watching Micro Men, the story of Sinclair battling with Acorn for supremacy in the early eighties just a few miles down the A11 from us really does make me think!
The idea of what the personal computer was and what it would be.
This weekend, for the first time, England's match will be shown online only. The pubs will be empty, as the Ukraine FA hope to cash in following the failure of Satanta.
It's a really interesting event as the empowerment that the internet brings enables this FA to side-step the traditional broadcasters and take 100% of the revenue by selling directly.
The interesting thing to see will be whether this achieves the level of viewers that an England internation would typically achieve. Do football fans want to gather around a computer and pay to watch the match online.
Is the infrastructure that the organisers have in place substantial enough to sustain the one million concurrent users that it plans to? How will our local networks handle the load?
It will tell us a great deal about the current position of the internet and where it might go soon - probably somewhere very different to where Sir Clive Sinclair imagined it would be!