We design solutions to problems every day. These problems can be pretty sticky, and they can seem insurmountable. But we usually find crafty ways to solve the issues at hand and move on.

One ‘insurmountable’ issue that we keep getting prompted about is local access. See, we’re big fans of consumer electronics providing serious competition against the service providers – so much so, we that think telcos should benchmark themselves against Sony and Apple and Samsung, not Time Warner, Cox, Cablevision, and other cable companies.

But every time we go into the “The CE players will eat the telcos’ lunch” spiel, we get hammered on the access question. “They will have to pay the telcos to get to the customers, or the customers will have to pay – which will stifle this competitive threat in no time flat.” Well, maybe so, but that assumes a lot – it assumes that the only way to get to a customer is via the traditional access channel. We’re not so sure on that point. In fact, we can think of a number of ways to get around that problem, if you want to be creative enough.

So in the spirit of brainstorming options, who’s to say that one of these won’t play out in the local loop to keep the telcos and cablecos honest?

* The traveling hard drive: we all know wireless can transfer a lot of data fairly quickly. The latest standards are promising lots of bandwidth when you are near an access point. So suppose we started treating out cars as mobile sync engines. Stick a Wi-Fi accessible hard drive in the dashboard or trunk, and not only allow it to serve content to your car, but also to carry content from point A to point B. Suppose your grocery store were an information off-ramp. Suppose NetFlix set up a deal with Hannaford or Big Y or Super Stop and Shop. When your car is in the parking lot, it gets filled up with movies. When you arrive at home, these movies are transferred to a local hard disk in the set top box. No access fees, no active work on anyone's part, no weird technologies – just making the solution map to the way people live. The single biggest threat to the telco IPTV business plans, in our minds, is the plummeting cost of hard disk space – it’s becoming cheaper and easier to give someone all the content they could ever want on one hard disk. The first terabyte hard dives are coming out now and it’s only a matter of time before they are really economical for CE plays.