From dailycamera, by Dennis K. Berman, Associated Press, October 19, 2003:
Broadband benefits consumers, sellers, investors
By the end of this year, about 22.5 million households in the U.S. will have high-speed Internet access, or 21 percent of all households nationwide, according to the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting firm; by 2008, about half of all residences are expected to have a broadband hookup...
Perhaps broadband's greatest economic effect will be the hardest to measure: that as a catalyst for all kinds of offline behavior. People who have high-speed connections, for instance, are more likely to buy new digital cameras, using their speedy connections to send digital photos to friends and family. They're also more likely to buy home-networking equipment, such as Wi-Fi cards, to share the bandwidth among multiple PCs...
Phone, cable, satellite and wireless companies all want control over the $15 billion broadband-access market...The broadband masses also have spurred a new generation of fee-based information and entertainment services that are improvements to the free offerings still available online...For instance, fans of the Chicago Cubs can pay just a few dollars per month to access video feeds of their beloved team direct from the Major League Baseball Web site. Before, they had to make do with online radio broadcasts or sit through ESPN's SportsCenter TV show. But with so many fans thousands of miles from their home teams, Major League Baseball saw an opportunity to serve them, rolling out its first video service last fall.