Comments on: Broadcast TV will never die.

By: BM

BM — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

Google and Yahoo are both now betting that broadcast tv and television middle-men such as cable tv and RBOCs will eventually be eliminated. Once home access bandwidth reaches an average of 30-40Mbps, studios and content providers, such as HBO, will be able to directly stream to the household on a per view or subscription basis. Yahoo and Google’s video-search initiatives are based on this eventuality. Betting on an N+1 disaster or that backbones won’t catch up is a losing argument. With MPEG4 and intelligent tunneling and network architecting, you don’t have to worry about bringing down the backbone. Compared to HFC networks where everything is broadcasted, IPTV multicast/unicast networks have an exponential advantage over the bandwidth limitations of HFC.

By: BM

BM — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

By: Kelly Smith

Kelly Smith — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

There are lots of challenges with IPTV but I don’t think the biggest immediate challenges are mentioned in this blog post. If you have deployed an actual iptv installation you know that SYSTEMS INTEGRATION is the biggest challenge by a significant order of magnitude. How many people make set top boxes in the cable market? Guess how many people make set top boxes in the IPTV market. About the same as cable times 100. Try getting STBs, VOD servers, conditional access, set top software, billing systems, support systems ad management software to all play nice when (thankfully) there are no virtual monopolies. That’s the IPTV market and that’s why BellSouth and SBC haven’t deployed yet. They know people need a service that is not only ON PAR with cable but, frankly, a “me-too” service isn’t going to cut it. Telcos can have advantages but they will need to do three things:

1) Get shit to work
2) Be competitive on price
3) Offer more functionality

That’s possible but hard.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

Fiber to the home should allow unlimited bandwidth via a Universal Telecommunications stream. Unicast, multicast and broadcast of any digital media (but not wireless)can become a reality, today with a little proactive prodding of the FCC, the RBOCs, the CATV MSOs to make music with the population, rather than continuing to prevent such a union. Then, we do live in the capitalistic democracy.
Active participation may only become the norm for shepards, not the sheep. TV may never go away.

By: Clarence

Clarence — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

I quit watching broadcast or cable TV 30 years ago. I don’t mind watching video on the internet because I can choose what and when. Even my radio listening is that way – no broadcast radio and even broadcast stations like kcrw allow me to listen to any program on demand, whenever I want. Enough people like me and broadcast TV is dead, probably already are. Look at the ratings.

By: Jim Dorey

Jim Dorey — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

For those of you that are interested, Mark will be giving a keynote at MEDIA Magazine’s Forecast 2006 Conference at the New York Marriott Marquis on September 26, 2005. Content hint: HDTV Media.

By: Paul Brooks

Paul Brooks — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

As an engineer working for a large CATV MSO, our team has developed a technology called Swtiched Digital Video (SDV). Think of this as IP multicast in the MPEG transport stream world. It works just like regular multicast in that we only send a video stream to a viewer when it is requested, and multiple viewers share viewing of the same stream.

Our field trial showed very fast channel change times (no one could tell the difference), and stream use statistics that were suprisingly flat and predictable. Peak use occured at or near prime time. Your N+1 scenario (in the telco world this is called the Mother’s day problem) will only be a factor if each viewer simultaneously requests a DIFFERENT channel. Our stats show that we can design very close to the actual stream usage curve with a vanishingly low risk of service denial, so low as to be less frequent than a network outage. (Cut the cable jokes, now!)

This technology uses settops already in the field, does not further compress the streams, and offers the potential of vast amounts of real time programming selection with little or no last mile bandwdith demands to existing cable network physical plant. Live HD content will be the big winner because SDV-equipped cable TV systems will no longer be bandwidth constrained.

By: Greg Martin

Greg Martin — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

My last post was double posted and subsequently removed. What it said was there is a broadcast network on the internet (unbeknownst to Mr. Cuban) that is operating 24-7 over the internet with 40 affiliate stations.

By: Napi

Napi — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:19 +0000

I assume you’ve come across this already

By: Shawn Morris

Shawn Morris — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:03:18 +0000

Mark,
Many large ISPs now run native multicast. There is no longer a need for tunnels. The biggest use for multicast these days is within enterprises, more specifically finance departments. There are many trading systems that use multicast to push quotes to trading desks. For consumer multicast the killer app hasn’t shown up yet. Furthermore since the demand for Internet-wide multicast hasn’t grown the router vendors have not made maintaining and improving the multicast codebase a top priority.