for the readers that dont realise it,sure the internet has had TV broadcasting capability from nearly day one, that being IP MULTICAST AND IP BROADCAST capabilitys…

the simple fact is it the ISPs that are holding you back as they seem to think its clever to turn off the multicast and broadcast capabilitys in all the comercial grade routers and related kit to and from the end users so called last mile conection.

if you really want to see some movement in all this , then write to your very own ISP boardroom CEOs and demand they turn initiate an across the board re-enableing of IP MULTICAST on all available IPv4 and IPv6 installed kit.

pay or become active in the azureus torrent developers circles and get some java multicast patches into the current open codebase, to start you off in your search look to the java multicast DHT codebase from the bamboo DHT website
http://bamboo-dht.org/javadoc/bamboo/openhash/multicast/package-tree.html

http://bamboo-dht.org/tutorial.html

\”Marcel has also written a report about his experiences building a multicast protocol on top of Bamboo. It may also be useful for tutorial purposes\”

hell if you cant even manage to get your ISPs to turn back on multicasting all the way to your user end ,then you can always do a poor mans multicast through a basic multicast tunnel, and get what theres also a very old Mbone (the old multicast fre network)free java app Mtunnel
http://www.cdt.luth.se/~peppar/progs/mTunnel/
\”The mTunnel is an application that tunnels multicast packets over an unicast UDP channel. Several multicast streams can be sent over the same tunnel while the tunnel will still only use one port. This is useful if tunneling through a firewall.
The applications primary goal is to allow for easy tunneling of multicast over for instance a modem and/or an ISDN connection.

The mTunnel has a built in Web-server allowing for easy access to information about current tunnels. This server listens by default on port 9000 on the machine where started.

The mTunnel also listens on session announcements for easier tunneling of known sessions.

If you download and install this package please send me an email! (peppar@cdt.luth.se)

The latest public version is 0.3 released 980102. \”

so the codebase is there, go do something interesting and get your ISP to stop limiting this multicast DHT torrent/p2p
becoming a reality for the good of your US selves, and the world at large.

BTW incase you didnt realise, AVC/H264 is becomeing the new EU/world standard for DVB broadcasting/multicasting transport streaming not your old US mpeg2 so theres a massive bandwidth saving there to be had today…..

Powerline Deployed in South Africa And Uganda – IP-TV Trial This Autumn
Balancing Act (London)
NEWS
July 17, 2006
Posted to the web July 17, 2006

By Russell Southwood
London

Powerline technology has always seemed to promise much but never seem to quite come to the boil. But Goal Technology Solutions (known as GTS) has rolled out operational 30 meg connections in South Africa and is currently deploying in Uganda for UTL. And come October this year it will be trialling IP-TV. Russell Southwood spoke to its CEO Adrian Maguire about why it had succeeded where others have failed.

GTS is a spin-off of the Power Line Communications division of Grintek Telecom. The GTS team worked for Grintek in this division for two years before setting up GTS in September 2004. Adrian Maguire, CEO, GTS is very honest about the early years:”The first two years we had relatively little success. We went through a number of suppliers who worked not quite well enough for commercial deployment and there were issues of cost.” But it is now the only integrator and value added reseller appointed by Mitsubishi Electric for the SADC region for its PLC technology. Maguire told us:”It’s DS2 technology but we’ve done quite a bit of local development. These are small tweaks to get reliability. And with that, it’s now gone over the curve of let’s see if it works.”

It went live with its first application in November 2005 with 130 houses in Pretoria. According to Maguire:”We were trialling second generation powerline technology and it was our first large-scale trial. The customer (Tshwane Municipality) wanted 4-6 meg per home but we were able to deliver a 30 meg connection per house.” The company is focused on providing “last-mile” solutions.

It has worked hard on the applications that can be delivered using the technology so that it does what it’s supposed to do. It has run voice and Internet, installed high-quality security cameras and deployed water meter reading devices. Maguire says:”The reliability is such that we don’t have to keep going back.” It will conduct its first IP-TV broadcast in October this year.

more…

http://www.allafrica.com/stories/printable/200607171173.html

Mark’s comment about media-center pcs… I think that these systems are where component Hi-Fi was in the early 70s. The adopter profile is similar and the mainstream adoption rate will probably repaeat that pattern closely. I know that several of my friends (non-geeks, by the way) have bought media center pcs and are using them, either with HD or without. I have been successfully using a Mac Mini since February 2005 as a media center (yes, well before the Intel version) and have been extremely satisfied with it. One little box does TV/DVD/Music playback and acts as a DVR (with EyeTV). Easy to set up.

SO – hybrid delivery, small, stylish, easy-to-set-up media center pcs sum up to solve the problems that Mark lays out. Eventually we’ll get to IP delivery of all content, but – as someone suggested – we’ll be using it to teleport to the live event, not watch it on high-def .

I have to disagree. You are correct in saying quality broadband TV is not possible RIGHT NOW, but I file your ten year prediction in the same category as some other famous quotes.

“640k ought to be enough for anybody.” — Bill Gates, 1981

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, 1943

“The reward for connecting a PC to an HDTV isnt worth the hassle and that wont change for years. Dare i say, not even in 10 years, if ever.” — Mark Cuban, 2006

Let me break your argument down into two sections. The first argument is that the backbone can’t handle the load. To this I point to an overabundance of dark fiber, the gradual rollout of 10 Gbps connections (Sprint is in the process of upgrading their entire backbone from OC-48’s to OC-192’s), and the improvement of multicast technologies. I think within ten years the Internet will easily be able to handle 10 to 30 Mbps into the home. Dare I say within five years?

The second argument is that the end user won’t have the bandwidth. I point to two rollouts:

http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/packages+and+prices/packages+and+prices.htm
http://www.presence-pc.com/actualite/ftth-experience-18331/

The first is the 30 Mbps service Verizon is offering. The second is the 2.5 Gbps service France Telecom is offering. Yes that is 2.5 Gigabits per second. These services are rare right now, but give them two or three more years and we should have a large enough potential audience to justify the creation of high-quality Internet video stations. (Should we start calling these Intervision stations?)

In response to your comment that its taken five years to go from ISDN to 5 Mbps, I would like to point out a few things. Bandwidth increases exponentially… (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps, 10000 Mbps). That today’s infrastructure (primarily Cable modems) has the capability to deliver higher speeds but there just isn’t a demand for it. The reason last mile speeds have stagnated is a lack of applications for high speed bandwidth. I see that changing. Online gaming is probably the biggest driver, but online video is quickly becoming another driver. Look at the adoption rate for ESPN 360 and Xbox Live if your still in doubt.

My prediction is that Intervision will be common within five years.

I normally don’t post comments on your blog; but then again normally you don’t make it so easy to prove a billionaire wrong.

Marquis Daniels

If you could add the ability to preload via the wire, or satellite, a selection of features that are timely, then many more folks would use this functionality. The technology is already in place, how you implement has many options, p2p on your cable box possibly. You could do day and date with theater release, charge $14.99 or $19.99 for some timeframe of access, and you’d have a second distribution channel for initial release and still have the ability to sell DVD’s later. If you go to the theater you’re going to spend at least that much, and going to the theater is a hassle for some folks, hence DVD rentals have had a huge impact on theater seat sales. If the cable companies use something like bittorrent to load your DVR and share the load inside their cable infrastructure, and your DVR could decode WMV-HD ,H.264, Mpeg4, DIVX-HD, you could do HD, without a huge physical server farm to dedicate, its just software at that point. It may take days to preload, DIRECTV and Dish would actually have an advantage in this case, but most content providers know when their release is coming so you can schedule it, or have the users select what they want a la Netflix or CinemaNow et al. I’ve seen your post about the networks and the iTunes model and this would be similar, just a different distribution method.

Customers should be willing to shell out a few more dollars to get day and date with the theatrical release vs. the delay and DVD release. But once you get the DVR in house, you can order both the premium (i.e. new release) movie as well as the budget (i.e. DVD release timeframe) movies at the same time, you can even have premium extras like a DVD has with the DIVX format. And both the studios and the cable companies can make money.

The only problems I see with this is that most major studios aren’t necessarily mastering HD content at the same time as film, or even DVD, at this point. So you get back to the problem of distributing an SD and HD version of your content, if you get HD you can distribute it and convert to SD, just not vice versa. Maybe once more filmakers start leveraging the HD cameras or distributing to DLP theaters then content stops being the issue and distribution is your only hurdle. The other problem is that “Hollywood” is in a conundrum today with the whole HD DVD vs BluRay format war, I’m not sure they want something else confusing the customer, but they should get proactive on this instead of reactive. Once someone cracks the DRM, and I’m sure there’s going to be a crack, there hasn’t been a encryption system that is both consumer friendly and uncrackable to this point, their content is going to get pushed out via the internet anyway, and they’ll not be able to hire enough lawyers to stop it. Better to get in front of it and take the revenue from all the folks that don’t want to go to the theater, and also don’t want to mess about with setting up a PC for pirated content.

There has been a similar discussion every time a new media distribution model comes out. When VHS rental came out there was still some benefit to going to the theater; video quality and sound, but still the studios didn’t embrace it for years. Then DVD’s came out, the rental model was entrenched by then, but since the quality of the media was much better, studios have had a tough time, many movies don’t show profitability until rentals are calculated. Now with 1080p HD content and sound, your quality of the media is fabulous, and you don’t have to worry about the guy on the cell phone or getting up to get more popcorn and missing 15 minutes. Yes, your wife is going to complain about that monstrous TV, but she still likes it better than fighting the army of 13 year olds to get into the theater on Friday night. And that’s the point really, going out to a movie used to be an event, now it’s a chore. The fact that we work more, and are tethered to work via 72 different devices, it’s just more relaxing to stay in. The media companies have been scared to death of the internet for 10 years, but look at music, eventually they started to embrace things like iTunes or Rhapsody, because their customers were already using it and the companies weren’t seeing any revenue, in fact declining revenue. See Napster. Fundamentally there really isn’t a difference between music or video, just cost of developing content and the contents size.

This is what I want personally, I moved my whole house to HD 5 years ago, when the available content was just not there, plus just built a dedicated home theater room specifically for all this stuff. I’d rather wait 3 months and watch the movie on one of the DVD formats than go to the theater, and I live within 3 miles of 34 screens, all of them new. It’s Vegas, everything’s new. I’d gladly pay $20 for a day and date release without leaving the house, but maybe it’s just me. I just don’t think that there is a technical issue; psychological, maybe; inertia, probably; but with all the smart people around the technical side is probably solvable. Of course, if it were my money, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t want to be second to market instead of the first.