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Japanese Makers To Forge An Internet TV Standard
An anonymous reader writes "Five Japanese TV manufacturers will form a working group to hammer out technical specifications by October for
digital TVs with Internet access. They will develop a consumer electronics version of Linux to provide functions and performance required for digital products. The resulting source code will be made available through the General Public License procedure."
Have you ever heard of RCA? a company formed from several different American companies to standardize radio broadcasting and reception. Or the maybe the NTSC you know the National Televison Systems commitee, the one responsible for the television broadcasting standards in America?
Just Checking.
What? 400ms satellite vs 150ms 28K modem?
:P
If I was trying to play games online I know which one I'd pick!
8mbps ADSL connections over in Japan are extremely common with 12mbps starting to be introduced.
Actually, most ADSL customers here have already gotten their free upgrade to 12mbps. And now a lot of people are moving to fiber: 100mbps for about US$30 a month. Note that fiber to the home is available even in rural areas like Fukui prefecture, so claims that this is due solely to higher population density are simply false--the incredible disparity is mostly the result of poor US legislation.
What? 400ms satellite vs 150ms 28K modem?
:P
If I was trying to play games online I know which one I'd pick!
I had satalite for several years (was one of the first customers) until less than a year ago, they put cable out here in the sticks.
I could get a 400 ping, if all i did was PING, but for online gaming, my EFFECTIVE ping was really about 800+. This holds true for other tests I had done as well.
Oh, and Hughes service sucks. Absolutely sucks. I had been on hold with them for over an hour, many times. When my BRAND NEW system was installed, it took 3 months of replacement parts to get it to work (not true now tho) and when they had a network down, they would NEVER admit it, so you are trying to figure out if its on your end. After a while, you learn that if the hold is more than 20 minutes (the average on a good day) then lots of people are calling to complain, so its not on your end. Really, they absolutely suck at service. If they did not have a monopoly of sorts, they would be out of business. Not bashing, ask anyone who has been with them a long time.
As a note: they also THROTTLE you down to 56k speeds if they think you are using too much bandwidth, it is NOT unlimited. Read the fair use clause. And yes, thanks to a.b.w. I had been throttled a few times. If you download a few ISOs a month, then no, but anything else, yes. This is one reason I would never consider a TV/Internet package from Hughes here in the states. I switched to cable, and was never happier.
And I get 150 pings on a modem in town. 300 in the country.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
To build Opera 6 for iTV you need a development platform with the following characteristics:
One of the CPUs: x86, PPC 405, StrongArm or MIPS
Linux kernel version 2.4.x
Tool chain: gcc 3.2 and glibc 2.2.5
QT 2.3.2 (Trolltech's QT embedded or QT on X11) dynamically linked and multithreaded
On the target hardware at least 4 MB of Flash and 8 MB RAM available to Opera
The thing you want to see is OpenCable, which should be coming sometime around 2005-ish, give or take. It's not exactly wonderful, but it'll let you pick up a digital cable box at a local store and plug in into whatever company provides in your area.
TV over IP will be quite a while before it hits mainstream, just due to bitrates. MPEG-2 is still king (at least until MPEG-LA and MPEG-4 part 10 settle down), and it's 2-4Mbps per SD channel, 19Mbps for HD. Cable modems tend to max out at 6Mbps theoretical.
But still, the idea of any IP device receiving IP TV in anathema to broadcasters. They want hardware copy protection and encryption, so it'll be quite a while before you can watch HBO realtime on your PC in digital quality.