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Verizon and Microsoft Partner for IPTV
benore writes "According to the AP, Verizon joins other baby bells SBC and Bellsouth in choosing Microsoft to provide TV content over high speed internet. IPTV, whose technology will deliver TV content in much the same way as VOIP delivers phone service, relys heavily on fiber optic speeds. According to SBC, Microsoft's IPTV technology will allow a home to receive 3 standard TV signals, 1 HD channel, and high-speed Internet access all at the same time."
I like how Microsoft, like Apple, is moving beyond just PCs.
"3 standard TV signals, 1 HD channel"
No thanks, I'd rather stick with my 500+ channels from Charter Communications.
Surely that can't come without a performance hit. (Yeah, didn't RTFA. It's obvious, isn't it...?)
Metro will be the next fiber boom, this is just what we need to drive it.
how could there not be DRM with microshaft involved
Yes, but does it run Linux?
Will the general public latch on to this? In the past, to my knowledge, they have not been jumping to joy to buy new equipment to use a service that ultimatly has less costs overall. Main Point : Comsumers are lazy. They dont want to have to do anything to get what they want. They want good TV, and they want it now.
But you can bet it isn't going to be good for the rest of us in the long run.
Microsoft does a lot of smart things, but the smartest thing they did was pouring all that money into snapping up nearly every researcher in video codecs in the world and having them all work on WMV. There have been a number of things resulting from this; the main one is that within not too many years, WMV will be the only remaining non-MPEG standard in the field, and MPEG will be declining in importance.
Another possible result, which as of today seems a lot more likely than before, that within 10 years the Tivo will be utterly gone and there will be no difference between the terms "PVR" and "Microsoft Media Center".
While simultaneously allowing Microsoft to spy on your TV viewing habits, not to mention which shows you tape. Oh sorry, I thought I was reading the WMV license terms. But you get the idea. Let Microsoft in your living room and you never know what you are agreeing to.
Oh well, just a little baseless paranoia for a Friday night.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
I don't want to point out the obvious here, but Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. I guess it's lucky for them that they've got friends in the top ranks of government, otherwise a Justice department that was doing its job would be all over this kind of illegal expansion of business.
This DRM bondage is getting too tight!
besides my TV viewing being at the mercy of DOS attacks and trackable (you think http cookies have been abused, just wait) and limited since I can currently buy more satellite receivers if I want more simultanious HD streams?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
To save bandwidtch they are going to compress the hell out of it. I am certainly not buying this.
"to be transmitted in the language of the Internet"
Finally we'll be able to get the news in 1337 - and I never throught I'd live see the day.
I'm doing well. Today is Friday, so that's a plus. Thank God.
For years, both the cable companies and the telephone companies, when confronted about the fact that they respectively tend to hold local monopolies in many areas, have defended this by saying "we're not a monopoly; I mean, we have a [cable/telephone] monopoly, of course, but it isn't a monopoly because we have to compete with [telephone/cable].
But then something interesting started happening, and we see the beginnings of the final stages of it with this Verizon/Microsoft partnership. Now the Cable companies are all trying to do exactly what the telephone [now dsl] companies do, and the telephone [now dsl] companies are all trying to do exactly what the Cable companies do, and they're both getting good enough at it that anything having to do with satellite dishes will be entirely marginalized pretty quickly.
I can't help but think it won't be too long before your area's one telephone company does, in fact, compete with your area's one cable company, and your area's one cable company does compete with your area's one telephone company, but neither of them compete with anyone else in any fashion. When this happens I don't think it will be too long before collusion between the cable and dsl companies becomes an absolute standard. Why not? Duopolies are good for business, and what's good for business, at the expense of consumers or no, is apparently good for America.
No matter what the article said. Just because this is Slashdot.
I wonder how one would pee tv streams...I bet HD would hurt
http://instagram.com/thephotographer
I'm just curious. We keep hearing about Microsoft making all that money. But of all the money that Microsoft has, exactly how much of it is actual cash and how much of it is stock?
I'm not sure I totally understand but when it says "recieve 3 standard TV signals, 1 HD channel" does it mean you will only be able to have 3 boxes in your house to recieve TV from IPTV?
IP over anything, I suspect, will be the new craze. First there was X[insertname], then it was i[insert capital letter and name here], now its VO[insertname]. They [consumers and companies] seem to go towards prefixes that sound cool and scientific. Like the cosmetics companies trying to make up names that sound very medical. Now they are marketing VOIP, it was about a year and a half from when it was first introduced and announced. Will this come early or late? 2005 or 2010?
They're going to have to start opening up all that "dark fiber" sooner or later, if you get my drift
Katie Couric would now say Bu+ f1R5+ +h15 1s t3h T0d4y 0n /\/B(?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
3 standard TV signals, 1 HD channel, and high-speed Internet access all at the same time.
Gee whiz, TV from Microsoft. There goes any semblance of fair use rights, and hell, probably the ability to watch any given show without rebooting the TV three times.
Seesh.
Fight for something better: www.socialistalternative.org
i just want my TV to be just a simple cable ready TV, i just want my computer to be a i686 PC and i dont want my cellphone taking pictures or video and only able to make phonecalls
Not good enough, damnit, not good enough!
What company caved in and let Microsoft buy them, so Microsoft can add "IPTV" to their product portfolio?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Regular TV just wasn't doing it for me... I mean, actually having to move *from* my computer *to* the couch? How am I supposed to manage that? I also have always hated how big my TV is and how comfortable my couch is. I would much rather watch a small screen that a) has bottom and top black boxes or b) has a horrible resolution and sit on my computer chair!
"You have changed the channel. Your TV must reboot for this change to take effect...."
"Hi! It looks like you are watching Fear Factor. Would you like me to help you lower your IQ furthur?"
"TV update has detected 14 new updates, 5 of them critical. Install now?"
"You have changed your PVR, stereo, and snackbowl. You must re-register your TV before you continue."
"J00 5uk3r! PW3N3D!"
"Program JSPRINGER.EXE has causes an exception in GOODTASTE.DLL..."
www.eFax.com are spammers
It means, if you're trying to watch that much TV, you've maxed out the bandwidth available to you. Since they're using Microsoft, I'd guess the video will be encoded WMV9. Which means, a little over 6 Mbps for the HD channel, and 1 Mbps each for the SD channels. So, they'll give you around 10 Mbps worth of data to your home.
Who needs them ! What we need is high speed fiber to the home thats AFFORDABLE ,$20-30 a month that uses all it's bandwidth to INTERNET 2 or something similar. Having 3 regular Digital channels and one HDTV channel is stupid. I don't want to see QVC in HD. Who will decide on what we see ? Same problems as always without Alacarte. Same stupid Kiddy shows, Sports shows, News shows, reruns. Fuck em all. I am sick of Corporate rule.
Can I get IPTV over my cable internet connection?
Signature.
The demo I saw allowed allowed selection of different camera angles based on personal preferences in a baseball game.
It looked awesome. I was also suprised at the quality of the streams and the speed at which channels could be changed. Since there is no TV tuner it had multiple Picture-in-picture capabilities.
I can't wait for Verizon to install fiber in my area.
I will be subscribe to this from day one.
it's really going to suck when my tv signal freezes up for no reason like my windows box does.... I don't know that I really want microsoft taking over anymore of the world than it has already...
You know the story
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
Even so, that's probably the way they'll go. They have to, if they are to reach the number of consumers they'd need to be profitable. This is where there's a problem, though. ISPs don't provide multicast to the home. Microsoft would have to force a radical shift in attitudes amongst ISPs, if this plan is to have a hope of working.
Multicasting would solve one of the other concerns mentioned by Slashdot users - privacy. Because routers only know the next link in the chain, it would be impossible for Microsoft to determine who was listening to the multicast transmission.
However, this creates a problem for the cable companies. Anyone can set up a multicast feed. It's easy. This means that anyone can set themselves up as a TV station, virtually unregulated by the FCC (which has next to no authority on Internet matters), with none of the licensing issues "real" broadcasters have to endure.
Although Joe Average is unlikely to offer serious competition any time soon, start-up channels which start entirely on the Internet would have significantly lower overheads and therefore have more money to produce quality output. Those start-ups may very well be dangerous to existing TV stations.
TV-over-IP, because it would be unregulated, completely bypasses all ownership rules. This means that newspapers and radio stations that are looking to muscle into TV would have an advantage as they could get into IPTV without restriction, whereas TV companies are limited in what they can do in other media.
Multicasting is already supported across the Internet backbone, which means overseas operators could transmit to US homes. As it stands, several European sports channels are already relayed over the Multicast backbone. Those channels stand to reach a lot of extra homes, if this is the method Microsoft adopts, which would likely be very interesting news to their sponsors.
Of course, if the F/OSS community could pressure Internet Providers to switch multicasting on now, it would preempt Microsoft's strategy, which in turn means that our favorite monopolist would not gain total control over the entire televised media industry.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From the article: "IPTV, whose technology will deliver TV content in much the same way as VOIP delivers phone service, relys heavily on fiber optic speeds."
Verizon can't even provide decent (>768Kb/s) SDSL service in New York, which is one of its core markets. When I called them 2 months ago, SDSL was still a "new technology" to them. Go speak to someone in IT who deals with Verizon on daily basis, they'll tell that Verizon and incompetence go together.
i might be wrong, but doesn't digital cable actually only stream one channel to your box at a time? each box has an IP address (or the cable-net equiv) and as you change channels it requests the stream from that one channel. i dont think my house is always getting all 300 possible channels piped in. they are available, but not all actually feeding at once. it makes sense... you would need 1/500th of the bandwith that way.
i have no idea how many tuners can run at a time, but i am pretty sure if you have more than 4 or 5 cable boxes they run a second line, or some heavy duty line.
if that's the case, then this Verizon/M$ partnership really could take on cable companies. well, them or any of the other phone companies planning to roll this out in the next year or so (there are a few coming).
This is just a backdoor into the cables and hollywood. MS can see the writing on the wall with OSS. Now, they need a new monopoly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would you buy it? Aside to be trendy? Well if the dish you buy doesn't have line of sight to the satellite, then this is alternative way to get digital TV.
It'll be compressed using MPEG4 (I think).
Damn straight they'll be recording your viewing habits.
"When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks."
-Valiss
I am sick of Corporate rule
How much do you think it costs to get fiber run up to the door of every house? Who, besides very large companies, could ever raise enough money to build a system like that, and tolerate the years and years it would take to make a single dollar back.
You want it for $20-30 per month? Let's be ridiculous, and assume that what you're getting for $25 only costs the providers $10. That means (ignoring taxes and everything else), that they've got $15 left over. That's $180 per year. A single buried cable pull to a residence can cost hundreds of dollars (that's labor - doesn't even count materials and equipment!). So you're expecting service that can't possibly even pay back the company that provides it for several years, and you're not even thinking about who is going to provide the upstream bandwidth, routing, and peering relationships. And you think who... the government should provide that to you? With my tax dollars? No, it's going to be very, very large companies that can absorb the billions and billions it will cost to set that sort of thing up, and since you don't strike me as the sort with billions in the bank, I'm guessing you can't foot that bill on your own.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Max Headroom coming soon!
Imagine if this was available to people who get hi-speed Internet via cable. Sure, it would serve no purpose to get TV-over-IP-over-TV, but some people would do it just to be cool. Also, why should I get DSL (or fibre-optic, or whatever this needs) and ditch my TV any more than I should get cable tv, internet, and VOIP?
That stands for Intellectual Property Television, right?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The adult entertainment industry always leads the way. Free, no popups, ad-driven tv channel. Check it out: http://www.adultinternet.tv/
can you name a non-porn dvd that uses it? and for bonus points- do you own any?
the fact that different angles are available- means squat.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Could this officially make Microsoft into Big BRother? Because we know that they will be watching all the time everyday.
Now millions of TVs all over the world will become spam zombies...
Why use buried cable ?
The municipals can string fiber through already existing pipes or near overhead phone lines.
I am not against Verizon . I just think that they shouldn't be shutting out REAL competition from municipals who want to install Fiber the home .
I am sure it will be open standards and it will run with linux. Just because I know how much SBC and Microsoft embrace linux. I'm not sure I really want this - I am already paying for cable, dsl, telephone, and long distance. I am already thinking of dumping cable cause TV basically sucks these days. Also if it is another box that I have to do maintenance on the microsoft way then forget it. I hope this is just for paying for the fiber and signal coming and then I can do what want with it from there. But probably not - microsoft will somehow try to lock me into one of their crappy products just to watch tv.
1 HD channel = 20Mbit/s (maximum at 1080i, dont know if it would support 1080p/30)
3 SD TV channels = 3Mbit/s each, 9Mbit/s total
Internet variable, probably at least 1-2Mbit/s
Total BW: 30Mbit/s.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Great. Now we will have the same piss-poor programs from the same five mego-opoly media behemoths streaming into our homes but, this time, transmitted on a different pipe using a different transmission protocol. Whoop-tee-do.
Seriously, more competition in the service provider space might keep prices down, but since it will be the same garbage programing, I can't get very excited.
Although I'd rather not see Microsoft's proprietary technology used in the transmission protocol, I'm not too worried. TV streams from the Baby Bells are still a long way off for most people. The vast majority of their outside plant facilities need backhoe-style upgrades to get that fiber to your house.
I know they are claiming these services are just around the corner, but they have been saying that for about 15 years now. How many of you can't get a DSL line because you are on a long line? Of those who can get it, how many get more than 1.5 Mbps? Yeah, thought so.
They need at least 10 Mbps to each house for this roll-out. It's gonna be a while.
Now I just have to wait until it hits our area...
Click here to see if its in your area!
Here is a good forum for discussing it:
DSL Reports Verizon FIOS Forum
Here are some samples of the FIOS speeds! They are crazy!!
... they're all positive, the bandwidth is as advertised. Now we just have to wait and see what happens when everybody is using it.
(it's available in my area so i might get it soon)
- sigs are for wimps.
It would be -1th post, not -1st post.
I have a perfect answer for you - don't buy this. Get rid of your television. Stop using a commercial ISP. Stop buying food. Stop buying anything. Stop working. Go hunt and gather, and fight to survive. We'll miss you, I swear...
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I thought they were coming to take over Iowa Public Television.
I don't think anything could make a week-long pledge run more unbearable than a phone company and interspersed BSODs.
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
How do you pronounce that?
--
make install -not war
They should get rid of broadcast tv all together and make everything IPTV. Then we wouldn't have to worry about the FCC at all anymore. Also, anyone who wanted to create their own tv network could without regulation or huge equipment costs and would add competitors in a closed market.
OK, this is the THIRD time this stupid story has been posted. And STILL there is not one single bit of IPTV. Can we just agree to not post this story ever again? Or at least until there IS such a thing as IPTV?
Microsoft and Verizon? It looks like some people got jealous of SCO's success at becoming the Most Hated Company Ever and decided to join forces to boost their united hatedness quota. Micrizon?
Qxe4
I would bet money that It means you can have as many TVs as you want but only 3 stations at any one time.. Bandiwdth is limited by the amount you have at any one given time, not the ways you can split it.
That's not to say that they're not artificially limiting you to 3 TVs though, so really I've no idea.
Hey, I've got a revolutionary idea! Let's take the phone system and jam it full of broadcast quality television and radio! Then we'll take telecommunications and do something completely crazy, transmit it from towers across the land! MUHAHAHA Nobel prize now please ; )
-- Bored? Check out my Portfolio
I neither have the 3 standard TV signals, nor the 1 HD channel, nor my high-speed Internet connection.
I have nothing, becuase someone installed something he shouldnt have.
The lunatic is in my head
So when will it come to the point when all electricity, television, telephone, internet, and all other communication come through a single pipe to everyone's home? Who gets to own it? Will there be DRM on my electricity to determine what devices I can use it on (say CD/DVD burners?) And what of my crazy neighbor that has the occasional "accident" with a backhoe just up the street?
Personally, I don't like all my eggs in one basket, and I don't like having a single service provider for everthing.
Delivering TV over IP is not as hard as you might think and not as expensive either. At least not the consumer part. Laying the fiber is the expensive and time consuming part but that can be handled. The most annoying part of the whole sh-bang is the content providers. None of them want to see their content comming anywhere close to the internet. I have worked with many people who wanted to develop such a plan and everyone was stopped by the content providers. Then again, who has every lasted long against microsoft?
IPTV! It's like a call to Moe's...but not quite as good as I.P. Freely, I.C. Wiener, or Amanda Hugginkiss.
Nobody watches television any more.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
this is very bad ms will just us it to have get the (false) facts on daily.
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They may not use Multicast, at least not in its simplest form. Imagine all those VOD streams they need to feed. Those must be on singlecast. If the backbone has say 5gb/s capacity, they can support 500 households on 10mb/s*household, which should be enough.
SBC. Nope, not gonna hook up with those ass pirates.
M$. Nope, not gonna use anything touched by them either.
Try again. I will never, ever hook up a wire to my house or business if SBC has anything to do with it. I grew weary of the constant raping they gave me from 1994 to 2001...
Bah - you know nothing of Free Software!
sudo make CHANNEL=new_chan install
www.eFax.com are spammers
And erect poles where there are none? There aren't poles on every street, like my street.
So how many people have more than one HDTV in their house? How many people even have ONE HDTV in their house? Plus, they can always upgrade the bandwidth in the future. This tech. is sufficient for *most* homes.
3 SDTV and 1 HDTV channel.
This doesn't mean only ONE channel in the service is HDTV, it means that you can only receive 1 HDTV channel at a time. If I only have 1 TV in my house that is HDTV complaint - thats fine, I can watch any of the HDTV channels on it, however, if I have more than ONE HDTV in the house, they are both going to have to be tuned to the same channel. Also, if you have more than 4 TVs in the house going at the same time, 2 of them would have to be watching the same show. While maybe the assume that many people wouldn't have more than 1 HDTV and 3 SDTVs it almost sounds like a step back to the days of pre-multiswitch satellite, when you had your 1 receiver feeding all the tvs in the house the same show.
I'll keeo my DirecTV and TiVos thanks.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
despite the crap, I doubt this will take off really well, bugs are bound to show up with the service, lag when too many people are watching the same station, et cetera.
Plus, this could fuck up the internet quite badly, and ipv4 addresses would be eaten up instantly, if anything, they need to use ipv6 to roll ths out.
which starts the plus sides.
If they use IPv6, then most isp's will have very little reason not to use it.
Also, the fact they're now installing fiber lines will now at least modernize the US, technology wise. fiber travels farther than copper, so they need less repeaters to strengthen the signal, which will cut costs.
So now we'll have highspeed internet (I dont consider our current speeds high speed)
that will be loads faster, et cetera.
Also, I think these streams, from how they're saying it, will be streamed on demand. IIRC. Thus, for the people worrying about the net connection slowing down, your streams would only be on when you wanted them to be on, and instead of all channels streaming at once (like with cable and satellite) channels only load on demand.
The othe upside is, this venture may not pay off due to most people getting sick and tired of tv, and there are still LOTS of people with rabbit-ears who are getting their television for free.
Knowing M$ and the way phone companies price shit, this will probably start off as a really expensive service. in which cable will still be unharmed, and satellite will still be going strong for quite a while.
oh and someone mentioned how this could be used for pirate tv streams, hell, why not? prolly would be better than conventional tv anyways.
Anti-trust law does say that you can't use your monopoly in one area to obtain a monopoly in another area, which seems to be exactly what Microsoft is attempting by using Verizon: leveraging the dying desktop monopoly to delivery and content.
I can't help but think it won't be too long before your area's one telephone company does, in fact, compete with your area's one cable company...
Except when your phone company is SBC and your cable company is SBC.
Moderation -2
100% Offtopic
How is a post about having posted the story in another thread "Offtopic"? If anything, it's about the topic *only*, to the exclusion of even the implications of the topic. TrollMods see "[...]1st Post" and stop reading, but not clicking.
--
make install -not war
they are the one group of people who will not put up with a bsod...
Get your torrents...