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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.
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.
3 singals streaming.. at one time... meaning... Picture in Picture Beside another picture... All on top of a HD picture... next to your computer streaming live porn. Now that is what *I* call a sports bar!
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.
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 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.
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.
I wonder how one would pee tv streams...I bet HD would hurt
http://instagram.com/thephotographer
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?
*sigh*
...
Baseless attacks and disinformation regarding anti-trust law in this country helps no-one.
It is not a crime to hold a monopoly position in the market. It is a crime to do certain things with that monopoly position. Such things are called anti-trust violations. When you violate them are are not convicted of being a monopoly, you're convicted of anti-trust violations.
Nowhere does anti-trust law say that once you have a monopoly in one area that you can't enter business into a new area. Anti-trust law does say that you can't use your monopoly in one area to obtain a monopoly in another area (ie: refuse to sell windows to that company unless they agree to use Microsoft's IPTV stuff, or make sure windows won't connect to their internet service unless they agree to use Microsoft's IPTV stuff).
But hey, don't let the reality of things get in the way of your rants
Proformance is better, traditional cable is constently sending you all the data about every show, so its a constant stream of everything. With the IPTV it only sends you the data (channel, station, website, etc) that you are currently requesting.
So the proformance is better, but at the cost of "loading" times each time you make a requst for a different channel, station, website, etc.
TruePunk | Games
So the proformance is better, but at the cost of "loading" times each time you make a requst for a different channel, station, website, etc.
Done right, you won't notice a difference between what you have now with digital cable, and this new system. The only additional delay will be that for the request to change the channel - and that may end up being masked by the fact that you already have to wait for the I frame to arrive before you can switch to a new channel with existing digital receivers.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist And they just acquired Boardwalk to go with their Park Place.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also true. However, in the past, when Microsoft enters into a new area, it often isn't long before it starts doing those certain things that are crimes in that market, and it often isn't long before they start leveraging their monopoly to try to create a new monopoly, which as you observe just happens to be one of those certain things. They of course haven't done this yet, I mean how could they they just entered the market today, so the grandparent post was wrong if they were trying to say what Microsoft did today is illegal. But, Microsoft does do those certain illegal things very, very often. So often that it is totally reasonable to expect they will do them again. So often that it is reasonable to expect their legal expansion into this market today is just a first step that will certainly lead to illegal expansions
I don't know what backwards banana republic you're from, but in this country the idea is that you try people for the crimes they've done, not for the crimes you think they might do.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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.
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?
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.
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aphex
I Steal Music!