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IPTV Revolution Put on Hold
prostoalex writes "Business Week says the IPTV revolution might be postponed. As telecoms are launching the new service, they are facing the problem of lack of content: "But improvements like these can happen only if content providers - media companies and movie studios like Disney - play along. So far, it seems, they're not. Disney didn't return calls from BusinessWeek Online seeking comment, and it hasn't signed with any outside distributor to provide its movies for video-on-demand. Most studios have agreed to only limited video-on-demand distribution, fearing it could cut into revenues from rentals and DVD sales - now generating bigger income streams than the box office itself." The solution just might be buying out content companies, like Mark Cuban does. In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense."
AOL/TW resulted in the largest write-down in corporate history - $135 billion in losses. This is "starting to make sense"??
I don't understand why the channels that shop themselves out to cable companies (like the SCiFi channel) do not join up with some IPTV provider and do the natural thing of selling TV episodes over the internet.
It's a market that is uttery ripe for the plucking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Start offering things like Anime or SciFi, they can use the expanded market. Once companies realise this is for real, more content will show up.
Exactly. The studios will keep their heads in the sand until guys in their basements are making better content for peanuts.
From TFA: The Internet technology could transform home entertainment. Problem is, what's the point of unlimited channels if studios won't provide content?
The point is the major studios are looking over the precipice of irrelevance. Who cares if major studios take their ball and go home?
We're now in an age when the average home theatre built for a couple thousand bucks provide a better entertainmnent experience than going to a "real" theatre, and somebody is going to provide content to the home via the internet. If the major studios don't do it, someone else will. Likely it will be a distributed effort of many small businesses rather than a few large studios.
It does not take $millions to produce amazing animation or produce, edit, and distribute high quality content anymore. Therefore, the studios are also losing their monopoly on producing high quality content.
The only thing left for the studios will be the $200M blockbusters, but those blockbusters will be competing directly against equally (or more)compelling content created for $200k by small independents or $2k by guys working in their basements.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Of course, TV on demand has absolutely no benefits. Like the chance of offering content that wouldn't normally show up on even conventional cable channels. Not all of it will be good, but I think it offers opportunities for independents to distribute their videos without having to suck up to cable giants for limited air time at a time slot that no one watches.
And since it's a web server dynamically serving one channel at a time to you, it would be extremely easy for the IPTV provider to record what one watches.
That is a good point, but lots of webservers are already recording what they can of what you do. I suppose you could flush your cookies and never log into any site and such, but that's extreme.
Don't tell me that Tivo doesn't record what you do, and they offer the ability to timeshift in a way that is similar to what IPTV might offer. They say they don't record such information if you ask them not to, but I don't trust them not to do so. I expect the cable-company provided PVR boxes to be even shadier.
The solution just might be buying out content companies, like Mark Cuban does. In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense.
Yeah, because when a company has electronics/software components and media components they always work. What about Sony, who potentially lost its stronghold on the portable music player market because the media division wouldn't let the hardware division support the mp3 format on their players, fearing that their devices would just be used for the listening of their own pirated content. The content companies will come around eventually, just as they did for vhs, and as the music industry is starting to for digital distrubution. Buying them out will only cause problems (as it has for AOL/TimeWarner) and will serve little purpose.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
"I, for one, do not welcome our new IPTV voyeur overlords."
I'm going to die laughing if you have a TiVo.
Seriously folks, some of you are trying to enter this century kicking and screaming. "Oh no!! They know I watched an episode of Will and Grace!! MY PRIVACY HAS BEEN ABUSED!!"
Get a grip.
"Derp de derp."
True, but sometimes people DO NOT want to choose down to that detail, they have had enough of 'choosing' all day at work with countless decisions, they want to relax and be supprised.
So, instead of a traditional ONE station of variety TV, you could have 1000 stations.
Station 1: Series 1 Simpsons Episodes looped
Station 2: All IMAX docos looped
Station 3: Stargate Atlantis looped
You can have NEAR VOD. eg as per foxtel.com.au , where it can have 4 channels dedicated to one movied with 30 min offsets to start times. Sure its a limitation of satelites, but once you get 100000 viewers on AOL, its better to multicast it otherwise your routers are going to burn. (couldnt be bothered with the maths but its huge)
I really doubt you could scale 1.3m users at 512kbits each, its just not worth it.
Eventually things will scale well, but when they dont, you have to choose the next best thing thats technically possible.
Now re PAUSING, you can still achieve that via multicast, your 'client software' can keep downloading but 'cache it up' on disk. You could pause the whole show and have a 'copy' on your local cache, that might 'expire' in 24hrs, but still thats just as good as 'live real VOD', you just cache it before you wish to view it on the multicast network.
I want my GTV (google tv)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The telecoms can't get content from the distributors, while most foreign or independent films can't get carried by American distributors at all. Something is fundamentally wrong here.
Solution: Create a new market. Go directly to the original content creators. Start with a mix of independent and foreign films, independent and foreign networks (including news), and round it out with free-to-air satellite channels, public access productions, and pay-per-view programming.
Normally I don't watch any TV, as it is 99% junk. I attend quite a few art films. So if an IPTV service came along with the above features, I would definitely subscribe.
There is no shortage of available content. However there does seem to be a bottlneck which needs to be bypassed. If the legacy media giants don't want to play, then just leave them behind in the dust.
Geeks like us have always been the early adopters, which is why they should be focusing on us. Hell, we've been driving the PC hardware industry for years now starting way back with Doom. Here we are again at the advent of the IPTV industry with our downloads of Battlestar Galactica, chomping at the bit for legal downloadable content. Quite frankly its obvious there is a market, just nobody is willing to sell us the content in the format we would actually purchase (i.e. high-quality, DRM-free). Currently my on means of getting such content is through ripping my CDs and DVDs onto the computer. However, I'll give up the security and higher quality of an origianl copy if I can get a downloaded version of a movie or TV show at a reduced rate. Itunes figured this one out, although I believe their sales figures could be much higher if they'd set a lower pricepoint.
An alternative to outright selling me downloads of movies or episodes of shows is to just sell me the stations via a la carte subscriptions. For years we've been waiting for this to happen in the Cable TV industry, but its just not going that route. With IPTV, TV stations/channels can tack on an extra $x per month and make their content available to broadcast subscribers (similar to how broacast radio also "broadcasts" online) both through cable TV and online, eventually rolling over to IPTV completely. Or better yet, all the downloadable content as a benny like many broadband providers to with traditional dialup (aka, an added feature). Come to think of it, for most mainstreme television going IPTV may be the best value added benefit to come along in years, especially for their customers. I just hope it catches on....
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
There will always be a market for $200 million productions (as well as big-budget television shows). Why? Because with $200 million you can afford large numbers of people, each person working on a specific portion of the film. This (ideally) diverse group of people are a set of experts at what they do (including story development). Film-creation technology is improving, but unless the technology can actually replace a crowd of talented people, the home-made film (and mid-budget film) won't replace the big-budget production.
Look at the music industry. It's very easy for musicians to create top quality works in the home studio. Local concerts provide a way of getting the word out, that movies don't really have. People complain about the quality of popular music buch more than the quality of popular movies. Music compresses much smaller than movies, and even on a modem connection it doesn't take long to download. Still, indie music is probably less strong than it was before Napster came along. Why should movies do any better, when everything is working against them?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
media MAFIA (Movie and Film Industry Association) the companies just have to look into other countries. I am not talking about bollywood here (which produces more movie than anyone else, but most of them have questionable quality) France also is a huge television and movie producer, germany produces most of its tv content itself, and italy also does, at least France and Italy have very high quality standards, whereals germany has high output (mostly soaps, soap related stuff and sometimes gems and good comedies in between and excellent cartoon movies which are on the rough side of humor)
If those companies start to look outside of the US for content, they at least have some, and since most of this stuff produced outside of the US is sold only to one or two countries besides the country of origin they might be eager to hear about online distribution in the US or on a worldwide scale.
Let's imagine for a moment that I thought that knitting was the coolest thing. Were I to say, "Start offering stuff like darning and crochet...", you'd laugh in my face. Big, loud, throaty laughs, too, I'd reckon.
IP TV has the opportunity of satisfying micro-communities like anime and SciFi buffs (and, heck, knitting wonks), but to say that the 'big studios' will learn some sort of lesson from it is to completely misrepresent what they do and why they have so much money today. They don't care about narrowcasting because it doesn't get them where they want to be. If IP TV had heaps of viewers, they would care, but it doesn't, so they don't. It's another stupid idea, driven solely by technology, that has arrived stillborn.
when major studios own major nerd content such as stargate, family guy, simpsons, futurama, xfiles, star treks, farscape and whatever else you might think of wanting to snag couple of episodes off from then yeah, you might care if they don't want to play(in addition to that them having distribution deals for a lot of anime too).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If your BitTorrent client uploads the content (or chunks of it) you're downloading, it's most likely that you violate copyright laws. Some people can live with that, some not.