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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."
all my tv content already comes through the internet...
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.
as long as it will not be televised.
Sence it is Internet you can loop a annoying but funny thing like another flash of the Numa Numa song and just call it TV...
I don't see why TV over IP is needed. The infrastructure to deliver TV via cable already exists. For people who have broadband via cable, they would just be getting what they already could. Seems like reinventing the wheel. And besides that, if it's streaming from a server, unlike standard cable all channels will not be sent at once in order to save bandwidth. 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's valuable information to advertisers, and could be much more accurate than Nelsien ratings. I really think at some point this will happen if this tachnonlgy becomes popular. I, for one, do not welcome our new IPTV voyeur overlords.
AOL/TW resulted in the largest write-down in corporate history - $135 billion in losses. This is "starting to make sense"??
The technology behind Video on Demand is useful enough that even if the "on Demand" part isn't exposed to the customer, eventually it will become the backbone of the cable infrastructure. The idea of streaming shows off of a hard drive sitting at the head end and digitally inserting local commercials, etc. is a good one, and interactive commercials ("click here to purchase!" or "here let me run this ActiveX control on your TV") are the wave of the future, for better or for worse.
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
I know its in the 'wierdo' catagory and not 'sex drugs rocknroll' content.
But christian tv etc... are BIG money, or at lest BIG audiences.
Right away you have 1.1 billion customers
Im sure Mel would pony up a consortium
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.savetz.com/mbone/ch9.html
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/674/4.html
broadcast IP
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
65535 channels and nothing on...
KDDI Hikari & SoftbankBB. I kinda collect internet connections.
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 must know all kinds of people who would love a platform to put all kinds of original video content out there. There's plenty of Creative Commons stuff - Why don't they just let people put up their own stuff?
Can't have the little people thinking they can be a TV station, I guess.
But improvements like these can happen only if content providers - media companies and movie studios like Disney - play along.
Once again, we see the problem of media consolidation. We don't even consider the possibility that *gasp* someone other than Disney could provide content worth watching. There are only 4 media conglomerates left, and they're all in bed with each other. None of them is going to try and get a jump on the new IPTV (or other) market, because they've all agreed that they don't feel like it. That's what being a cartel means.
They, because they have been allowed vertical monopolies (AOL/Time Warner) and government-supported monopolies on content (copyright) are able to SINGLE HANDEDLY HOLD BACK TECHNOLOGY.
This is not Promoting the Progress of Science or the Useful Arts.
I didn't used to be opposed to copyright, but the more I see, the more I wonder if it causes more problems than it's worth.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
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"
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.
So do I, except it's legal.
Seriously, I tried this service a while back and it works really well. So far I belive it only works on Windows, although Real has released a DRM-enabled client for Linux for quite some time ago. I know you hear DRM and groan - the service is worth the cost however. I believe it's $13/month with unlimited viewing of as many movies as you can download. The movies "expire" but that is expected - but they offer a live feed of the Starz channel along with it.
Almost as good as Netflix or Blockbuster online. Don't even have to send anything back. When it expires, you just can't play it. I think HBO should offer the same type of service, but they are owned by Time Warner (my local cable provider). Shame too, they have the most content and offer the most channels.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I'm currently working at Belgacom, Belgium's biggest telco, they'll be soon launching their IPTV system and offered everybody a demo of the system.
Well, I must say I really do not see how they'll ever make it happen if they keep it like it was shown.
Quality wise it is just as good as any other digital signal you can think of, satellite or terrestrial DVB, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But as the article (or the summary, this is slashdot) says, the big problem is in content.
They provide exactly the same channels as you get on cable here, and belgium has a 99,99% coverage of cable (and the other 0,01% don't even get ADSL).
When I asked about the price their answer was "about the same as cable". The only 'real' advantage is the possibility of paying to watch recent movies, you pay 2,5 per movie and have the right to watch it during a 24hs period. This is exactly the same as if you rent the film on your video store, just that you do not have to move from home.
Also, you can only watch IPTV on -one- television at the time, as the signal takes approximately 3Mb/s of bandwith, which also means that unless you get a really high speed ADSL, you cannot use your ADSL for anything than watching TV while the TV is on.
Oh, really? Whowoulddhavethought?[/sarcasm]
I work for a company that launched an IPTV service about 4 years ago. Aside form lots of porn (come on, what is the #1 advantage of not having to go to a rental and face live clerks?) content was mostly B movies and stuff.
Funny thing is, it wasn't security or piracy the content providers were concerned about. They simply didn't think it would be a market large enough to "waste" their blockbusters on.
Remember, that was four years ago. Thinks have changed a little, and we're about to re-launch the service. Let's see how it goes this time around.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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.