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A Look at IPTV
Q-Tip writes "Ars Technica has posted an introduction to IPTV, which is the TV programming technology AT&T (and formerly BellSouth) will be using to provide TV service over its next-gen optical network. The article covers how IPTV works and how AT&T and other providers will be able to provide more interactive services once their networks are up and running."
I don't want an interactive service. I want to passively sit on my butt and watch TV!
Saying it will work on the "next-gen optical network" doesn't provide a time line for someone as uneducated as myself. Could someone please put a rough time line on this?
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
This doesn't seem like a good idea. The bandwidth is STILL an issue and it's crippling HDTV signals still. Isn't this kind of a waste of time? Xserv
"I love lamp."
next-gen optical nework.
Nice! I was waiting for them to find something faster than slow old......light
No, Television is dying on its ass. Its got nothing to do with technology and everything to do with content.
Not wanting to throw the usual Slashdot cynicism about here, but 'TV is DEAD!!'
Even the dullest couch potatoes I know are turning off their TVs and finding more interesting things to do with life.
I must have heard it 20 times a week, "Wow there's nothing but shite on TV isn't there?". Maybe its the war and the depressing Orwellian propaganda? Maybe its the new depths advertising has sunk to blatently insulting the viewers self esteem? Maybe its that cheap reality TV has exhausted everyones patience?
What do kids talk about? Funny video clips they got off Flickr or YouTube, and more and more I hear adults talk about what they heard on the radio. Maybe radio is going to have a revival?
Personally I havent watched TV in over 4 months, not even casually, by accident. I haven't owned a TV in more than 6 years.
It will be interesting to see if this takes off from the google advertising angle. With tivo type profiling and now an ip address it would be a natural for them to very much want to be involved in providing the advertising to user of iptv. What is interesting is that in the their adwords system there is now user targeting by demographic, which, as far as I can tell, is based on the demographic of a site, but if the demographics of the actual tv viewer could somehow be ascertained it would pretty much turn tv advertising on its head.
Instead of channels instantly changing it's going to be *buffering* for a couple of seconds every channel I flip. No thanks.
Being an administrator of Cisco's existing IPTV solutions, I probably trust AT&T to do a better job.
Hell, MICROSOFT could do a better job than this.
Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP
I've been using TVoIP for a year an a half now.
I get Video on Demand, Radio, Broadcast TV and Internet over the ADSL with 2Mbps Internet while watching TV and 5Mbp while it's off (8Mbps is possible on the best lines right now)
All this and free off-peak and weekend calls and lower line rental from http://www.homechoice.co.uk/
But it's not that popular yet - the monopolistic Murdoch satellite provider we're stuck with wont flog the channels people want to Homechoice so the channels we can get are fairly limited. The only reason I have it is because I'd have to pay £220 for the first year and £80 a year after that for the priviledge of renting a satellite feed as I'm in a condo and cable haven't gone down our road yet.
IPTV is frightening Sky so they're buying into it big time right now.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
When the local office receives this request, it checks to make sure that the user is authorized to view the new channel, then directs the routers in the local office to add that particular user to the channel's distribution list. In this way, only signals that are currently being watched are actually being sent from the local office to the DSLAM and on to the user.
Sounds like if you change the 'channel' you will have to wait for it to load a few packets to get it started first, I don't see how it could be instantaneous or even quicker than a few seconds. But if most things were 'on-demand' it may not matter that much.
More competition will hopefully mean that our cable bills will go down. Wait and see...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You mean, like Belgians will resell German satellite smartcards to French users, so they can watch their soccer matches without needing an expensive Canal+ subscription ;-) ?
All these systems will cause the death of Free-To-Air TV. Even though FTA is mostly crap, it is still free.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
While the article provides a well-written guide to IPTV and how it works, I think most consumers would not find this an "introduction." Most average consumers have a hard time understanding that IPTV is not Internet TV...let alone MPEG-2, H.264, multicasting, DSLAM, etc.
Hate to break it to ya but this line is nearly as old as TV itself.
There is never anything on TV to watch but many will still watch something anyway. Face it, people like to complain but do nothing about it. They will still turn the same old shite on and just be content to bitch about it.
With hundreds of channels there is bound to be something on that is appealing enough to prevent most from turning the set off. With video on demand services and TIVO devices there are even more opportunities for TV to be part of people's lives.
The only way TV is going away is when we manage to convince people to call it something else. It will still have nothing for us to watch or do that we "want" to watch or do but we still will.
go figure
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
when coax cable got strung to his door.
This is old news to Canadians. I have had IPTV for a few years now and I like it. It is more than just TV it's got video on demand, internet, email and games. Other nice thing are interactive weather forecasts and local news. And there is no "buffering". The only thing that is annoying is that the menus load kind of like a website. All the text appears and the graphics follow a few seconds later. My provider Sasktel came and installed a free wireless router and wired every room with CAT5 jacks for free. What more could you ask for?
Why are audiences plummeting in all major TV markets? According to a recent survey, the average Brit now spends more time on-line than in front of the TV. Though how much of that on-line time is spent actually watching TV is open to debate. For me, quite a lot.
Not really comparable. Maginot's mandate was to build his line, not to remove it...
Without taking the time to elaborate on all of the parameters (this is a complex situation and it's too early in the AM here ...) all folks really need to know is that "broadband TV" is coming, and it is a *VERY* good thing.
... OF COURSE there are bugs in the current crop of offerings ... none of it is going to seriously damage the cablecos bottom-line ... YET. But you don't have to be Warren Buffett to see indicators are appearing like the hand writing on the wall. The stage of the game where small innovators test the market (Akimbo, etc.) has already past. The big boys with lots of cash are now wading into the pool. The train has left the station. Need a few more metaphors?
... or bundled services (voice/data/TV) for $49.95 a month ... you will hear the cableco executives screaming halfway around the globe. Yippee!
... and that they can deliver that product without giving the cable company (or the telco) a sniff of the fee. The status quo of the recent (and distant) past created a detente where no one was willing to cross this line. We are about to enter a "wild and wooly" phase wherein all bets are off.
... enough rambling ... I'm off to refill my coffee cup.
The confluence of technology development, trends in the entertainment industry (all kinds of trends: economic, demographic, etc.), government & regulatory evolution, and other forces are (admittedly) slowly but surely creating a vacuum that can only be filled by a "fourth provider" of television service. (In addition to OTA (over-the-air), DBS (direct-broadcast satellite), and cable.)
The cable television industry shares a good portion of the blame (or credit) for this situation, which will ultimately dig the grave for much of their own profits. Their stranglehold on most "in-home" entertainment - including the WWW - coupled with their buccaneer behavior trying to eat the telco's lunch (with IP phone service) have brought competitors out of the woodwork. And some of these competitors (like SBC/AT&T) come to play. Add to the mix the upward-spiraling cost of cable TV, and you have what business-people like to call "low-hanging fruit."
Before y'all get started
And of course, this is all "A Good Thing" (TM) because it will mean a good ol' fashioned PRICE WAR. How long since we've seen *that* happen in TV? Ever? When AT&T (or some other player with deep pockets) steps up to offer a viable TV service for $19.95 a month (a permanent, not a "promotional" price)
One more prediction: Watch for a la carte TV to become a reality in the next 2-3 years. The reason being that as all of this competition heats up, networks (think Turner or Discovery) will start to wake-up to the fact that there is a niche of viewers out there who would like to pay them directly for delivery of a reasonable-quality stream over the broadband connection they already have
Okay
See you space cowboy
The current Planet Earth series is great - must have cost a bomb and a lot of time to make.
;-)
Dr Who when it comes back is also very good.
Otherwise - not much worth watching. Better off going out cycling/karate/whatever.
Hmmm, someone who does martial arts, and has words like "Bomb" and "Martial" in his online posts. I wonder how long before the black helicopters arrive
Not all of us want to live under rocks. There are many good productions on TV; the issues revolve around their delivery.
I see TV becoming more akin to books, that is any place, any time delivery systems of information. What really does that mean:
That does not imply for all the fearmongers out there widespread copying etc. There are ways to make this vision work, but it has to be openly embraced by producers and distributors, not fought tooth and nail. All they need to actually look around. TV is starting to work this way, but because of people wanting it this way, not because of the producers' efforts. It's the reality of TiVos, downloading the media to your PSP to watch on a plane, or torrenting an episode that you might have missed (because the bastards pre-empted my coverage for some news crap I did not even care about).
That's the new reality. Green eggs and ham.
...tizzyd
With IPTV, it will be possible for the cable companies to log exactly what channels I watch when. What about privacy?
Well, don't worry. It will still be called free TV.
You'll have to pay a monthly fee to get it. But don't worry, that's just a fee for the technical distribution, it's not for the content!
Oh, and because of the necessary subscription you'll need to hand over your personal data. But don't worry, these will be treated in accordance with data protection laws. Sure! Honest!
And you need to buy a new settop box too, because the old one will no longer work.
Isn't progress beautiful?
From the article: This will allow a user to own a single DVR that can be controlled from any set in any room.
You mean like mythtv?
I bet any cable-tv/tv voting system is more 100% full proof than any diabold justice dept approved
voting system to vote in a 'illegal' presidente' that is part of a secret cult and CIA family.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Does anyone here note that my telco (formerly SBC, formerly Ameritech, now AT&T) has a monetary interest in Dish Network (formerly Echostar)? I bought DSL + landline + Dish satellite TV in one call to them back a year and a half ago, and am being charged on the same bill. Some points here: * Is there room for IPTV when satellite is ubiquitous, cheap, offers many channels and supports multi-room setups? * If IPTV is the wave of the future, does AT&T have a problem now that they own some of Dish, and were promoting it as a cable alternative? Or does Dish have a problem? ahref=http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051229/19 9211_F.shtmlrel=url2html-27661http://www.techdirt. com/articles/20051229/199211_F.shtml>
Well, dont shot commercials. During the time when everyone else is seeing them, buffer the next segment of the show. This should, in theory, allow one to stream HD content through a smaller bandwidth. It won't benifit the end user because there will still be dead air during broadcasted commercial breaks.
When do I get IPTV over my cable broad band which has (...estimates...) 10-fold the band width?
I figure I need about 150 Mbps into my home in order for me to satisfy my entire homes phone, tv and internet through IP. I assume the following: 1 HD TV stream for my family room, 4 HD streams (at times) for my bedroom because I will definately use IPTV with a PVR. 1 line of VoIP phone. Plus 10+ mbps for the several PCs in my home.
Guess I need giga-bit wiFi now. Whatever this IPTV set-top box is, it MUST HAVE vga output for my 19" LCD. I need a way to watch HD on my 19" LCD. I'd prefer not to but am willing to go through my computer. Anyone know of an HD capture card (that will hook up to an HD cable box instead of OTA HD)??
I know someone who worked for Kingston Communications when they rolled out their TV on demand service in Hull back in the mid-90s. The STBs had a 4Mb IP feed to them, but only 256k - 2Mb could be accessed by the customer depending on how much they paid. Kcom staff had access to the whole 4Mb. I would guess that that is the model that most providers will take. Time to dust off the CV...
I must admit, I'm always amazed by the slashdot articles talking about new and revolutionary internet technology that everybody else in the western world has been using for years...
Here in France, we've had IPTV over DSL lines for quite some time now. Free (ISP) started upgrading its network to ADSL2+ with 20Mbps access nearly 2 years ago. And in Paris and Pau, you can subscribe to FTTH with 100Mbps symetrical.
Interactive TV is nothing new to us, as we can tap directly into the tiple play modem and a) retreive the TV via the ethernet/wifi/usb connexion and display it on the computer (so no tv card, no analogical conversion, no loss of quality), or connect the modem to the computer, and browse our files, watch divx, listen to our music collection, display photo albums, listen to web radios or watch web tv streams, and with a few mods to the software (based on the FOSS VLC player) have basic web browsing, directly on the TV.
OK, your computer has to be on, but it can be anywhere in the house.
So yeah, IPTV is great, but damn, I can't believe you're only just beginning to talk about it on "next gen networks" that everyone else already has...
if they bring Seinfeld back. Then it can be a show about nothing where you do nothing too!
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Although in an average week there's only 2-3 good shows ... but I have to watch 6-8hrs a day to make sure I don't miss those gems.
FYI, AT&T is actually SBC. For some reason they thought it'd be a good idea to buy AT&T and assume their name (at least, that's how it was presented in the news).
I hate AT&T, but I've had nothing but good experiences with SBC. It's confusing!
While cable networks like Comedy Central, Scifi, HBO, Showtime, et. al. are producing increasingly popular cutting-edge fair, the networks are producing increasingly embarrassing reality TV shows and bland sitcoms that no one watches (when is the last time you tuned in to NBC's "powerhouse" Thursday night lineup?).
And, not only this, but the networks are also facing increasing competition from the internet, an embryonic internet TV, 24-hour cable news, video games, and "video on demand" services such as the iTunes (which makes their "must see TV" more into "see it whenever you want to TV").
The old model of everyone tuning into the big three networks, and them delivering you content on THEIR schedule with conventional advertising, is probably coming to an end. Good riddance!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So AT&T wants to have a tiered internet service so they can compete with television, not just VoIP?
I would be rather depressed to hear that I'm not getting the bandwidth I thought signed up for because they would rather I was watching Real Bachelor-Survivor Idol: Zimbabwe.
I subscribe to an IPTV service in the UK called Homechoice. They've been running for about a decade now.
The presentation is much like any other cable TV system, but with a few added extras. I get the standard bunch of UK digital TV channels, plus a bunch of extra video on demand channels. There are variable packages - if I were paying for a more expensive package (I'm on the cheapest) I'd be getting their "C1" channel, and could pick to watch any episode from about 2 dozen different series seasons, such as Futurama, classic Star Trek, Buffy, Friends, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, etc. That's their entertainment on-demand channel... There's also V:MX which is on-demand music, Scamp, for kids, and Discovery Factual On Demand, amongst others. Naturally there's also pay-for mainstream movies available too.
All this kind of stuff is of course standard on many cable systems - I had much the same on Rogers in Toronto.
One thing above Rogers is a feature called "Replay TV". On certain channels you'll see an "r" logo next to programs in the guide - those programs get stored for a week for you to replay when you feel like watching them. This is my favourite feature - it almost turns it into a DVR - although I don't get to choose which programs they record.
All this through my phone line, so I didn't have to get the road dug up for the cable company to put a line in. It works using ADSL, and the set-top box is my ADSL modem, so I just plug my computer into it and surf away. They currently offer up to 8mbit data connections, although they've got faster (24mbit) ADSL stuff in the pipeline.
When my telephone company (MTS, here in Canada) decided to offer television, we knew it'd be our way to get out of the cable TV monopoly run by Shaw (also canadian). We didn't like satellites because the quality was determined on the weather, and with our winters, it was not a good idea sometimes.
So we (my family and I) got it and we loved it. It was cheaper prices, great quality and easy to use interface. Also the fact that it ran on linux, has weather info and all the shiney bullcrap that makes things "interesting" was a plus.
That being said, there are some issues with IPTV as I've found out through talking to people. While I don't have these issues since I'm basically sitting right on top of the junction box for this whole section of the grid, other people have told me quite explicitly their gripes of the service.
One major one is artifacting. While I've not experienced it, I know of people who have. This is where the screen gets digitized and cubes show up all over the place if there's a quick change in scenes in a tv show, or inbetween commercials.
Another major issue is bandwith bottlenecking, again, which I haven't experienced. See, since they offer you a delicious package, most people get DSL on top of the TV package (round it out with long distance and you save a decent amount). However, people have noticed that when you're downloading something big (Let's say that new Linux distro just came out and you've gotta get everything to go with it) the menu slows down, and channels take a few seconds to appear.
There's other smaller ones, but they all deal with garbage data (Shows are mislabelled, channel feeds are off by hours if not days, etc.) which is caused by lack of bandwith.
While very the two major issues are minor issues seperately, if you've got both together it can make for a rather frustrating experience. So there's downsides (digital garbage) and plus sides (cheaper tv with the same packaged as other more expensive mediums). All in all, it's a decent service for its cost.
I, for one, welcome our new telephonovision overlords.
I Lost My Virginity While Waiting for BSD to Compile.
There's been IPTV in Europe for some time now. Spain started to have IPTV more than a year ago and I'm prety sure that Spain wasn't the first one to have IPTV in Europe. The bad thing is that ISP over here are too lazy to put HDTV in IPTV for now :-/ I hope that changes soon.
"next-gen optical network"
I'm not sure what they are waiting for. ADSL2+ over copper can go 9.8 Mbps at 15,000 feet - enough for one HDTV channel (at a time), downloading the latest Linux distribution and making 10 VOIP phone calls ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Oh, that's right - they have to share copper but not fiber with competitors.
Due to the incompatibility between free software and the digital restrictions management that six major American motion picture studios impose, MythTV is not compatible with high-definition streams on pay channels.
Is there room for IPTV when satellite is ubiquitous, cheap, offers many channels and supports multi-room setups?
Consumer satellite TV doesn't do video on demand, which Comcast has been heavily advertising in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
One big hurdle with IPTV is channel changes (surfing).
With the newer video codecs, the GOP sizes are large (in the 1-2 second range).
So you might have to wait 2 seconds for a channel's initial IFrame to come in.
This scenario is completely unacceptable to the normal analog TV viewer.
Is this going to degrade the quality of the image even further than digital cable already does with all its compression artifacts?
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
Cable companies are doing IPTV as well, you just don't notice because it's on their transport end. The company I work for began rolling this out about 1.5 years ago, the non-local programming is carried across our fiber ring until it gets to the headend that needs to deliver it across the cable where it is modulated into a QAM and received by the set-top-box. True it's not IPTV the entire way but it is forseeable that at some point it may be.
IPTV forum in London
Disclosure: I work for Myrio
If you post it, they will read.
HD on the net already exists, there is a company www.entice.tv that is putting out internet porn. Granted, the site doesn't work, they have lost 20 of 21 programmers in the last year and the owner is a psycho napoleanic freak. The best part is finding out that Entice.tv and Lasoo.com are both owned by the same company, and that while the porn side is moving forward rapidly, the non-porn side (entice=porn, lasoo=Standard hollywood pictures) is lagging far behind, it appears that Hollywood is more leery of new technology than the porn industry. Wonder what the hollywood moguls would think if they knew the two sides of the company share an office...
DRM straight to my TV! Yes!
How many products called "IPTV" are there, anyway? Cisco has a VoD system called IPTV that uses/used MPEG1. The server comes/came in the same case as a PIX 520 or a LocalDirector.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is the beauty of laptop computers... you can spend your time online in front of the TV now. Slashdot makes for great reading during commercials, no? :)
So after RTFA'ing I'm convinced that these stem to stern networks that are heavy on multicast are bound the be the first places to deploy IPv6 networks. In fact, that may be the whole break that IPv6 needs. The Telcos will want to run an IPv6 network end to end so that your set-top box and VOIP router are addressable. I'd imagine they might even decide to encapsulate your IPv4 internet connection in their IPv6 network to take advantage of all of the additional QOS and other features it has to offer. IPv6, meet your killer app. ::Digitac
You heard it here first.
OK, but it seems MythTV isn't compatible with IPTV. One of the main components of the MythTV setup is the video capture card. So you run an analog signal into it and it digitizes it.
Well, OK. I see that you could connect your MythTV box between your set-top box and your TV. But isn't it less efficient to convert the digital signal to analog, convert it back to digital to record it, and then convert it back to analog to watch it?
My nephew recently got upgraded to a system where they ran fiber to his house, then cat5 cables to the rooms where the TV set-top boxes were. It looks an awful lot like IPTV to me. He was a little bit bummed because the PVR that he had with his previous satellite system didn't work any more, and asked about a PVR for the new system. I did a little bit of research into IPTV and figured this should be a no-brainer. You should be able to plug a Linux box into the hub just as easily as a set-top box. I figured there should be some open source software that emulates a set-top box and allows you to watch TV on your Linux box's monitor.
But I couldn't find any. The tech support guy at the provider says they're working on a PVR solution, but it won't be available for "a couple of months". I figured maybe this is just new technology and we hackers haven't had time to come up with an open source solution yet.
But then these guys post that they've had IPTV for YEARS now. So that can't be the problem. I can't see how it would be so hard to capture a few sessions and decode the protocols from the set-top box to the provider, and the protocols are all documented in RFCs and linked from wikipedia. So why can't I find any open source IPTV PVR software? Do I just suck at searching? Are there legal issues? Compatibility issues with different providers? Not enough interest yet and I should just build it myself?
Actually, with the solution that AT+T has chosen, there is barely any lag between changing channels. The Microsoft TV solution (see brochure has a concept called "Instant Channel Change". I can't tell you how it works, but I can tell you i've seen it, used it and it does work, and its pretty damn fast.
Interactive pr0n.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmon ey/12sliver.html?ex=1299819600&en=b93a73a9426aeb16 &ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
And for those who won't RTFA:
"ANDY STEWARD, a successful London computer consultant and sailboat racer, became exasperated when trying to watch his favorite sport on television. There were a few half-hour recaps of some major sailing races, but they were always shown late at night.
Mr. Steward looked into creating a sailing channel on the Sky satellite service in Britain, but his idea was soon dead in the water. He would have had to pay £85,000 (nearly $150,000) to start the channel and £40,000 a month (nearly $70,000), as well as the production costs. That was a lot of money for an untested concept.
But in January, he did introduce a sailing channel, one that is rapidly filling with sailing talk shows, product reviews, programs on sailing techniques and, most important, intense coverage of the sort of smaller races that don't make it onto traditional television.
His new channel, however, will not be available over the air. And it won't be found on cable or even on satellite, at least not yet. The channel, called Sail.tv, is broadcast only on the Internet, which enables video to reach a much larger worldwide audience at a much lower initial cost than a satellite channel. Because "we didn't have any idea how big the audience would be," Mr. Steward said, he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible. "Internet television is an investment we can grow into," he said.
In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.
Perhaps more interesting -- and, arguably, more important -- are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.
In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase "the long tail" to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.
Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop -- think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.
"The next wave of media is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests," said John Hendricks, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, which is developing a series of specialized video services. "Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack -- because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines."
Already, there are specialized video services serving hundreds of specialties, including poker, bicycling, lacrosse, photography, vegetarian cooking, fine wine, horror films, obscure sitcoms and Japanese anime. There is also a growing market for Webcasts of local news and entertainment from every country and in every language, aimed at expatriates.
"We're adding two or three new channels a week," s
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Digital TV actually does take 2-3 seconds to do this (well, at least Illico does).
Videotron has this now (of course, a certain minimum of the chosen channels have to be Canadian):
You can customize your package by picking and choosing from a wide range of specialty channels, including channels dedicated entirely to movies, sports, international programs and music. And if you change your mind, you can change your channel lineup as you please
http://www.videotron.com/services/en/television/5
Is there nowhere in the US that has this yet?
I broke my ciggerate, coffee, and Tv addictions. I replace it all with /.. Now, if I can just break my slashdot addiction.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I want to use my computer instead. Settopboxes come with moronic limitations (one channel per box, no way to record stuff).
Is there any chance that that will become possible, or will the signal be buried ten feet deep in DRM and smartcards?