Slashdot Mirror
2008 - The Year Internet TV Became Mainstream?
revilo78 writes "Will 2008 be the year we can finally drop our expensive cable bills? It's sure looking like it with Joost constantly adding content, ABC announcing it will stream shows in HD, and media boxes such as the Apple TV becoming popular. Television networks finally seem willing and ready to distribute their shows on the web, and hardware manufactures are finally making easy-to-use media boxes that will bring the web to the living room. Do you think we're finally there, the internet-based TV-on-demand we've all been wanting?"
there are not enough people with fast enough internet and HD displays capable of taking advantage of it to make the advertising revenue work for it. most likely you'll see it as an expensive premium service a select few will adopt. so no, you won't be rid of those cable bills.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Goodbye to pricy cable, hello to expensive broadband! They'll get your money regardless.
IPTV isn't about Media Center computers. It's about the ability to connect and stream a broadcast. The reality is that Comcast could be doing it today for all you know with their On-Demand. It's an early implementation of a packet driven TV system.
If IPTV is to take off, setup boxes will come with a pre-configured (and probably remotely managed) list of channels. By changing channels, you close the connection to the previous channel and open a new one. New channels will be added by your IPTV provider, or in an ideal world, you can add them yourself. But, lets be honest. The media industry does not want us to have control over anything.
To reduce costs, channels will be multicast from some decentralized multicast. One server would multicast, and each lower network point would cache and multicast out. By doing this, they can reduce lag and delay, and ultimately cost of sending 2,000,000 unique streams vs 1 unique stream from the server, with the cost center being the last mile, where most of the cost is today anyhow.
Custom streaming IPTV will be further off. But, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, look for it.
As far as replacing cable, believe it or not more people I know are starting to use it like a DVR, since they can watch the show at a time of their choice and there are no fees. And don't underestimate the number of bored office workers out there, now able to see their favorite show at work rather than just read news articles.
The good news for the cable companies is that since they've expanded to providing internet connectivity, they get a cut of the profit regardless of whether what goes over their wires is analog or digital.
...
PATH train schedule online
Wow, you really need to get laid
The voice is in the past tense because it's showing what we could see as a headline in several years. It's grammatically correct.
It's going to be extremely expensive compared to the current cable broadcasting. For starters you won't be charged a flat fee for unlimited downloads like you are in "broadcast cable" TV. You will charged on a banding of minutes in the show (even if you don't watch it all) and it's popularity. So Greys Anatomy will be at a premium and The Red Green show will not. It will also be banded by time of day, day of week, seasonally, and sports will be insane.
The social response will be to group together to watch these shows to be more cost effective. The network response will be to push the prices even higher. You think $5 a movie was bad? Why not charge $10 for a football game? Or $100 for the SuperBowl?
There is absolutely no way that this is a move which will do anything but cost the consumer more money.
While the TV bill may be reduced to zero, the Cable bill (which is often through cable TV networks) is going to be increased such that a typical viewer who currently pays $100 a month for both can be expected to pay $150 for both and those who use the TV as a baby sitter will be paying in excess of $200 and more. Babysitters would be cheaper at this point.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
I would argue that a show distributed on the internet could be as valuable as a show broadcast. What does "valuable" mean? Sure, we all think about eventual DVD compilations and piracy. But it's the advertising that the broadcaster is concerned with, right? They shouldn't worry about limiting internet broadcast. They should be concerned about eliminating the fast-forward button.
Let's be honest. Most of us are lazy asses. If you knew you could go to any broadcaster's site and conveniently access anything to download for free even if it meant the commercials had to play, wouldn't you? I bet comfortably over 90% of the population would. And, no doubt, MSN and AOL would make it "extra convenient" to enable the user to do that. The current distribution of edited downloads would be marginalized. And with VCRs why did anybody ever buy a DVD compilation in the first place? In other words, if they could just distribute everything with commercials burned in, why wouldn't the same people still buy as many deluxe DVD compilation sets as before?
I think the problem is the laziness, greed, fear and lack of vision of the broadcasters and advertisers. Broadcasters have to convince advertisers that internet distribution makes sense. How hard can that be? They already rely on polls to set their advertising rates. Just do it. And advertisers have to admit and accept that even if the broadcaster has given up one stage of control, they are still delivering the eyes and ears promised in a slightly different way.
That's something that always annoyed me about the first international wave of stream some years ago. There was technical enthusiasm but it seemed like management treated it as an expensive toy in the basement. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I don't have to understand every word of a Paris stream to make out the words, "Coca Cola". It's a global company, I'm a potential customer, and it doesn't matter whether I'm sitting in Minnesota. I've just been served. I got the feeling broadcaster marketing was seldom aggressive enough in pushing that paradigm shift. Broadcasters, advertisers -- take stream and downloads seriously. Not as a threat. As an opportunity. And try to talk some sense into the content creators.