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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?"
OH GOD IT'S A TIME PARADOX
2008 - The Year Internet TV Became Mainstream?
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.
People who watch a lot of TV over the internet are no doubt going to experience a fairly annoying problem fairly quickly.
TV over the internet will push anyone far over the so-called standard deviation from mean internet usage; HD over the internet, especially high quality HD, will bring the utter wrath of cable modem ISPs... especially if you decide to forego cable TV service as a result.
Also watch out for a huge upsurge in packet prioritizing - as in all but blocking TV-over-internet sources outside your ISP's network.
This is where secret ISP "bandwidth hog" limits and non network neutrality are guaranteed to hobble the next big thing.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It's already pretty trivial. Welcome to my living room. I use giganews, a pay usenet service that gives phenomenal throughput. I'm able to download at a sustained, average speed of 10-15mbps to my university internet connection, for any file on usenet. Giganews has 120 day retention, so just about any episode of a popular tv show in the last year can usually be found. Almost any popular movie can be found as well, and you can download it in minutes.
Since it is a pay service, with an SSL protected link to my HTPC that downloads this stuff, I am unlikely to be sued. Only giganews knows what I download, and they claim to not keep records. No third parties (such as RIAA/MPAA sniffers) can tell what I am downloading. This is vastly superior to bittorrent and other P2P services. As much as I download, there's a significant chance I could have been sued by now had I used the "free" P2P services.
Yes, I am technically a pirate. Usually, however, I download TV shows that I *could* have seen on my fuzzy analog cable. Instead, I get an HDTV rip made from someone's computer who lives in an area where this show is broadcast in HD.
I get things that I CAN'T pay for : for instance, the last 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica were shown in High Definition on a Canadian TV station. I was able to download these.
Stargate Atlantis is also available in High Def (the sci-fi channel is NOT, even on satellite or premium cable packages) including 10 episodes that are unaired in the United States.
While you may find fault in my taste in TV, the quality is incredible - the PC is connected to a large 1080p HDTV via a digital HDMI cable.
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.
but here in Belgium we're still paying 50$ per month for a ridiculously fast (download speed at least) connection with 10Gb/month bandwith limit (you can get up to 50Gb per month, going to about 80$/month i think and that's about it). with that kind of limits, i doubt we'll be streaming a lot of tv, we've got enough problems planning how to use the little bandwith we get, imagine if we started streaming tv... (the penalty for exceeding the limit is smallband internet, modem speeds and zero reliability of the connection, even trying to receive your e-mail hardly works when you're on smallband...)
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.
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PATH train schedule online
Wow, you really need to get laid
> my university internet connection... [I watch TV all day]... Battlestar Gallactica... Stargate Atlantis... [All I do is watch TV]...
ShooterNeo, this is your Physics professor. Haven't seen you in class in a while. And your lab partner is worried. For your own sake, please, turn off the TV and re-engage society.
Regards,
Professor Harrington
I live in Europe, but I like The Colbert Report. With Internet-TV this seems to be no problem at all, because the Internet has no barriers. Perhaps I could watch the show on my cellular phone? Think again.
You can watch the Colbert report for example via iTunes. This means: You can watch the show only if you live in the United states. In Europe there is no Colbert Report in the Itunes Store. They don't want my money.
OK, but there is this fabulous new service 'Joost'. They have a deal with Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central. But the Comedy Central shows are not available for European Joost costumers.
But there is MotherLoad, the streaming platform of comedy central. For now I can watch the Colbert Report via Motherload. Quite a TV experience. They cut the show in 5 peaces. I can put several parts of the show on the playlist, but after the first party it won't start the second part until I choose it manually. The advertising is working. While you can't understand Steven Colbert without pumping up the volume - the advertisement is really loud. You can't skip this part and it is always the same.
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.
1998 was the year for that, IIRC. And good riddance.
Will 2008 be the year of going for walks and reading books? Not probably.
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.
Sanctuary is trying the Internet-only approach to TV distribution. It stars Amanda Tapping (Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1) and some other familiar faces. You can buy DRM-free 480p and 720p downloads or watch the Youtube video for free (Sanctuary Fans has a link to that).
It's a very cool show and could easily be picked up by broadcast TV if they wanted to deal with the nuisance involved. I'm hoping they're successful.