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The Apple Broadcast Network

Posted by timothy on from the interesting-future-ahead dept.

Hodejo1 writes "In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it."

6 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Over what bandwidth? by tftp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    s of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.

    The 3G connectivity is not sufficient for watching video in volume comparable to TV. TV bandwidth is essentially free (a true one-to-many broadcast,) whereas 3G is not (it's limited and shared.)

    Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.

    1. Re:Over what bandwidth? by fredmosby · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I haven't watched 'traditional' television since I discovered hulu.com and bought a computer to drive my HDTV. I can't believe I used to be willing to make an appointment to watch a TV show.

      I agree about the 3G though. Cell phone networks have been slow to realize that they need to develop a high speed high bandwidth data only network and deploy it everywhere.

    2. Re:Over what bandwidth? by tftp · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Cell phone networks have been slow to realize that they need to develop a high speed high bandwidth data only network and deploy it everywhere.

      Laws of physics may be against them. If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps) (which is about half of what broadcast digital TV uses - 19+ Mbps) and if you have 10,000 (10^4) viewers in service area of each cell site then you need roughly (10^4 * 10^7) = 10^11 bps. If we assume s/n = 20 dB that requires 10^11 / 6.65 = 11.5 * 10^9 Hz, or about 12 GHz of bandwidth. That can't be done on a carrier that is around 2 GHz! Variations of multicasting could be used to reduce that number somewhat, but it's a lot in any case, even if you reduce the bit rate at the client. At best you could achieve some mediocre reliability of a small picture for a limited number of clients. You can't get to the target bit rate without going into millimeter wave, and that isn't going to work due to poor penetration of buildings. And the root cause of all that trouble is that indeed "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with magnetic tapes." Broadcast TV delivers an incredible amount of bits per second, even though each client gets exactly the same bits as any other client.

    3. Re:Over what bandwidth? by FuckingNickName · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a radio ham and general "get off my lawn!" sort of person, I still feel guilty when I catch up to some TV programme online. There's something very wasteful (at an instant) about using a one-to-one link for what should have been multicast/broadcast.

      It's really weird to see more recently arrived 'net users not even stop to contemplate bandwidth allocation. Or throw away food or packaging. The trend's reversing, but at a snail's pace. We can assume there is an infinite amount of sunlight (beyond Earth) - anything else is something we're quite fortunate to have right now.

    4. Re:Over what bandwidth? by Vellmont · · Score: 4, Interesting


      If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps)

      Straight off, you're off by a factor of 10. Streaming video can quite easily be compressed down to 1 Mb/second corresponding to about the quality of SDTV. Since you'd only then require 1/10th of the bandwidth, that means only 1.2 ghz.

      --
      AccountKiller
  2. Also by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People don't buy phones to watch TV. They buy, well, TVs.

    I do not get this idea that retards in the press have that TVs and computers are going to go away and be replaced with phones. No, they aren't. It isn't a matter of technology, it is a matter of convenience and features. Yes, modern smartphones have no problem displaying SD video, and you can surf the web on them. No, that doesn't mean you want to use only them.

    I just bought a new TV, it is a nice 46" LCD TV. Why did I do that, if my phone could play media? Because I want a 46" TV. When I want TV I want to sack out on my couch and have a nice large screen to watch on. I do not want to have to hold a phone right up to my face to see what is going on. For that matter I don't even want to watch on my computer. My computer has a nice screen, and it is plenty large for using close up, but I don't want to sit in my computer chair all the time. Likewise, it wouldn't work well to move the system out in to the living room and try to use it there. Hence, I have a TV. Even though I have other devices that could technically fulfill its function, they do not have the features, namely the size, that I want.

    I certainly think people will continue to consume media on their portable devices. After all, if you are in the doctor's office waiting it is convenient to have a device in your pocket that can entertain you. However that doesn't mean it'll become the primary or major way people get their media.

    A big problem, in terms of streaming to mobile phones, is that pesky little thing called Shannon's Law. It states that the amount of information you can get in a given channel equals the bandwidth (in Hz) of the channel times the log of the signal to noise ratio. Well this is a real problem for high speed sustained wireless. The frequencies you are working with aren't that wide. When you are working in the 1900MHz range, you can only have channels that are tens of MHz wide. You can't have 1GHz channels or anything. Also, because of the low signal levels (-80dBm or less generally) your SNR sucks. 20dB at best, and it can be as low as 6dB for GSM. That equals not a whole lot of bandwidth. Now it can be fine when people use it in spurts. You allow someone to use a bunch of channels and get a big transfer, then someone else can use them. However if everyone is trying to sustain downloads, as is the case in streaming media, you simply run out of bandwidth.

    Unfortunately, just upping the frequency isn't a solution either. The higher the frequency, the less penetrating power it has, and the more line of sight it is. A 100GHz signal could have great bandwidth, but won't even go through a wall. So in the frequency ranges that are useful, there's just only so much bandwidth you get.

    As such, you aren't likely to see anything replace TV and cable/fibre as the main video content delivery for most people. It is simply a nice way to watch. Phones will remain a peripheral device, used occasionally but not the main thing.