The Apple Broadcast Network

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."

Comments

How they plan to pay for it?

[ravenspear]

They've already "paid for it" with the bucketloads of cash they've made from selling all the devices.

Re:How they plan to pay for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using my rough calculations, with $100 bills, $900 million is about 1 cubic meter in volume. Apple makes about $8 billion in profit per year. 1 bucket (unit) is 0.01818 m^3. This is about 480 bucketloads of cash (roughly 80 tonnes). Really, at this scale they should be thinking of using barrels or truckloads to move their cash. Even a pipeline would be more feasible than buckets.

Over what bandwidth?

[tftp]

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.

Re:Over what bandwidth?

[fredmosby]

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.

Re:Over what bandwidth?

[tftp]

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.

Re:Over what bandwidth?

[FuckingNickName]

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.

Re:Over what bandwidth?

[Vellmont]

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.

Drivel..

[Wovel]

I told the firehose this link-bait was stupid, not sure why it did not listen. TFA article does not make any sense. There is no meat to it. It does not offer any information. The entire thing is pointless.

BTW there is nothing in the article that is not in the summary, so feel free to comment away without clicking. Not clicking is actually preferable in this case. I would dispute the point of the article, but since it makes no point, it is difficult to dispute. It is also, umm, pointless....

exaggerated numbers

[phantomfive]

As often happens when someone is trying to support their position, these numbers are exaggerated. A lot of people have bought two iPhones, so there really aren't that many iPhones out in the wild. The phones are not all in the US, either, and an iPod touch with nothing but wifi may not be the best media delivery system.

In other words, if your business plan (or anything real, other than a slashdot story) depends on these numbers, you better dig deeper so you know what you are really dealing with.

Huh?

[Scareduck]

How do you get from "people own devices made by X" to "X has a network"? Dumbest. Story. Idea. Ever.

TVs can be watched by many

[LoverOfJoy]

The whole family (which was larger on average back then compared to now) would gather around a single TV to watch together back in 1959. Iphones and even Ipads aren't really conducive to shared viewing like that.

Re:OUseless without an unlimited data plan

[PenguSven]

nobody wants to pay to download Wired magazine's 500 megabyte iPad edition (which is what happens when you cancel flash support and leave everyone scrambling).

Two things...

1. Apple never indicated that Flash would be supported on it's iPhoneOS devices, so how can they cancel support for something they never supported?
2. How is it Apples fault that Adobes "solution" for a lack of flash, is to bundle a heap of IMAGESinto an App?

Re:OUseless without an unlimited data plan

[node 3]

Maybe Apple should have allowed Flash to run on the iPad then?

There is nothing about the iPad app that couldn't have been accomplished with either HTML5 or as a native iPad app without resorting to images. The reason the Wired app uses images is that that's how Adobe decided to solve the InDesign -> iPad workflow. This solution is very Adobe. They make great creative tools, but horrible end-user presentation tools. Adobe Reader and Flash are prime examples of this.

As for allowing Flash, had the Wired App been a Flash app, it would have been smaller in size, but awful in interaction and performance. Also, those that say things like "Apple should allow Flash" seem to be ignorant of the fact that Flash is not on a single handheld device, except as a very recent beta for Android. A beta which by all accounts is atrocious.

At the moment they say they are against Flash but the problem is, whats the alternative?

Cocoa Touch on the iPhone OS. As well as HTML5. There are zero cases where Flash is technologically better than both of those.

HTML5 is still too much in it's infancy to be an acceptable alternative

On mobile devices, Flash is much, much worse. Also, HTML5 is on its ascendancy, meaning that it's improving, and doing so swiftly. Flash is relatively stagnant, and there's no indication that current handheld devices will fare well with Flash, even as the awful beta version is improved over the Summer and into the Fall.

and things like this 500mg iPad magazine shows that the other option isn't a good option since the new data plans listed are what? 2 gigs max I think before extra charges?

The Wired iPad app is not large because it's not in Flash, it's large because it contains videos and flat images. The videos in the app take up about 100MB, which is less than the PNGs, but still significant.

As for data plans, you can't even download the app over 3G. Apps larger than a certain size (I think 20MB) cannot be directly downloaded over 3G, only WiFi. Given that most everyone with an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone have WiFi, and that their device spends a significant amount of time on WiFi, and that the PC they connect their device to has either WiFi or an ethernet connection to the Internet, the caps on 3G service are not a big deal. Hell, in a pinch you could walk into an Apple Store and use their WiFi. I'm sure they'd be happy to let you use it to download a large app.

So 4 magazines and there goes your bandwidth and you have to pay more to surf the internet or only download the magazines when your on a wifi-only link (which kinda kills the whole 3g network concept).

That the coming 3G data cap for the largest standard plan only covers the data for four magazines (which you can't even download over 3G anyway), means that the whole idea of having 3G on an iPad is a flawed concept? Do you really think people would be downloading such large apps over 3G, if it were even possible, on a regular basis? If someone feels the need to download more than four 500GB magazine apps per month over 3G, and such large app downloads are allowed over 3G, these people can buy additional bandwidth at $10/GB. Not the most economical solution, but if someone is crazy enough to rely solely on 3G for such large transfers, what's another Hamilton here and there?

In the end at the worst case is that Apple should allow at least a watered down version of Flash to run since it would be better then nothing and then make it obsolete when a better technology shows up.

Apple notoriously leaves behind technology that is seen as either on the out, or as something which compromises the overall user experience, and it has served Apple very well. Flash falls into both of those categories, and as such it's futile to expect Apple to support it. It's also far from clear that supporting Flash would be to Apple's benefit, and a watered-down version would be even worse.