Disclaimer: I work for a small rural telco who is rolling out IPTV in a few weeks. My responses are based on my personal experience.
"But will government, cable distributors and Hollywood allow it?"
I don't envy my manager and the VP who have had to negotiate the contracts with the content producers. When they see the letters IP behind TV, they immediately think, "OMG our content will go on the int0rnet!!!!!!!!111" As it stands right now content producers make it much more difficult for IPTV companies to carry their content than cable companies by making us prove the security of our infrustructure and put encryption in place before they'll sign the dotted line.
As far as local government, the city stands behind the competition that it will foster. Besides, if a cable company can offer VoIP, why can't we offer IPTV?
I am very interested in seeing what MS can do to overcome bandwidth concerns at the backbone, ISP and user level (TFA only eludes to it).
Depending on Microsoft's exact strategy, they might not even really care about bandwidth. Chances are they'd be the middleware and user interface, not the transport.
As things are with IPTV now, you get your MPEG off the satellite and local channels off-air, shape/encode them at a specific and constant rate, then ship them out multicast across your transport. Multicast has the advantage in that it only takes up the bandwidth for a specific stream once; you just tell your transport that you want to begin listening to it. (Think analog tuning for digital streams)
As far as last mile bandwidth is concerned, we're going to be deploying with ADSL2+ which goes up to 24Mb, with VDSL2 just around the corner, which will probably go up to around 40-50Mb in the real world.
Will this eventually be a separately managed "Internet" bridged at the DSLAM or ISP level?
We're going to be offering the triple play: voice, video and data, and it will all come over the same port on our DSLAMs.
We looked in to WebTV like features when we were first getting started, but it's just too lame right now to actually give it to people. We will, however, use a walled garden concept of WebTV; just a few pre-defined buttons that show you webpages that have the weather, local news, etc.
Will it run Linux? Err...
Our set tops do. There's something especially cool about being able to ssh in to your TV.:-)
IPTV is still totally bleeding edge. There's a lot of companies out there, but none of them really know how to work together, and the integration definitely lacks elegance in some areas. Heck, according to our vendors, our little company is the first in the nation to get our combination of hardware with the latest'n'greatest software up and running.
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Disclaimer: I work for a small rural telco who is rolling out IPTV in a few weeks. My responses are based on my personal experience.
:-)
"But will government, cable distributors and Hollywood allow it?"
I don't envy my manager and the VP who have had to negotiate the contracts with the content producers. When they see the letters IP behind TV, they immediately think, "OMG our content will go on the int0rnet!!!!!!!!111" As it stands right now content producers make it much more difficult for IPTV companies to carry their content than cable companies by making us prove the security of our infrustructure and put encryption in place before they'll sign the dotted line.
As far as local government, the city stands behind the competition that it will foster. Besides, if a cable company can offer VoIP, why can't we offer IPTV?
I am very interested in seeing what MS can do to overcome bandwidth concerns at the backbone, ISP and user level (TFA only eludes to it).
Depending on Microsoft's exact strategy, they might not even really care about bandwidth. Chances are they'd be the middleware and user interface, not the transport.
As things are with IPTV now, you get your MPEG off the satellite and local channels off-air, shape/encode them at a specific and constant rate, then ship them out multicast across your transport. Multicast has the advantage in that it only takes up the bandwidth for a specific stream once; you just tell your transport that you want to begin listening to it. (Think analog tuning for digital streams)
As far as last mile bandwidth is concerned, we're going to be deploying with ADSL2+ which goes up to 24Mb, with VDSL2 just around the corner, which will probably go up to around 40-50Mb in the real world.
Will this eventually be a separately managed "Internet" bridged at the DSLAM or ISP level?
We're going to be offering the triple play: voice, video and data, and it will all come over the same port on our DSLAMs.
We looked in to WebTV like features when we were first getting started, but it's just too lame right now to actually give it to people. We will, however, use a walled garden concept of WebTV; just a few pre-defined buttons that show you webpages that have the weather, local news, etc.
Will it run Linux? Err...
Our set tops do. There's something especially cool about being able to ssh in to your TV.
IPTV is still totally bleeding edge. There's a lot of companies out there, but none of them really know how to work together, and the integration definitely lacks elegance in some areas. Heck, according to our vendors, our little company is the first in the nation to get our combination of hardware with the latest'n'greatest software up and running.
"This would be an incredibly unlucky situation," he said.
Luck had nothing to do with it.
Ahahaha! Victory is mine!