Internet Served TV versus Cable and Satellite TV
by Loyd Case on January 20, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing general
I've been using Dish Network for quite a few years now. Recently, I went through a forced upgrade to their latest ViP 722 high definition DVR. (I say "forced" because the older ViP 622 I had died, and Dish no longer supported the older unit. I didn't have to extend my contract, though.)
I haven't paid a great deal of attention to how rapidly IPTV services have been coming to the living room, built into consumer electronics devices. I've certainly used Hulu, plus the dedicated streaming services from individual "legacy" networks -- NBC and the like. I've also watched shows on Revision 3 and others of the new generation of Internet-only video.
About the only regular IPTV viewing we do here at the Case House as a family is the Netflix Watch Instantly service through the Xbox 360. Overall, that's been a pretty positive experience. We did have a couple of burbs, however. A few months ago, we transitioned from Comcast consumer broadband to Comcast Business. I mostly wanted faster upstream bandwidth, but we also encountered the dreaded bandwidth cap when using the Consumer service. What happened when we hit the cap was watching videos through Netflix in highly compressed, worse-than-standard def mode. Ugh.
But most of my internet TV viewing has been through the PC. Watching videos on a high performance PC is necessarily different than watching on a TV in the living room. PC users tend to be more forgiving than your average TV watcher. If you get a momentary pause as more data is buffered on the PC, you'll tend to accept it as routine. When that happens in the living room, there's usually a chorus of groans.
Nevertheless, we've seen a whole bunch of IPTV services integrated into consumer electronics devices in the last 18 months or so. Netflix Watch Instantly and Youtube have been the most common, but Amazon.com's service has garnered a few wins.
At the recent CES 2010 show, even more devices had Internet video services integrated -- even networks, like CBS, CNN, ESPN and others were integrated directly into devices. Companies like Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Sherwood and others now have IPTV right in the box.
From what I can see, users will encounter a number of different problems. Network configuration issues will probably become a major problem. Most of these devices purport to work wirelessly, over 802.11n. My brother-in-law can't keep his run-of-the-mill Linksys router working. I can just imagine him struggling with streaming services on his TV.
There will also be the inevitable security issues, though no one seems to know what form that will take.
Internet TV services are also struggling with their business models. Hulu is already poised to start charging for their service. Will a TV owner with Hulu built in pony up the subscription fee?
On the other hand, these are very early services, and as the infrastructure becomes more robust, delivery and networking issues will gradually subside, though I suspect that will take years. What will happen to the cable and satellite delivery services then? One thing they do offer is content aggregation -- users pay one company for access to a variety of networks. Will customers want to manage a variety of different payments to different services?
Nevertheless, delivering video services over the Internet will gradually become one of the accepted delivery vehicles. Whether the cables and satellite companies can adapt will be interesting to watch.
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vinylrecord - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
In India, these IPTV has been commercially available for over 2 years. I'm a subscriber of Airtel triple-play (TV, internet and Phone) and it's pretty good - Airtel actually records content for about 30 channels on their servers that go back a week, and you can view these on-demand: this is a big differentiator as compared to HDD-based sat boxes.Ymir - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - link
Hi there I live up here in Western Canada. We have a choice of a cable company, and IPTV service or regular Satellite.The company serving IPTV (Telus) has been doing it for 3 years and only has 100k customers, it simply is not taking off due to the degradation of other services (internet).
If IPTV companies want to be truly competitive, they need to drop the contracts and compete with the cable companies on price and choice and not locked in.
IPTV has several drawback I have experienced using the service available to me. Using even VDSL2 I believe it is called I can still only have 2 HD tv's going at the same time and no more due to bandwidth limitations.
The whole infrastructe I was told needs to be upgraded and that is something like 10 years behind everyone else.
People are just too dubious and hear the horror stories that are out and about and if companies are going to lock you in with terms and conditions it just waives a red flag.
A coaxial cable can carry hundreds of different types of signal and gives less compression giving a better picture.
The whole home PVR is really really limited. Might have a shiny new microsoft media software running on the STB's but even that is limited to what is already out there. No start at show 5 mins before broadcast and 5 mins after ending? gimmie a break.
To many glitches, it needs to mature, and that is years away.
mikecel79 - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - link
IPTV is not the same as Internet TV. The two terms are not interchangable. Netflix Watch Now, Hulu or any of the other streaming video sites out are Internet TV. U-Verse is an example of IPTV. I expect a writer on a well respected site such as Anandtech to know the difference between Internet TV and IPTV.Reflex - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - link
Thanks for pointing this out, I was about to jump on the author for this as well. IPTV is simply a method of delivering content on existing cable systems using TCP/IP. Many digital systems use it. It has *no* relevance to the internet however beyond sharing a protocol.More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV
Fanfoot - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
Well that's not really right either. IPTV uses IP, but doesn't use the internet per se. Instead it uses a private network. So AT&T U-Verse is IPTV and delivers video over IP from AT&T's servers and routers to your STBs in your home over AT&T's managed network. Allows them to guarantee priorities and bandwidth and all that.Yes Comcast can do IPTV if they start delivering video over their packet network (overlayed on top of their cable network for data) using IP protocol. But more often it means a non-cable network.
AgeOfPanic - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - link
Hulu Desktop actually integrates pretty nicely in MediaPortal using the MultiShortCut plugin. It has already replaced downloading as a source for a couple of my shows (especially comedies like The Big Bang Theory). If they can expand the number of shows and movies they include, I might be persuaded to actually pay a small fee.However, I will need a better internet connection than my AT&T DSL, that I have now and the picture quality could be better as well (the Daily Show is still broadcasted in SD 4:3 format).
It's coming, but they're not there yet.
Fanfoot - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
Umm... Big Bang Theory is on CBS. So its never been on Hulu. And in fact its not on TV.com either. I think you're mistaken and you're still watching torrent downloads of this show.Yes, I love the show and yes I think its stupid its not available online. Generally CBS is more open to this stuff than many networks...
AgeOfPanic - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
You're right. I didn't want to admit that I watch Cougar Town on Hulu, so substituted it with BBT. To redeem myself however, Community is also on Hulu.I've noticed they switched to widescreen for the Daily Show. Now all I have to do is get a better connection then AT&T, which is too flaky.
The0ne - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
I thought Daily Show is now produced in HD or was that Colbert Report. It might be the latter as I recall Colbert giving the finger and not Steward :)ksherman - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
Yeah, they both are. After their winter hiatus, I noticed they switched over to a 16:9 aspect ratio, they were using 4:3 for the longest time. Can tell they haven't 100% transitioned, there is a lot of dead space on the side (I know that standard, to keep compatibility with older TVs, but it seems more than usual shows)