Consumer Electronics Show 2005: Keynote with Bill Gates & Conan O'Brien

IPTV

Quite possibly the most eye catching demonstration during the Gates' keynote was SBC Communication's IPTV demonstration. IPTV, as the name implies, involves broadcasting television over the internet, most likely high speed fiber or some equivalent.

The first thing you noticed about the demonstration was that it was flawless, most likely running off of a high speed LAN, but everything just worked and it worked well. If you had seen the demonstration you would've thought that IPTV was here today and working right in front of your eyes. Each channel change was instantaneous, the content looked wonderful and the system worked without a hitch - granted that was probably a major point of the controlled demo environment, but regardless it was done very well.

SBC promised four simultaneous streams of video over their IPTV solution, most likely enabled through high-bandwidth fiber to the home broadband. The four streams would allow for four separate TVs to be watching differenet channels at the same time or for more creative uses such as watching one show while getting a mini preview of another show in the guide as you flip through the guide channels.

IPTV with a MCE look and feel, note the mini preview of The Discoverers in the lower left

SBC also demonstrated a MLB broadcast that utilized the four concurrent video streams to offer multiple baseball game broadcasts at the same time or multiple angles of the same baseball game that the user could choose from. Again, what was most impressive here was that everything just worked and it worked well.

Four simultaneous baseball games going on at the same time, and you thought you couldn't get enough baseball

The demonstration also highlighted instantaneous channel changing, which is a huge improvement over the ~2 second lag we currently have with digital set top boxes.

With IPTV any TV will be able to act as a fully functional DVR, and of course the reason IPTV was being demonstrated here is because SBC employed a Microsoft designed UI for their IPTV interface - and you guessed it, it looked a lot like Media Center Edition (which is actually a very good thing).

IPTV's recording functionality - look familiar?

IPTV got us excited and of course there was the requisite cell phone demonstration that showed the remote access capabilities of IPTV. Of course IPTV is mostly a bandwidth problem and we weren't given any idea of when to expect SBC's rollout, although details were promised for later.