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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john810 - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link
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Sahrin - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
The article uses these two terms interchangeably, but it's very important to note that they're not the same:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_TV">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_TV
IPTV is a packet-switched TV network which uses Internet Protocol to deliver content (as opposed to the traditional 'broadcast' method which blasts all channels to all users, wasting a bunch of bandwidth in the process) to users, serving requested programs to a network device that decodes the stream and sends to a display.
Internet TV is television content delivered over the internet (generally on top of HTTP), using a broswer or other front-end.
IPTV is what drives systems like Uverse (and eventually FiOS, not sure if they've actually deployed their IPTV system, I know initially Verizon was using broadcasting over fiber) and allows them to deliver full content suites without Gbps range bandwidth required by broadcasting.
Fanfoot - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
All fine except for that "wasting a bunch of bandwidth in the process" comment.If you've got a broadcast channel like CBS that a lot of people are watching, the TV approach (broadcast to everyone using a single copy) is actually preferable to the typical internet solution of sending a separate copy to everybody which wastes a lot more bandwidth. Sure there are internet protocols for doing multicasting, but those don't work on the wide-open internet, which is why IPTV often uses them on their dedicated private networks only where they can be guaranteed to work.
marc1000 - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
In fact, other than US and maybe europe, I never heard of anywhere else in the world where these services exist. The real test for these services would be to work really worldwide, as do the traditional TV broadcasts. In fact, i'm little to nothing interested in this technology right now, because the companies don't seem to be making any effort to turn it to a global service. Hey, Hulu even BLOCKS access from other countries! This is absolutely NOT funny!vinylrecord - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
In India, 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 compatred to HDD-based set-top boxes. check out http://www.airtel.in/interactive/">http://www.airtel.in/interactive/marc1000 - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
Ok, I regret my words, but only partially. I forgot that India is a technology exporter today, and of course there is japan and some part of china too. But this is still a small part of the world, so I still don't believe that these new TV techs will change the way the world watch TV any soon...Doh! - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - link
You forgot Korea where IPTV services by 3 companies have been available for couple years. Then you have Singapore, Thailand, Phillipines....etc.Fanfoot - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
And IPTV is big in France. And Britain. And Brazil. And...Penti - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
IPTV are tied to the provider. "Internet Video" (which doesn't qualify as TV) are instead geo blocked for where they don't have the rights to transmit. TV/Film/Music rights are differentiated between countries and a contract in US doesn't give you the right to stream to the UK, and a contract in Sweden doesn't give you the right to stream to Norway. That's why all those services sucks and are only available in the US pretty much. Sweden got the normal IPTV-services less quality same channels as cable/satellite but is terrible at VOD-services. Nobody is gonna subscribe/buy from a service that only got 2 000 films/videos total when Amazon VOD got like 20 000 films and 20 000 tv-series :) The rights for it all are too fragmented (between distributors and music copyright collecting societies) for those services to work here.marc1000 - Thursday, January 21, 2010 - link
Ok, I regret my words, but only partially. I forgot that India is a technology exporter today, and of course there is japan and some part of china too. But this is still a small part of the world, so I still don't believe that these new TV techs will change the way the world watch TV any soon...