Lots of people have been telling me that IP delivered video will be big. For a long time, I have disagreed because innovations like the PVR (and therefore simple timeshifting) and the coming of age of multiplexing (and therefore multi channel tv) have expanded choice and allowed me to fit good TV that I like around my schedule.
I disagreed on the grounds that unicast IP is a fairly bad way to broadcast large volumes of data. When wrapped with TCP to guarantee delivery and ensure quality, the infrastructure to handle the volumes of viewers for major tv series or live events, makes it hard to imagine it being possible to deliver real-time internet TV. This is before we consider the bandwidth requirements for high-definition video and audio.
So why the change of mind ?
I previously assumed internet delivery was the Raison d’etre for Net Video. Its not. The internet might not have proved itself as the most viable platform for broadcast video, but it has proved itself time and again as the perfect platform for publishing content. Internet TV is going to mean that “TV” gets some of the “wisdom of crowds” treatment, and that organisations with interesting things to say will be able to launch video content to worldwide audiences. Previously, content makers would have needed to work with a huge machine of tens of organisations before video hit the airways, and they’d need to work with hundreds if they wanted to distribute to a worldwide audience. Today ? All you need is a bit of content, a bit of tallent and some hosting.
The second benefit to internet video is how portable it is. I have syndicated three shows from Revision3 (Diggnation, Systm, and Scam School), Scobleizer TV, and some other geeky video stuff. It is downloaded to my laptop, and copied to my iPhone. I can watch this on a normal TV at home in high quality, via a cheap phone to tv cable, or on the move via laptop or phone. I can watch my usual TV if I am staying away by plugging the phone into a tv in a hotel room.
In the future, I expect to watch niche stuff that is downloaded, and popular things that are spooled to disk via a broadcast system. I would like to see some really neat devices shipping this year which allow me to combine recorded broadcast TV with downloaded Internet video, and let me carry broadcast TV in the same portable manner.
Also would love to hear what internet TV people are watching via the comments on the blog!
We’ve talked about this before. I don’t know the technical difficulties of it but I can give you a bit of a update on sites that already stream content. When living in the USA I only watch TV online.
I think one of the best examples is http://www.hulu.com. They include a lot of the features that you mentioned in this blog post. HD streaming, Queue your favourites, it also allows you to skip to a specific time within the video. They also allow you to embed episodes into your own site. Hulu also doesn’t require any extra installations like a lot of other streaming sites do. (http://www.joost.com/ recently closed down there desktop app and is only streaming online, from the creators of skype they followed the same P2P model for there joost desktop app…)
An example of a site that requires you to install some extra software is http://www.abc.com player. It is very good too and the interface is very slick but it has a few issues one of them being the install factor and the other being that you have to click everytime an advert finishes to continue viewing the video. They also allow for HD streaming, but you need a pretty good connection.
A few more to checkout is http://www.nbc.com and http://www.fox.com, both are up there but I wont rate them as high as the previous two and seeing that all of the there content appears on Hulu… Don’t really see the reason of using them.
I don’t get why television stations has taken so long to start streaming the content online? When someone TIVO or save a Episode on there machines they can view it again and again and again and the television stations don’t get any revenue from that. I don’t worry about saving content seeing that I can find it online. In that case the television stations get the revenue everytime we view the content.
Anyhow. I suppose I can rant on for some more time, but I’ve gone a bit of track.
Overall try hulu.com when you’re in the states.
Posted by aibean | January 4, 2009, 11:30 pmInternet TV per se is usually of low quality. While there are some good examples of Internet TV that interest me (such as Revision3) they’re hardly mainstream.
The future of TV is probably something like the BBC iPlayer, but the bandwidth associated with it may choke many providers.
What’s needed is an open standards system that does the following:
By pressing a button, you get instantaneous TV, such as the latest BBC News etc. They’d be streamed from a server somewhere, presumably with the aid of a CDN at various POP sites. This would be invariably on-demand.
Popular content, such as your usual soaps and episodes of Spooks would be multicast overnight to anyone who has selected it as a favourite programme, and released for viewing at a set time.
Finally, live programming could be incorporated with multicast from various points close to you.
Then, you get the benefit of on-demand TV for stuff that not many people want (and still have lots of choice) but you also get the benefit of using the otherwise quiet internet times (after midnight) to stream content to PVRs for popular programmes.
What’s holding this back is TV networks working together, the technology is out there, it just requires the media corporations to agree on a format and an interface. Utilising the quiet 0000-0600 hours for multicast uploading of content to consumer boxes would greatly reduce the burden on the networks, and can be easily segmented so that any corrupted parts can be individually downloaded after the stream has finished.
With 1TB HDDs now well under £100, literally days of content can be stored on the box and if only 100GB was reserved for multicasting programmes that only *might* be watched, you can save a lot of bandwidth straight there.
Unfortunately, until this set-top-box is created, we’re stuck with Virgin’s poor user interface and Sky’s outdated broadcasting concept.
Posted by dotwaffle | January 8, 2009, 10:58 am