It's the end of TV as we know it Carphone Warehouse has signed up to Project Canvas and the BBC is to promote it. This probably heralds the beginning of the end for broadcast TV. The addition of Carphone Warehouse just before Christmas, brings in the recently-acquired Tiscali TV operation, with its experience of using video on demand to deliver services that …
TV over IP - perhaps the stupidest idea of the last ten or twenty years. Currently I can record up to three channels in full broadcast quality on my computer with a single Freeview tuner. How many Megabits is that? Certainly in excess of 6, perhaps (depending on the streams) more than 8. The town where I live has 70,000 people in it and about 20,000 homes. So, since every home can pick up the same signal I can, that's 120Gb of usable bandwidth coming down from a single transmitter to a single town. Add up all the towns and cities in the area covered and you're well on the way to Peta-bits of bandwith.
So, let's put all that down the broadband network. Er... perhaps not.
TV-IP is a fail technology. It can not hope to deliver the quality of even a cheap broadcast TV system. It *can* deliver something else, and perhaps the key is that people don't want TV any more - that they want a more interactive medium. But I doubt it. UK viewing figures as a whole are still in the realms of 41,000,000 per day according to BARB. With the number of alternative forms of interactive entertainment already available, that's a big vote of confidence in passive, receive-only telly.
People *want* entertainment that entertains them, not that requires them to entertain themselves or each other. That is certainly going to be an important niche in the future but it will never be the majority for the same reason that the Ancient Greeks went to the theatre instead of doing improv at home. After a day's work, we just don't want to be bothered with interactivity when there's interesting/amusing/dramatic people out there that we can pay to do it for us.
I imagine that much of it will be multicast, which will help with the bandwidth usage somewhat; but there are still those like me who are “out in the sticks” (despite being in a built-up area)… and one more thing:
“Friends, Romans and countrymen! We know what you're watching!”
Multicast IPTV is the nuclear fusion of the IT industry. It's always ten years away :-/
As it happens both 21CN and GEA (the access product for BT's FTTC) have multicast designed in. The problem is going to be deciding how it will work when each exchange serves customers of a dozen or more ISPs. Some of them will be using WBC - others using LLU.
It'd be like having a dozen restaurants all sharing the same tables and chairs. How do you work out the rent?
I dont mind the idea of IPTV, but I've some concerns. You state that TV viewers will pay for guaranteed bandwidth. I would if I could even now, but less than 50 miles from London and 10 from the main County town, i can only get 400kbps (as measured by the BT Tech, who assures me it cannot be improved) and there's no realistict chance of it reaching levels to support IPTV for a very long time, and only then if some form of universal service obligation is imposed. That's notwithstanding the 5 days of no telephone or broadband as the local cable was nicked, and the engineer says they'll never put fibre on the overhead lines that BT considers the only economical option in rural areas.
I know that if I dont want to pay Sky (I dont) I can get Freesat and I probably will in due course, but terrestrial broadcasing is so much more. Its relatively resilient against network faults that might take out a few hundred houses (or more) if a local switch goes down, and in a power cut, some of us still have the odd 12v dc set in the garage as a backup (although I've not noticed any that are not analogue, must have a look), and portable set and ariel that is easy to set up is still relatively easy to find.
I'd like to see progress but not the the expense of leaving too many behind for too long, lets hope they get this one right.
TV over a 1Mb connection only, look forward to it and the resultant degradation of the Internet; my ISP already bitches about downloads, shapes the traffic and chokes bandwidth.
Then there's the issue of government monitoring of TV choices as well as everything else, and those lovely targeted ad people will have a field day.
"It's interesting to note that the project is well aware that it must offer third parties the opportunity to make money, integrating shopping services and suchlike to squeeze more revenue from the viewer."
It should also be noted that presently the BBC Royal Charter and Agreement also must offer third parties the opportunity to make money, but of course it has been abused to provide a cash cow to a very few and is a very poor intellectual shadow of its Formation self ..... Lord Reith must be turning in his grave to know of the rubbish and spin aired to deceive and entertain the poorly educated masses.
However, the Internet itself is a New [NeuReal and SurReal] BroadBandCasting TeleVisionary Medium against which the Talking Picture Box in the Corner, now Morphed into the Plasma Screen on the Wall competes for your Mind and Control of IT and thus will the Television grow into just being another screen for showing Chaotic Computer Clubbed Content ...... and Real SMART Intellectual Property which Sublimely Leads in Beta Directions Virtually ...... for AIMachine Governance of Humanity.
Please note that that is shared as a Statement of Fact which Fiction and BroadBandCasting will Realise and Produce for Presentation with Works and Programs and Projects Showing Future's Progress rather than wasting Time and Space/Effort and Bandwidth on the Past and Memories Best Forgotten. In a Brave New World, why haul in Old Baggage whenever you can Invent whatever Great Imagination Delivers?
How about some figures, and a comparison with these to what current pipes can provide, and the financial implications of adding more infrastructure if necessary.
And while I'm here, hope everyone had a good xmas.
um.... it's A future, not sure it's necessarily THE future. For starters, even for those 18m households with broadband, the bandwidth is not always sufficient to stream TV programming at a decent quality. And, as we've seen from the ongoing BT/ broadband shenanigans, that *reliable* *consistent* bandwidth for all is a loooong way off.
... they will need to come up with a better name for it than 'Project Canvas'
Freeview and Freesat are brilliant brand names, because, like that well-known advert reminds us, 'it does what it says on the tin'
Project Canvas as a name is bland, meaningless and, dare I say it, blank?
How about instead "youchoose tv"?
(Just send the £Ms in consultancy fees to my usual address)
IPTV will supersede broadcast, as long as you include a broadcast feature on IPTV, since "that habit is hard to break" is not a habit, it's a requirement. A lot of people still want automated delivery without having to become their own program director.
Having said that, the amount of crap of the telly now is forcing the herd to risk RSI on their thuimbs to select something half or at least quarter decent, and/or upping their grey matter usage to figure out how to program the TIVO box.
For the licence fee, I get a ton of content (and ITV)
for Canvas, I need a licence fee plus the ISP costs.
Still anything that scares Murdoch must be worth a go.
Like the idea that the providers decide the common interface rather than 15 slightly different ways to surf an EPG.
Erm, remember the hype surrounding digital TV when it launches in 98? The world of tv-based teleshopping never arrived. Much of the touted interactivity was overtaken by text messaging. Plus the example cited, of chatting along with TV, was done years ago by Teletext on Channel 4 alongside GamesMaster. It's used today with Question Time on the red button and Ceefax, but you can surely see it's niche. Aside from catch up TV, what is the real utility? Canvas doesn't say.
You forget what broadcasting is good at - reaching millions of viewers at the same time. Canvas isn't going to blow that away. Don't overhype it.
Whats the betting the BBC forces the Gov to come up with a IPTV license that makes all streamed TV require a license including time shifted content that currently doesn't require it?
Also, will the ISPs increase their downloading cap to allow this? A 10-30Gb / month cap simply won't allow much TV watching per month.
"Put the same message on the BBC, under the Freeview brand, and everyone instantly understood - it was fun to see exasperated OnDigital executives ranting about this while drowning their sorrows. Without apparent effort, the BBC achieved what they couldn't,"
The reason for the BBC sucessing and OnDigital not is in the first syllable of the replacement. That little, and very attractive word "free". If you were that interested in having hundreds of channels, then you'd most likely already have gone the Sky route. There is far more room in the available spectrum for satellite channels than there can ever be for terrestrial. Quite simply, the very high frequencies required to fit in those many hundreds of digital channels won't refract round obstacles the way terrestrial TV frequencies will, so you need line-of-sight. Satellite will always have that advantage over terrestrial TV - it simply has vastly more space for channels, and, to add to that, you can cover huge areas from just one transmitter in the sky. In fact it was OnDigital's attempts to squeeze far too many channels into the limited bandwidth and consequent dreadful reception which further limited their appeal.
In the case of Freeview, then the attraction is simply the price - for the most part putting nothing much more than a set top box on the end of a TV antenna appealed to both the skinflints and the lazy (in which category I includce myself). Paying monthly fees to OnDigital just did not appeal .
Of course satellite cannot do what cable delivery can do - true on-demand viewing. To keep satellite going in a broadband age will require Sky to keep a firm hold on content rights. Quite apart from the limited channels available on OnDigital, it is that hold on sports and film rights combined with the installed equipment of their customers which are their greatest assets.
If it really *is* the end of TV as we know it then bring it on - the Xmas TV offering (not that we watched much at all) was so dreadful that we just switched off and went back to our DVD collection.
If it means that we get to watch such quality programmes as "East Enders Christmas Special" in June, on whatever Internet-capable device I have to hand, then they can forget it.
A decade is an incredibly long time. A decade ago, we still had analogue satellite and digital through a dish was in its infancy, while digital through the air was but a dream. Who can predict where the next 10 years will take us?
Don't forget, also, one of the main problems with TV via the Internet is bandwidth. Is the infrastucture capable of providing real-time television pictures (we'll surely expect HD or better in a decade)?
As to why ITV Digital failed... it was nothing to do with the technicalities of who did and didn't need a new ariel. It was because it carried the ITV branding. That was sure to kill it...
Penguin icon 'cos it is cute and I'm in a good mood.
heyrick says ITV digital failed "because it carried the ITV branding". Bollocks!
ITV digital failed because (a) the content on offer was utter crap, even worse than the worst of ITV at its worst; (b) equivalent shit was already available from Sky (and is still on offer there for those who want it); (c) nobody was prepared to pay a monthly subscription to watch endless repeats of Crossroads and Stenhousemuir v Port Vale football matches.
that the BBC is going to be still in operation in a decade ?
Or maybe you think that Rupert is getting into bed with the conservatives because he likes a change ?
I'll bet that once elected it will be a year at most before there is a "commission" set-up to "commercialise" the BBC.
Downhill all the way.
And still have the licence.
Gov: win-Win
I bought a freeview box, as I didn't want to have a bin lid on the side of the house. Once I upgraded the antenna to the biggest highest gain I could find, I discovered that I had 80 channels of absolute crap rather than just 5.
If I'd have done sky I would be paying for 200 channels of crap.
More doesn't mean better. Prehaps if they invested in some better content, this might be an option
Broadcasting provides a massive effective bandwidth, PVR's provide the on-demand and trick play that's the big benefit of IPTV for that bandwidth. We'd be better off with the BBC subsidizing PVR's in viewers homes instead of a plan to burn bandwidth continously.
IPTV has a minority role filling in the gaps but as the major backbone its just wasteful madness. We worry about the power use of net server farms, iptv would dwarf that and the decoders will be burning just as much power whether recording and playing off air or over ip.
It's not IPtv or tv-on-demand that is 'the end of tv as we know it'. It is 'tv as we know it' that is 'the end of tv as we know it'.
The orignal BBC-only service was obliged to give a variety of programming, to a minimum standard. Then came ITV, with regional obligations and local programming. Even adding BBC2 and ch.4 wasn't a problem: they produced good, varied, programming
Now we have a multiplicity of satellite channels - which are either endless repeats of programmes from before satellite multiplicity (The good life, To the manor born, Fools and sodding horses) or are endlessly and minutely repetitive (escape to the sun in the country cooking kitchen) - and then endlessly repeated.
For glod's sake, further opportunities to view drivel doesn't stop it being drivel. We have enough distribution channels already - arguably far too many. What we don't have is anything remotely worth distributing on those channels.
I'm going to buy a season ticket for live theatre. And renew my library ticket. and then take the dogs for a long walk and check the local wildlife.
Paris. 'cos she is not only who the programmes are aimed at, but who they are about!
I was hoping the various networks had agreed to pull the plug! :-)
I haven't actually watched TV in years, but whenever it is on (friend's house, whatever), it seems to me that nothing has changed in decades. With the exception of the News[1] and indevidual sporting events, it's the exact same vapid wasteland that it was 20 years ago.
[1] Remember, children, even the News is entertainment[2], not education! It exists to sell razor blades, shampoo, tampons and bacon sarnies, just like every other program.
[2] For small values of entertainment ...
So Orwell's Telescreen is planned for our homes, allowing our media consumption to be added to our 'personal profile' by TV stations, and a corrupt Government.
And naturally the project is enthusiatically supported by the UKs state controlled media organisation, who have already been busy feeding our web streaming choices to Omniture in secret.
I fear the world we are creating for our children; I wouldn't want to inhabit it.
Terrestrial and satellite broadcasting is the perfect example of bandwidth effective multi-drop transmission; as many people as want can simultaneously watch and record as many channels as they want if they have enough TV's / VCR's / PVR's in place.
Admittedly one's limited to what's broadcast because it's not infinite bandwidth and IPTV gives the possibility of 40 million people each watching something different, but just how feasible is it ?
Freeview channel bit rates are somewhere around 2Mbps at the low-end, so to match that we'd need infrastructure capable of 80,000,000Mbps.
I don't see the 50p+VAT tax per month on landlines covering that, nor ISP's doing less throttling in the near future.
I am currently living in South Korea and have recently signed up to an ISP who provides landline, broadband and IPTV all for the equivalent of £20 a month. The landline has yet to be used but the broadband in fibre to the house 100Mbps and I usually get speeds above 70Mbps. The IPTV shares this bandwidth but makes very little difference to internet use, I have a full range of approx 150 live broadcast channels plus a huge library of content on demand both free and paid for. The broadcast channels include 10 or more HD feeds with full 5.1ch sound while a large amount of the on demand content is also HD.
When comparing this to Virgin Media from 2 years ago there is a world of difference, the service works well all the time, the video and sound quality are much better and the price is a fraction of the Virgin price.
All of this is possible due to Korea investing in infrastructure before it is needed instead of 10-15 years after. The UK government and business need to work together fast to improve things in the UK, in Korea this year the government decided they need to upgrade almost all of the broadband lines to 1Gbps by 2012, this I can actually see becoming a reality here as people will just get on with it instead of arguing about it.
Project canvas is a great idea but in the UK may not be possible for a long time due to bandwidth issues, the service needs to be reliable, easy to use and cheap but without a massive improvement in broadband standards this is simply not going to happen.
A 1Gb backbone is hopelessly inadequate unless there's only you and a handful of other people using it.
IPTV is based on failure: it can only work if the vast majority DON'T use it. If IPTV ever reached even 60% penetration there's not a network on the planet that could carry it when some major live event occurs.
Imagine what 9/11 would do to a system like that - no one would be getting any pictures or information, just as no one could get a mobile call out of Manhattan on the day while broadcast television continued to work pretty flawlessly across the whole island and for that matter across the world.
I have Verizon FiOS (fiber to the house), and the "triple play" bundle, broadband, TV and phone costs $150-ish per month, including $25 for DVR and additional set top boxes.
Because of the wonders of a competitive market, I could switch to Comcast and get the same service for $160 a month.
And you think a TV license is expensive?
I have pretty lousy internet service here in Australia, but I love the fact I can watch shows on the ABC iView (Australian equivalent of the BBC iPlayer).
I don't watch much broadcast TV any more and I know people who don't watch any... they either watch it on streaming services or download it. Everyone is sick of being hostage to some station programmer who has no idea what we want.
Free IPTV is the only way the broadcasters are going to be able to claw back audience from bittorrents and other illicit download mechanisms.
As for bandwidth caps... there is always the room for ISP's to get a competitive advantage by signing content distribution deals so their customers can access the content without impacting bandwidth caps (my ISP already does this for iView).
On a side note, what does Freeview mean in the UK? Here in Australia it's a marketing effort aimed at getting people to switch to digital broadcasts with the promise of the broadcasters offering extra channels with unique programming (although some of the broadcasters frequently forget this and play exactly the same programming across all of their channels).
We do get extra channels in the UK, though many of them rely almost entirely on material that has already been broadcast on the main channels, or are time shifted copies of the main channels. However, the picture quality is better than analogue. There are also some channels reproduced from cable or satellite providers.
As for a marketing exercise, it isn't needed. Analogue is being turned off, as is also happening in the USA. What we get for that is more bandwidth on the airwaves for mobile phones and so on. You want mobile phone service, right?
OK - we might not have the best "broadband" (and I use the term loosely in the case of certain providers) in the world - but it's better that some places... but even with what we have our household viewing has been transformed by the careful use of iPlayer and suchlike, along with niceties such as VPN services and Hulu etc ;)
We rarely watch broadcast TV these days - in fact the only time we make an effort to do so is for Top Gear, Dr Who and F1 - the rest of the time we will often use IPTV services (or similar)
I'm all for moving away from broadcast to broadband - especially as some folks I know who live in built up large cities cannot get decent freeview but can get decent broadband (10-100mbps) - whilst ironically family who live in rural areas get better freeview but "only" about 6mbps broadband.
Why can't we applaud moves to try and move things forward instead of griping and whingeing about them?!
If this really takes over, those of us who cannot even get a basic 2Mbit broadband service will once again start losing what we can get, as current delivery services are allowed to wither and web providers assume everyone has even more bandwidth available. Even now I have to surf with flash turned off by default or wait ages for every page. I used to surf with images disabled, but you simply can't navigate anymore if you do that.
I hope the new toy doesn't cause freesat to be smothered in its crib, or slowly starved. Freesat is currently the best broadcast delivery system for visual quality (no technical advance will help program quality) and I would hope to see more rather than fewer content providers in coming years. And yes it is free, once you install Gran in a spare bedroom to get a free TV license. Best of all, the TV plague of sport, sport and more sport has been almost cured by isolating much of it on Sky.
Infrastructure first please (beats on deaf ear with inflated pig's bladder).
In the UK.
As others have pointed out this sinks a *huge* chunk of the national bandwidth to (more or less) replicate a service which already exists.
However it is true that such a system could facilitate new types of programmes and services which cannot be delivered any other way.
Would I want to use them. Who knows? I doubt it will be the future. It could definitely be *part* of the future.
The point of Canvas is that it uses multiple sources - satellite, terrestrial OR IP.
To say that it is for IP is misleading. Freesat will be the biggest loser of course but they have closed so much to others and don't have the capacity for a decent number of HD channels they have problems anyway.
Let's face it, folk. Pushing new tech is all very well, but when the standard of the product being transmitted is going down the toilet, the medium being used to transmit it with doesn't make a shred of difference.
The actual end of television as we knew it has already been and gone. What we have now is, to a great extent, rubbish. Technical arguments aside (and I do see the point of the bandwidth argument), it makes no difference to me if it is pumped down IP or pasted up on a billboard outside my house. If there is nothing for me to watch, the damn thing stays switched off and I have plenty of other things that I can be doing.
Like reading El Reg! :)
.... .... and AIMODified Environments.
"Like reading El Reg! :)" .... Chika Posted Wednesday 30th December 2009 15:28 GMT
Chika, Whenever it's done by Registering Experts, is IT the Greatest of Great Games Edutainment with Sublime CodedD ProgramMING for Every Overarching Need and Underground Feed ....... Passionate Worthy Desire.
And just you wait and see what 2010 has in Store for All, already Launched and causing Organised Chaos to Corrupt and Corrupting Systems, which makes IT a most Popular Public Service.
Do you Think the Internet controls Televison Programming/Brainwashing, and if so, who would be in Control of the Internet, which is an Imaginary Space Place considered to be Real but actually Virtual ......... and Remarkably at One with Reality ergo is Reality, Virtual too. And that is a Fact and not a Question, although it does Raise and Support the Proposition that the Future is a Fiction to be Built Upon with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT Drivers Priming IntelAIgent Media with Noble Novel Content.
..... for ZerodDay Media Nowadays.
El Reg,
It would appear that NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT Drivers* have vocal support from novelist PD James ...."During the interview, Lady James suggested the BBC had lost its way. She said while it was easy to name some programmes of superb quality, others hardly qualified as public service broadcasting." .... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8435633.stm
And with regard to the statement/sentence .... "But Mr Thompson said the BBC was still losing key staff to its rivals." ..... Mr Thompson would have to accept that the loss is due to his inability to Create a Creative medium. And a simple look at the Festive menu as dished up this last week confirms that sad and sorry tale ..... in spades.
* As shared in an earlier El Reg post .... "Dumbing Down the Masses ...a Forlorn Foolish Hope in CyberSpace Theatres of Special Operations ....and AIMODified Environments." .... Posted Wednesday 30th December 2009 16:09 GMT
Having thrown away 3 obsoleted set top boxes so far and having two digital hard disc recorders which now do not work correctly as a result of changes to the broadcast digital TV standards, I am at the stage of totally avoiding purchasing new TV sets as they will be obsolete within 3 years. Purchase a new wired TV system? Not a hope in hell for at least 10 years.
I cannot believe the degradation in picture and sound quality that is now being foisted upon the public in the name of progress. No wonder people are going back to vinyl!
You can guess that the UK government is looking at a big bag of cash for this bandwidth auction.
But who will bid?
IIRC no one turned dup for the 34Ghs/60Ghz auctions
This is in the 100s of MHz, which has pretty good building penetration but I think cells reusing frequecies would have to be quite seperated to avoid same channel interference.
More digital terrestrial broadcast TV?
>> It will take a decade or two for punters to get the hang of IPTV It's always surprising how many TiVo owners still watch broadcast TV - the habit is hard to break
I find it impossible to watch live broadcast TV. I only watch the programs I have series linked, if I want to watch anything else, I use V+ on demand - that way I can watch shows from the beginning without any adverts*.
*btw, I don't mind the principle of adverts - but the thing that really kills it for me is the whole volume boosting thing. If they are going to make me reach for my remote every time an advert comes on, then I am going to fast forward or change channel, not turn the volume down.
What the powers that be really need to do is sort out the content, not the delivery system, which already works almost adequately (and least for analogue). Loads of freeview channels just spouting repeats simply isn't appealing. Give me a few channels with something decent at all times, and then we're "talking". That said I watch too much of this pap now, I'd not get away from the box if there was actually anything decent on.
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