IPTV

Cow Moolester

I skimmed so don't kill me if its been said, but Microsoft are launching IPTV in Europe in Autumn 2009 on the Xbox 360.

Linky

watty

useruser wrote: »

That's a bit of a turnaround from your earlier claim that "In Ireland the DSL version of IPTV has no future," and that "The only viable alternative to aerial, Satellite and Cable TV is fibre."

Not at all. A non-Starter means no customers. No Future means a limited uneconomic customer base. The statements are not exclusive but elaborating.

The only real value of IPTV is true VOD with big catalogues. But that needs massive servers and massive core network usage because it's unicast. Then it is uneconomic. Hence Irish IPTV is a poor copy of cable and rather pointless.

I'll mention IPTV & Broadcast TV that is already in publicly announced trials. I can't comment about any hypothetical service other than the logic of it.

BT also does XBOX IPTV in UK and "IPTV"/VOD. Except actually for the ordinary channels it uses off air DTT via an aerial (not on Xbox). It's a hybrid box. Their UK DSL / copper is much better than ours (higher density of exchanges, better wire, except Milton Keynes ironically which has poor aluminium!). It also makes a lot of use of non-realtime hidden Push content. It wouldn't be that research (rather than IPTV vendor hype) suggests that real time VOD is a poor experience and bandwidth hungry?

useruser

watty wrote: »

Not at all. A non-Starter means no customers. No Future means a limited uneconomic customer base. The statements are not exclusive but elaborating.

Ah well, at least we got from "it doesn't work" to "it's not economically viable."

The only real value of IPTV is true VOD with big catalogues. But that needs massive servers and massive core network usage because it's unicast. Then it is uneconomic. Hence Irish IPTV is a poor copy of cable and rather pointless.

The "massive" servers you describe are really just commodity hardware these days with a lot of storage. For large scale VoD these will be moved closer to the customer, so no need to use core capacity unneccessarily.

Their UK DSL / copper is much better than ours.

I often hear this but do not have any actual data to back it up, do you?

It also makes a lot of use of non-realtime hidden Push content. It wouldn't be that research (rather than IPTV vendor hype) suggests that real time VOD is a poor experience and bandwidth hungry?

My understanding of BT vision is that all IPTV content is streamed on demand, I'm interested to hear that they are also pushing content to the box, do you have a source for this?

nicamuke

Magnet just launched a free channel http://magnetentertainment.ie/mitv.ie/ on thei website