[opendtv] Re: 060707 Free Friday Fragments (Mark's Monday Memo)
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2006 19:26:16 -0400
Kilroy Hughes wrote:
> PS. Bert, you are totally clueless as usual. With IPTV you
> can junk the proprietary MPEG-2 TS and CA systems and
> replace it with Netgear and equivalent IP routers at a tenth
> the price and 10 to 100 times the throughput (very little of
> which is multicast). "Tuning" consists of parsing packet
> IDs in the STB, for instance for a dozen streams if you want
> to show a live video EPG grid or record a few shows while
> you watch(want thirteen tuners? ... have more, they're free),
> and a box requesting a new show or a jump to another part of
> show has about 400ms latency, less than a digital broadcast
> channel tune.
Kilroy, your post made sense until I reached this part. Forgive me for
not drinking the cool aid.
IPTV over cable, as well as any number of other non-IP interactive
features, are enabled by OCAP. OCAP runs over MPEG-2 TS.
Do you really think the cable industry wants to introduce switched video
and IPTV to allow customers to buy their own Netgear home systems, "at a
tenth of the price," for recording and home networking? I don't. They
want to sell the same "switched and stored in the network rather than in
customer premises" solutions the telcos are constrained to offer, for
lack of last-mile bandwidth. They want to control the PVR function.
The main reason for IPTV is that the switching is done upstream. This is
true for telco systems, where that's pretty much mandatory, or for cable
systems, where it's not mandatory (because the cable company's coax
carries much more bandwidth than the telco's last mile link).
As to home networking, your "tenth of the price" Netgear solution could
be used ragardless. It's no huge deal to offer an in-home box that
receives X channels over MPEG-2 TS, with CA, from a cable feed, and then
encapsulates these in UDP datagrams for standard home network delivery.
The challenge is only that the service provider wouldn't get a cut. So
this idea that IPTV is offered to give the customer extra flexibility
with cheap and ubiquitous non-cable hardware is truly a stretch. I'd
say, quite naive.
Let's ask just how wide that IPTV pipe from the cablecos is going to be,
and how many simultaneous HDTV streams the home user will really have to
play with (you mention 13, for example).
Of course, the cable company *could* bind together any number of cable
channels to create a very fast IP/OCAP pipe to individual homes. The
facts are against this. The facts are that IPTV and "switched video" are
used to restrict, rather than increase, the simultaneous streams you'll
be free to play with at home. (The claim is that you'll have greater
choice overall, but *not* that they will have less control.)
Bert
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