Craig Birkmaier wrote: >> Of course that's possible. All you are proposing is a cellco >> equivalent of disbanding FOTA TV and having everyone subscribe >> to cable or DBS. You can expect your cellco bill to go way up >> for that sort of service, compared to what you are paying now. >> And also, you can expect the broadcasters to demand a piece of >> those cellco subscription fees too. > > Not at all. > > I said the video streams would continue to be in the clear, not > paid. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Sorry, Craig. If the cellco's cellular structure is used to carry the broadcasts, presumably what could happen is that every viewer would initiate a unique call, just as they do for any service from that cellular infrastructure. So now you have each user taking up all those Mb/s individually, because each one has a unique session set up. In the evening especially, when lots of people are watching TV, that would be very wasteful. Which means, very expensive. You see this, right? Instead of maybe a dozen 6 MHz channels to serve even millions of viewers, you'd have millions of viewers each one asking for (at least) his own 6 MHz channel. Short range, perhaps, but the scaling doesn't make sense. Oh, you say, no, you would actually broadcast the signal? It still makes no sense. Broadcasting the signal over a cellular infrastructure means you are dedicating the same amount of bandwidth, or more, than the TV stations are already using now. Except that you are having to depend on a dense mesh of towers in a MFN. No spectrum savings, but much more expensive infrastructure. More towers, big backhaul network to tie all the towers together (much like a cable plant), much more labor-intensive, and so on. Either way, if it costs MORE to transmit, how exactly are you going to convince people that the service can still be FOTA? What would happen is that the cellco would be happy to oblige, of course, but it would charge consumers more for the TV service than it would for just voice and the extra it already charges for data. (Oh yeah, cellcos already do that for TV programming.) With all you've been saying about ad revenue being inadequate, what makes you think the broadcasters could afford to make up the difference? > So an equitable approach might require broadcasters to pay a carriage > fee to the companies operating the cellular infrastructure - note these > are typically not the telcos, but companies they pay to operate and > maintain the cells, which often have equipment from multiple carriers. Which is a more costly infrastructure than what the broadcasters use now, especially if you expect to transmit the TV signals with the same HD quality. And it either takes up the same amount of spectrum (true broadcast over the MFN), or it may take up less to much more spectrum, depending how many people are watching (that would be the "switched video" kind of cellular TV service). Bottom line is, all of you "better ideas" seem to be attempts to get everyone hooked on MVPDs. There is a reason why broadcast radio and broadcast TV evolved as it did, Craig. Because it is the most efficient way to get the signal out to millions of people. For one-way traffic, it it the cheapest way to go. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.