[opendtv] Re: FW: Intel Will Lead Us to à la Carte Pay TV

  • From: Mike Tsinberg <Mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2013 00:14:00 +0000

Thanks Bert!

Best Regards,
Mike Tsinberg
http://keydigital.com



> -----Original Message-----
> From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-
> bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Manfredi, Albert E
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:15 PM
> To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [opendtv] Re: FW: Intel Will Lead Us to à la Carte Pay TV
> 
> Mike Tsinberg wrote:
> 
> > So can we say that both Flash HTTP (HDS), Microsoft Smooth Streaming
> > and possibly H.264 or its variant plus jump in data rate speeds to
> > 1Mb/s or higher was largely responsible for proliferation of Internet
> > TV distribution?
> 
> Hmmm.
> 
> Historically speaking, if you're asking me, the first Internet TV to me
> was over Windows Media Player and Flash. Real was probably an option
> too in those early days, but I did not have it installed on my PCs. And
> in my own early experience, WMP would always allow full screen viewing,
> but Flash did not seem to. Some kind of border remained, initially. But
> that soon changed.
> 
> The codecs used were H.263, or cut-down variants of H.263 to make the
> codec proprietary. This is MPEG-2 compression-like, but tuned to way
> lower bit rates. The realistic min bit rate for MPEG-2 is/was about 2
> Mb/s, where H.263 was designed initially for ISDN, bit rate 64 Kb/s.
> Way below MPEG-2 compression. It was pressed into packet-switched
> Internet service only because the last mile link speeds were way too
> slow for H.262, back then. So H.263, and its proprietary offshoots,
> were "the only game in town."
> 
> Flash, sent over HTTP, kept using that codec well into the era of
> decent broadband, and I can tell you that image quality got to be very
> good once your link speed went to 1 Mb/s or so. So that's why I
> personally wouldn't call H.264 "instrumental" in establishing Internet
> TV early on. It's ubiquitous now, of course. Maybe that's enough to
> make it instrumental. H.263 was instrumental by any definition of the
> word, however.
> 
> Microsoft Smooth Streaming is used by Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.
> That is a lot more recent than what I'm talking about, and at least for
> me, it's rarely used at sites I frequent. So I'm not sure I'd call this
> "instrumental."
> 
> But what is instrumental is adaptive bit rate streaming, and the
> companies involved in developing this technology initially, and
> generically (not necessarily tied to a product), are Toshiba, Phoenix
> Technologies, Microsoft, Apple, Akamai, Macromedia, and content owners
> like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Disney and others. This work
> started in 2002, which is right about when broadband to homes started
> becoming popular. And then Move Networks got their version of this
> patented in 2010. The adaptive bit rate idea I'd say is instrumental,
> even though I was watching some of this Internet TV without adaptive
> bit rates, at first.
> 
> And by the way, just to give you an idea of the time line, the first
> articles I read about H.26L (H.264) were in the summer of 2002. So
> H.264 didn't appear in real products until years later. H.263 was the
> mainstay in the early years of Internet TV.
> 
> In short,
> 
> First, non-HTTP solutions with H.263 (or variant) were used for
> Internet TV. So those solutions made a difference. To me, that makes
> them instrumental. Real and WMP.
> 
> Then, solutions which allowed streams to be sourced from regular web
> servers, vs special media stream servers, became all the rage. For
> obvious reasons. So that was in part why Flash was such a hit. No need
> for specialized servers.
> 
> Then adaptive streaming on these HTTP media streams was definitely a
> good feature, and that's what people a little optimistically call HD
> over the Internet. Perhaps if I had faster broadband it would look more
> like real HD.
> 
> Then came H.264, which made things a little better still.
> 
> Bert
> 
> 
> 
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