[opendtv] Re: Mobile TV
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2016 08:47:26 -0500
On Jan 6, 2016, at 10:34 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig wrote:
The content owners are broadcasters
Completely false. That's why you continue to get confused. What confuses you
is the artifact that your local station owns all of the content it transmits.
It does not. ABC/Disney does not need to beg anyone for the rights to stream
its content online. Your local ABC affiliate might, only because, surprise,
it DOES NOT own that content (other than its own news/weather/local content).
Disney owns ABC
News Corp (20th Century Fox) owns Fox
Comcast/Universal owns NBC
National Amusements owns Viacom and CBS
You are twisting things to make unfounded arguments. For months I have stated
that network affiliates cannot stream network content because they do not own
it and that the networks cannot stream content they license unless they
contract for the streaming rights.
Please stop these moronic tactics!
Exactly. And the numbers clearly indicate that we are not ready to shut
off the transmitters, DBS satellites, and wired MVPD services.
Again, that's completely false. Not only do you never quote any numbers to
make this point, but you also ignore the numbers you SHOULD be using, to
understand the issues. You should know by now, Craig, that your proclamations
are not credible to me. Prove your point.
Not going there again. Been down this path with you too many times.
Nearly 85% of U.S. homes subscribe to a MVPD service; and these homes watch
nearly 75% of their TV via these systems either live or via time shifted DVR.
And you claim the audience for FOTA is growing.
But the actual percentages are irrelevant. There is no indication that any of
these services plan to shut down. These services will coexist with OTT services
for at least another decade.
For example, the amount of capacity the cable companies COULD apply to
broadband is way greater than what they are advertising, ...
Thank you for proving the point that I, and now Mark have been making.
We're not there yet, and the oligopolies have no plans to abandon the
distribution platforms that are producing record profits.
Please stop sharing your vision of what "could be."
It is not happening.
And the best way to start moving in this direction is to adopt
the standards that they will use to feed the Internet for their
broadcast operations
What do those words even mean, Craig? For broadcasters to take an active role
in Internet distribution of content, they need to become either cellcos
themselves, possibly, and/or CDNs, more credibly. To go in this direction,
fussing over the codec used on the legacy one-way broadcast medium is totally
immaterial.
Pure bull.
Broadcasters already have a strong Internet presence. All they need is to set
up Internet servers, and even here they can use local ISPs or CDNs. The
Internet is now available to the vast majority of TVs in the U.S., so the back
channel to the broadcasters is already in place. There is no reason that
broadcasters cannot add new services to complement their "one-way pipe."
Btw, on the fact that TV sets are stable rather than constantly changing,
this is not much different from the Apple's walled in approach, and for the
same reasons. TV sets are expected to last for years, where Apple toys
aren't, so let's leave that important difference aside.
TV sets are stable?
During the decades since the ATSC standard was adopted TVs have evolved
continuously. We have seen multiple display technologies and a total shift to
progressive display formats. We have seen interconnections evolve from DVI
through several iterations of HDMI. We have seen the failed attempt to develop
a market for 3D. We have seen the growth of smart TVs with Internet
connections, Apps and advanced codecs. We have seen the growth of devices that
connect via HDMI to support Internet delivery of content. We have seen the
development of Apps that allow new mobile devices to control the TV and the
ability to mirror content from these devices to the TV. And now we are seeing
the growth of 4K displays and support for extended dynamic range and color
gamuts.
And yes, the mandated ATSC tuners are still there and largely unused.
Your attempt to draw parallels with Apple is absurd. First you are wrong about
the TV replacement cycle:
https://gigaom.com/2012/01/05/tv-replacement-cycle/
The incredible shrinking TV replacement cycle
"HDTVs might not have reached the two-year replacement cycle that most
consumers have for their mobile phones, but consumers are definitely making
HDTV purchase decisions more often. Those decisions are happening more along
the lines of the three- to five-year cycles that consumers have for computing
devices."
Second, Apple devices have a longer life expectancy than other PCs and mobile
devices. This is confirmed by their significantly higher resale value and other
trends.
For example, we are just now learning about the replacement cycle for tablets;
it appears that the replacement cycle will be comparable to or longer than TVs.
All Apple tablets introduced since March of 2011 can run the latest version of
iOS. My wife's MacBook was purchased in 2008; it runs the latest version of
OS-X just fine.
The smartphone replacement cycle is obviously shorter. This is driven by
multiple factors including:
- rapidly evolving cellular standards - 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE
- rapid improvement in mobile processors
- subsidies linked to services contracts
- a strong resale market for these devices (especially iPhones)
If broadcasters want to be certain that their signal can always be reliably
decoded, by any TV set out there, this is quite similar to Apple limiting its
customers to Apple-only peripherals. It is easy to install a new printer, if
you use a Mac. Why? Simple. Because Apple pre-loads all of the necessary
drivers, for all of its printers.
You do not have a clue about this subject.
Apple does not manufacture or sell printers. They do sell third party printers
in the online and physical stores. Apple still makes keyboards, mice and
trackpads, but almost all third party keyboards and mice work with both iOS and
OS-X.
Same applies to OTA TV. If Table 3 hasn't been updated in years, it's **not**
because the text in A/53 is chiseled in stone, it's **not* because we have
run out of packet identifiers, it's **not** because ATSC receivers can't be
replaced. It's only because the broadcasters want to guarantee that any ATSC
TV out there can receive their signal correctly. Over years and years. And
the OTA TV using public also wants this.
The ATSC attempted to update Table 3 several years after the standard was
adopted; support for 720 X 480 formats, fully supported my the MPEG-2 standard,
was proposed. Several manufacturers blocked this update because they hard coded
Table 3 formats and the MPEG extensions in the standard - their TVs were unable
to support this minor change in the standard.
ATSC receivers do not need to be replaced - you simply route the transport
streams to a device connected to the HDMI port of the TV. This may not be
possible with older HDTVs, but is a trivial update in new TVs. And most smart
TVs already have h.264 and HTML support built in.
There is NO REASON that a broadcaster cannot continue to support legacy
receivers, even as they add new services such as h.264 encoding. They can
deliver a low bit rate SDTV version using MPEG-2, and the rest of their bits
for updated services.
It is time to drop the ATSC receiver mandate - it is trivially easy to put an
ATSC receiver in a small HDMI dongle or Roku like box for those who need this
tuner.
But more important, it is trivially easy today to add new services above the
modulation and transport layers of the standard. This is EXACTLY what has
happened with your beloved Internet.
Regards
Craig
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