[opendtv] Re: Mobile TV
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2016 09:06:20 -0500
On Jan 4, 2016, at 9:44 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
Happy New Year Bert!
I was hoping we could start off the new year by avoiding the circular arguments
that have dominated our discussions for the past year. It would be helpful if
you would read an entire post and consider the meaning before simply
constructing a counter argument to each paragraph. Let's try to keep things a
bit more meaningful this year...
You wrote:
And "broadcasters" have nothing to say about ESPN either. Disney is the only
one that would have a say. ESPN is already available live, over IP media,
but only by subscription. But that's ONLY up to Disney.
ABC sports has become just another ESPN network, even using the ESPN branding.
Throughout the recent College football season ABC carried both regional and
national college games. I believe these games were also available via watch
ESPN to subscribers.
Those with ATSC antennas could watch these games FOTA, but ATSC is useless for
mobile.
But this completely misses the point. Much of the content that people pay for
via MVPD subscriptions is becoming available via the Internet thanks to TV
everywhere apps. By extension, these Apps make it possible to watch "mobile TV"
today.
But I cannot watch a NFL football game over the Internet, with few exceptions;
even CBS cannot carry the NFL games the network airs on CBS All Access. Thus I
cannot watch these games via mobile LTE broadcasts...
Oh wait...
The NFL licensed the mobile rights to Verizon, so in some markets, if you
subscribe to Verizon you can watch these games via Broadcast LTE.
So it's not up to Disney, or just the content owners. Program rights play a
role as well.
At least for now, the broadcast networks are mostly avoiding FOTI, although CBS
will allow free access to the Super Bowl and the upcoming play-off games they
carry via CBS.com.
This is still an experiment to determine the level of consumer demand; to see
if it is strong enough to create a new paid service. There are some reports
that NFL games may be available next season via a CBS All Access subscription.
Plenty of high value content is available FOTI, even if not live. If the US
TV networks decide to make this other content available live also, FOTI live,
they can make it happen whenever they please (for what it would be worth).
Yes and no. If they own the rights they could move to FOTI; if the buy the
programs they must contract for "live" Internet streaming rights.
But this also raises the question of how their broadcast affiliates are
protected, and how geoblocking can be implemented. For many sporting events the
networks only have local or regional rights.
And there is the minor issue of time zones. The networks provide broadcasters
with either east or west coast feeds, as prime time is different in New York
and LA. So FOTI may disrupt when shows are available unless there is regional
geoblocking as well.
Making programs available to everyone at a date/time certain, as Netflix does,
makes "time" irrelevant. But this also makes the network irrelevant - any
remaining benefit from program adjacency is lost.
Bottom line, it is problematic for the networks to move to FOTI as long as
local broadcasters are a core part of their business model.
**None of this can be decided by the middlemen anyway**. It's up to the
content owners, not the broadcasters. In Europe, there's plenty of live TV
over the neutral Internet. Has been for many years.
In Europe public television is pervasive. They have no commercial interests to
protect, so FOTI may accelerate the day when they can turn off the state run TV
transmitters.
I think, Craig, that you are still living in an era when TV signal
distribution **had** to occur over a separate infrastructure, out of
necessity. No other infrastructure was capable of the wideband task. We are
past that now.
What Mark said!
;-)
We are not yet ready to turn off the TV transmitters, and shut down the
subscription MVPD services. Please do not try to tell us the Internet is ready.
It is not.
Whether it is or not really does not matter, as the content owners are in no
rush to change the business models that are producing record profits, even as
ratings tumble.
The reality is that the content owners are experimenting and trying to figure
out how they can control Internet distribution to make even more money.
But this brings us back to the core discussion of this thread: what should
broadcasters do with respect to updating the standards they use to deliver TV
to the masses?
The content owners aren't pushing for any new OTA standard, nor, as you point
out above, is the viewing public. The content owners have begun the process
of taking IP delivery seriously, including especially on-demand, and
including mobile, because the viewing public wants it that way.
For most of the viewing public FOTA has been irrelevant for decades. As you
like to point out, the Millennials view TV differently. Yet some cord cutters
are using antennas to access broadcast content, even though much of this
content is available free, on demand via he Internet, after it has aired FOTA.
The value of FOTA to the content owners is political and economic; it protects
their oligopoly and the retrans consent revenue streams. So it is unlikely that
broadcasting will go away any time soon.
But it will change again as a result of the upcoming spectrum auction; there
will be fewer transmitters, with more consolidation of existing channels into
fewer multiplexes. Thus the opportunity to make some needed updates above the
modulation layer of the standard, that can help with your goal of moving
everything to the Internet.
But now it is available, with plenty of neutral appliances compatible with
it, so there's no excuse to stay away from it, moving backwards.
All the more reason to optimize broadcast operations to be interoperable with
the neutral appliances. Why continue to use MPEG-2 to feed the transmitters,
and h.264 to feed the Internet? Why continue to create metadata to feed PSIP,
and then recreate it for the HTML world?
In other words, broadcasters can move forward without having to move to another
ATSC standard filled with new IP (like h.265). They just need to do what we
recommended in 1992 - leave the layers above modulation open to innovation.
The Internet provided the neutral "test bed" to support the
evolution.
Test bed? Come now. Do you really expect that the TV industry will create a
parallel universe here, Craig?
You completely missed the point...again.
The Internet was open, scalable and extensible. Interoperability was not
guaranteed - people upgraded their PCs to handle new capabilities as they were
invented and moved into widespread adoption. In the process an entirely new
generation of mobile computing devices was enabled.
FOTA TV is a parallel universe now - several hundred million TVs have ATSC
tuners, most of which are never used. And more than a billion mobile devices
cannot access FOTA TV.
But stations cannot ignore the parallel universe of the Internet. They must
have a presence there and take advantage of it where they can. And this means
they must support all those standards created through the open Internet rules,
while ATSC was standing still.
And to answer your question directly, NO, I do not expect broadcasters to move
to Broadcast LTE to make their universe is fully interoperable with billions of
new devices.
I doubt it. Once you have the general purpose medium in place that can handle
TV signals, there is no reason to create special purpose media for TV
signals. That's legacy thinking.
Not sure what you are saying here. The ATSC broadcast standard is capable of
delivering the bits, albeit in a legacy format that needs updating. There is no
compelling need to update the transmitters and modulation standard; and most of
the hundreds of millions of existing TVs can be updated to support changes
above the modulation layer - smart TVs already do support most of what we are
discussing here.
If backward thinking compatibility is important to a station, they can still
offer a low bit rate MPEG-2 version of their programs alongside h.264 encoded
HDTV.
In other words, the industry does not need another ATSC standard designed to
create new royalty streams - they just need to support the existing open
standards that have made OTT TV a reality.
In the old days, the telephone network was unable to carry TV. That's why
separate TV distribution networks were needed.
Actually the telcos made network TV possible. They built the analog video
distribution networks that delivered the network feeds to the stations. The
high cost of these networks helped insulate the broadcasters from competition;
this combined with the inefficient use of the broadcast spectrum (white spaces
to protect adjacent markets) created the broadcast oligopoly.
Times have changed. These "times" started changing in the 1980s and 1990s,
Craig, when the telephone industry began designing and then deploying SONET
first, and then BISDN. BISDN never actually happened as they envisaged,
BECAUSE it was replaced by IP over DSL. And the cable industry, similarly,
began deploying IP over DOCSIS. Then metro area Ethernet and other PON
designs. So you seem to be advocating retrenching back to separate TV
distribution nets, for no technically justifiable reason.
The big change came with satellite distribution of TV content. I helped build
several network operations centers that handled the regional network feeds. And
satellites made it possible for many new stations to afford to start-up
broadcast stations, leading to dramatic expansion in the number of TV stations
in the '80s.
The early days of data networks were interesting, but irrelevant to TV
broadcasting. Even as the new DTV standard was approved and deployed, data
networks were too expensive, or too slow for TV bits. Now broadband and
cellular data, together with improved compression techniques have made OTT and
Broadcast LTE possible.
I am not advocating retrenching back to separate TV distribution nets. They
already exist. I am advocating for updates to the broadcast networks to make
them interoperable with the standards that are driving the future, and to allow
these networks to evolve along with the Internet.
For example: there is strong interest in h.265 to replace h.264. But there are
barriers to adoption, the most important being the licensing terms that were
initially proposed. There is no reason for broadcasters to leapfrog h.264 to
h.265, if billions of devices cannot support it. There are good reasons for the
upper layers of the broadcast standard to evolve WITH the standards used by
billions of potential screens.
On the other hand, the ATSC standard was locked down from day one,
You're only recycling old opinions, and they are incorrect to boot. The ATSC
standard was never "locked down," any more than RFC 791 "locked down" the
Internet.
Wrong.
Many components of the original standard have never been supported.
Broadcasters adopted Table 3, even as the FCC removed it from the standard they
adopted. You still cannot broadcast 720 X 480 formats; although today's MPEG-2
decoders can support them, it breaks some legacy receivers...
There are hard limits on what ATSC receivers can support. For the most part,
broadcasters have ignored all of the extensions the ATSC developed.
The only thing that kept appliances stable was that they, not the standard,
had not been designed to be upgradeable. But none of this impacts IP
appliances, or IP delivery of TV content, so it doesn't matter. TVs are now
starting to come out with IP front ends, as are many other devices. No need
to recycle old discussions.
You are in the recycling bin.
Obviously TVs have evolved - 4K TVs are now cheaper than the first generation
HDTV receivers. Smart TVs have Ethernet ports or WiFi and support h.264,
advanced graphics, and Apps based on HTML. If a TV is not "smart," you can add
a dongle or a cheap box that does these things.
The notion that you needed to lock everything down in a broadcast TV standard
was a canard. It was simply a ploy to develop lucrative royalty streams and to
give broadcasters a new 20-30 year standard to replace a fifty year standard.
The fact that today I can propose doing exactly what we suggested in 1992 -
opening up the layers of the standard above modulation and transport - is proof
we were right...
Just a few decades ahead of our time.
Modulation matters.
No, it doesn't, not as a new topic of TV-unique discussion. Modulation issues
are addressed by the IEEE, and those who design and deploy the various,
diverse, general purpose media. Modulation issues vary, depending on the
specific medium. It's different for every version of Ethernet, for example,
as it is for every WiFi variant.
Again, you are taking us into the weeds. We are talking about TV standards.
You just told us:
The only thing that kept appliances stable was that they, not the standard,
had not been designed to be upgradeable. But none of this impacts IP
appliances, or IP delivery of TV content, so it doesn't matter.
If "stability" was so important, how did the Internet win?
The reality is that TV became an IP appliance when we upgraded to the ATSC
standard. MPEG-2 TS can easily carry IP packets. The fact that all the upper
layers were specifically designed to create a locked down standard for which
the creators could charge lucrative royalties is what is relevant.
IT IS OBVIOUS THAT TVs HAVE EVOLVED AND THAT BROADCASTERS HAVE NOT.
If broadcasters are to survive, they must embrace the stuff I just
wrote about,
I doubt that. If broadcasters are to survive, they need to find a critical,
meaningful role, providing value added, for Internet distribution of TV
content.
If they must move to the Internet to survive they will no longer be
broadcasters. You have made it quite clear that the content owners do not need
broadcasters or MVPDs - they can now bypass those middlemen.
But that is NOT what they are doing. They are protecting these distribution
channels because this is where they derive most of their profits. OTT services
are just a new customer for their syndicated programming.
But that may be changing. The networks created a competitor with Netflix. They
are now re-evaluating that strategy. A few years ago they were trying to sell
Hulu. Now it looks like they may stop selling to Netflix and Amazon, and push
their on-demand reruns through Hulu.
Your idea is to have TV broadcasters re-create their old separate
distribution network, hampered by its one-way-only capabilities, and never
mind that MVPD media never required their signal distribution sevices anyway.
There is nothing to recreate. It already exists. I am simply saying it is time
to make broadcast TV part of the network of networks that is the Internet. Yes
it will remain one-way, although the Internet back channel is there for most
screens today.
Broadcast TV is adequate to support its intended purposes:
- Free TV for those who are interested in using an antenna;
- A stage for local, State and Federal politicians;
- The necessary prerequisite to demand retransmission consent fees from the
MVPDs and new Internet distributors.
We are way past the 1970s, Craig.
Yup. Time for you to catch up.
;-)
Regards
Craig
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