Does Television have a future?

Interesting points, and it's interesting you mention Homechoice because that has pretty much been offering the model the so-called visionaries are banging on about for years (about 10 I reckon). The problem is it has been pretty much a failure (when I first saw it, I was really fired up by it though. I still like it, but somehow not quite enough to subscribe).
In my view the situation is quite simple - there is a need for people to access the things they know in a simpler way - and on demand might offer that. But there is still the need for services offering people things they dont know. And in exactly the way that Radio does, there still needs to be a playlist/schedule/channel to do it. Just as iTunes doesnt remove the need for Radio, and I dont see any reason why iPlayer/Kangaroo need remove the need for a channel. *However* where change is needed is that there doesnt seem to much point in having loads of channels on Sky showing repeats: This is what needs to be moved onto on-demand services. We then go back to having fewer channels showing the newer material.

The problem with the technologists and so-called visionaries is that they can never grasp the fact that technology doesn't result in the wholesale replacement of things, it simply offers people additional choices that they can choose to embrace or not (a situation the public are actually very happy with, thank you very much).

Spot on.

A six-tuner module with multi-TB discs within the grasp of the average consumer is probably no more than five years away. This has the major advantages over existing pull-VOD in that:

1) You do not have to wait to download a programme;
2) Overnight broadcasting hours don't need to be wasted with product no-one watches.

This kind of technology will put paid to any talk of the existing VOD model becoming the norm. A mass of programming is available at the push of a button, for free and without download overhead, with the option of retaining individual programmes for later.

One could envisage a system whereby such a device is the hub to an integrated entertainment home network, where personal video players simply log into the box wirelessly and grab any programmes that have been on over the past few days, and are sent to the internal storage of the personal unit.

This is true video on demand -- not this silly folly surrounding individual downloads that just won't work -- ever.



Indeed -- and where the on-demand systems will really score is in these daft +1 channels that litter the schedules, and overnight repeats of entire evening schedules. A dreadful waste of resources both of them -- buffer the entire night's (and previous days') viewing and you can free up space for higher quality pictures and sound -- desperately required for Freeview if it is ever to go HD with any real commitment.

Time-shared channels would then really come into their own. "Virtual" TV channels could take advantage of overnight dead-time -- many TV stations show nothing but recorded content. These could easily be broadcast overnight for showing the following evening synchronised in software by the box.

This is the way I see the technology going -- with limited pull-VOD to fill in gaps, send on a pay-per-download basis which can pay for the infrastructure.

As for internet TV, don't make me laugh. YouTube would be dead tomorrow if you removed all the pirated-from-TV content on there. Who really wants to watch recordings of teenagers in their bedrooms spouting rubbish in front of their webcams for 20 minutes on a permanent basis? The system has its uses, but isn't anywhere near a replacement for real TV.

I have a real fundamental issue with YouTube -- it is owned by one of the world's largest companies, has revenues in the hundreds of millions and yet bases its entire business model on piracy. Why isn't the industry going after Google? They are quite possibly the world's biggest pirates right now -- if I sold a DVD with bits of films and TV shows on it, I'd have FAST on my back faster than you can blink. Do you think I'd be able to just remove articles as and when asked to by companies? Not flaming likely -- I'd be in court faster than you can blink.

Monumental, staggering hypocrisy.

Yes. If the directors of YouTube ran high street shop they would be in jail by now, and their defence would probably be 'not all our goods are counterfeit so it's ok'.

IPTV systems based around unbundled ADSL are the only sensible way to deliver TV over broadband. By the service provider putting their own equipment in the exchanges they bypass the BT ADSL infrastructure and backhaul costs which cripple any ISP that tries to deliver high data volumes over conventional ADSL.

Personally I think the IPTV systems have been unsuccessful down to lack of content rather than poor implementation. They have always been seen as a poor alternative to Sky or Cable due to a smaller number of channels. But there is no technical reason for there to be less channels than Sky or Cable, as your set top box will only ever request one multicast stream at a time from the exchange. My guess is that this has been down to IPTV providers spending money on providing a minimum service to a maximum number of exchanges, rather than focusing on providing a content rich service to a limited geographic region.

Likewise I mentioned earlier earlier how a few TB of disks would allow a week of the whole of freeview to be recorded in a few years time. If you are sharing your disk array and server between a couple of hundred users at the exchange then the per user costs are tiny to implement this now. However rights issues are what are preventing cable and IPTV companies doing this - not technology ones.

And not forgetting the pretty awful picure quality they deliver as well. Even HomeChoice - which was supposed to be a TV IPTV experience was (and AIUI still is) dire.

This is happening in the US - albeit in a different way - with their "Switched Digital Video" system. Each cable box is allocated a slot on the cable service - and the correct channel (or VOD content) is pumped down this single slot - so rather than every channel being pumped to every subscriber constantly for them to select and "tune' the right service, only the services that are actually being "tuned" (in reality requested) are pumped to the box.

They're doing this because their cable system are full - and to add high-speed internet connectivity as well something had to give - but the concept of push rather than pull is probably here to stay for some applications.



Though it isn't preventing people doing this - particularly as the Freeview Playback EPG is now so much better. The hardware and software to permanently cache months of Freeview is within lots of people's grasp.

Homechoice I've never seen 'in the wild', only as a demo at a show. The quality was lower than Sky, but no worse than the ex C&W Digital Cable I had at the time.

Whether quality is any lower in the home, or has deteriorated since it became Tiscali TV I don't know.


My understanding is that the UK digital cable networks already do something similar. The frequency blocks on the cable contain broadcast signals from headend which are then mixed with signals injected by a local distribution node in a roadside cabinet at the point where the fibre becomes copper - such as a VOD sessions or cable modem traffic that are sent seperately from headend to that area. As the cable is a closed RF system this local frequency block can be reused in as many adjacent areas as you need (with a different feed, obviously) to in order to maintain the required quality of service for subscribers.

who knows what might happen,only time will tell