Pay TV through the internet

Whilst sitting here watching QVC through the internet (stupid DTT box packed up after the shop shut) it's occuring to me how watcheable it actually is. Sure, it's hardly DVD quality picture and sound, but it does the job and the bandwidth it is transmitted at doesn't zap the whole connection leaving plenty of room left for web browsing and crucially making sure that the connection is never unduly loaded to prevent freezes. It all works very well.

Which led me to think, is there enough of a market for people to pay to watch TV through the internet with broadband connections? It allready sort of happens with the RealOne Superpass which provides access to BBC World (if you're outside the UK of course) but could a streamed pay TV service over the internet tailored for the UK and providing familiar pay TV channels work?

For people who can't have conventional forms of multichannel TV, it would be very useful if an operator provided a selection of basic pay channels like Sky One, UK Gold, MTV, Paramount, E4 etc streamed on the internet in return for a nominal subscription. Each channel could be available in low or high quality, depending on whether you want to watch TV and use the internet at the same time, or whether you want to use all the available bandwidth for TV to get better picture and sound (it would also be viable to put stereo sound on the high quality stream). Yes it still won't be the same quality, but it's pefectly acceptable, and if the price is right (which it surely should be, with no need for the provider to supply equipment to the customer and no premium channels carried) I could see something like this working as a cheap and cheerful way of providing pay TV to people who don't want to pay Sky, or those with no other access to pay TV; doors closed by ITV Digital going t*ts up could be opened again with this type of service.

The two biggest hurdles as I see it are A)security to ensure only authorised users in the UK are watching and B)getting clearance to stream the channels (I don't think there is any precedent for this sort of thing so I don't know how that would work). If they could be overcome, I do seriously see a market for a product like this, if well priced (ie it can't charge the same rates as Sky when it's technical quality would be so much lower).

I would envisage such a system as using some sort of custom software which provides comprehensive security (which as I said, would be the biggest issue - the rights sensitive nature of most pay TV output means that it mustn't be readily possible to use it outside the UK, and for the operator's security they must be able to ensure that only 1 user is using each account) along with an easy to use interface to select the channels as though they were on any other multichannel system, and for this to work in partnership with one of the existing proven streaming technologies such as Realvideo or Windows Media.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

1 thing - too expensive for the broadcaster

Yeah, it's called business.

Well yes, whilst I would like to type in a URL and settle down to The Simpsons on Sky One, it will never be that easy. As I said though, I do believe an internet delivered pay TV service is perfectly viable (even though I realise there are probably legal hurdles in the way) - as I said it does allready exist to a limited extent, and something which I could see being very popular, being available to anyone living in a broadband area. It could prove very popular for the consumer, with it being probably the only way of delivering pay TV which allows for more than 1 player per technology - there could be 4 or 5 providers all competing for my money so I can receive Sky One and UK Gold.

I realise it wouldn't have been part of the original plans for digital television with connections fast enough to support it being expensive (and often downright impossible) in the late 90's. But now with internet connections fast enough to support streaming of reasonable quality video and stereo audio (and it's not entirely inconceivable that in the not too distant future, consumer level connections would exist which would enable a TV channel to be streamed over the internet at the same data rate as a digital TV channel is by DTT or Dsat now) I do seriously think there is a big potential market there to be tapped into - with an even more bigger market since pay TV presently requires a dish or a cable to be installed, slamming shut the option of it to many people who rent their homes.

With all the time and money wasted on gimmicks bolted onto digital television, i'm surprised that something genuinly useful - an internet delivered pay TV service, isn't at least being considered.

Neither of those are bigger than the main one - the ISPs and available bandwidth at the exchange.

You are probably aware that although you are buying a 512kbps connection you are not exclusively guaranteed this service, and it can be much less than this at a busy exchange which has not had extra capacity installed. For example, if one in ten users tried to download something which was unlimited in bandwidth at the other end they would each receive around 100kbps.

The other limit is bandwidth applied by the ISP. They have to pay for the connections from BT Wholesale to the internet and most have a clause limiting excessive use by users. Some evev have specified limits - eg. 1Gb per day or 500Mb per day averaged over a week.

That said HomeChoice offer this kind of service. I thought they went bust but they seem to still be running:

http://www.homechoice.co.uk/revolution/rev_home.html

Gareth

And there's also another issue as well. The cost of the bandwidth.

Every byte of data that is sent through their connection costs them money unless it is within their internal network. But even then it still costs them money as they have to pay for the upkeep of the network equipment and infrastructure. See this cutting from "The Globe" , a newsletter for Pipex customers like me...

That's true but there are technologies which can allow for this. QVC's live stream automatically adjusts to the best it can offer for your available bandwidth, going all the way down to a 45Kbps stream if it has too (and still manages to have near full motion video at that bitrate even if it is a bit blurred - it's a very effective system they are using there). An internet delivered service could work in the same way - stream if at different speeds automatically adjusting to the connection speed. If the bandwidth is there, then give you an all singing all dancing stereo stream which doesn't look much worse than you're average divx'd film. If it's not there, give you a low bitrate mono stream which doesn't look or sound too hot but does at least work.

As I said, I do recognise that the technology to deliver something over the internet looking as good as an average dsat channel (not that that looks too great at times it must be said), but as long as the price reflects that (if I paid for an internet service providing 7 or 8 of the most popular pay TV channels I wouldn't expect to pay more than £5/month for it) I don't see that being a hurdle.

I really do believe this is one of the most useful things that digital TV could bring. When so much time and money is wasted on developing pure gimmicks (like most 'interactive TV' services, along with paying whoever it was who invented the term 'digital quality') it's annoying that research into providing a genuinely useful service that truly wasn't possible with analogue TV (so far I've seen no real benefits to having digital - Sky's old 30-odd channel analogue service was far superior in technical and programming quality to the modern day Sky Digital equivalent) isn't being done.

I know the author was making a point, but he did exagerate a bit. 500,000 Gigabytes = 5,000,000 pc's with full hard disks? That would mean each PC had a 500MB hard disk! This is not 1993!

That's what I meant by the bit about the BT Wholesale costs as the connection from the ISP to BT Wholesale is usually the only costs they incur for UK traffic.

For international traffic (what I think they mean by the term "transit") they either rent a fixed connection or pay according to the amount of traffic they use. When I was at university the JANET people were being charged £20 per Gigabyte of transatlantic traffic, although I suspect this is now much lower.

The current BBCi Broadband services are only viable because they are peered with the participating ISPs. What this requires is that the ISP has a point of presence (network connection) at LINX (in Docklands) and they link up their routers and configure it such that traffic between the BBC and the ISP goes directly across that connection rather than a longer route via a backbone.

There is an interesting diagram of the BBC's services here although it might be a little old:

http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/

Gareth

There is a company planing several Broadband channels in 2004.

Now im sure they won't be satisfactory quality for SOME (but then, the judgement of someone who thinks that old analogue Sky was better than Digital is highly suspect...but still)

To see broadband tv in action, try www. solent.tv 's live stream - quite watchable

It's in Win Media9 (which has a great variable bit rate detection)

Costings are complex, but to stream 192k would cost about 1.90 GBP/ 2.4 Euros per concurrent user per month.

192 K is about the best stable rate for the majority of broadband users at all times (peak traffic)

That basic cost (on top you have staff, programme rights and technical overheads) gives you an idea that it would have to charge about 8-10 GBP per month to make it viable for that stream rate.

Highr quality streams = More cash!

What was wrong with Sky through analogue Astra? FM stereo sound instead of compressed MPEG2 sound. Full motion uncompressed pictures instead of overly compressed MPEG2 video (the only real problem was the grainyness that could be imposed by some Videocrypt decoers - but I still maintain that picture quality on Sky Analogue was better than digital). Yes there was no interactive or EPG, but most interactive services are gimicky nothings (one of the earliest interactive services, Sky News Active also remains one of the only genuinely useful interactive services on the platform), an EPG wasn't necessary with a service with less channels which provided a full printed guide included in the price of the subscription, and I fail to see that channel expansion has benefited Sky in any way - all I'm seeing is the same programming spread out ever more thinly and a proliferation of waste of space new ventures like Friendly TV - but in any case Astra's analogue satellites could have expanded further and provided Sky with more capacity on their existing analogue system.

Anyway, so what channels will be included in this broadband service?

That's pretty much up-to-date