Apple to kill Cable TV ?

[Robert E. Seastrom]

Chip Fetrow <tacos at fetrow.org> writes:

> MAYBE Apple can, but can the Internet providers?

In a word, yes.  But so many of them are video providers too.  So it's
unlikely to "kill Cable TV", just cause a paradigm shift.

> Today, broadcast and cable are a "one to many" form of literally
> BROADCASTING.  Yes, there is video on demand, and Netflix, but it is
> very small compared to the broadcast offerings.
>
> Once everyone is getting everything by subscription, it is a server to
> user service, and frankly, the Internet just isn't ready for that!

Yes, "the Internet" isn't, but individual ISPs *are*.

First off, there is always multicast.  It Does Not Work Well between
providers, but within an autonomous system, it works reasonably well
but is just a pain in the butt to debug.  It is good for broadcast,
not useful for on-demand.

Second off, there are content distribution networks for unicast
traffic.  Think like Akamai, but built within the individual network,
to serve that network's needs.  OK for broadcast, better for on-demand.

The interesting fact for on-demand is that just as we used to mock the
ATM folks for excessive overhead while shlepping around IP packets, so
too the video guys grumble about IP + ethernet overhead compared to
stuffing the video down a dynamically allocated 256QAM channel.  It's
actually quite non-trivial, and IPv6 makes it somewhat worse due to
larger headers.  IP has its appeal as a universal solvent, but that
may or may not be enough to override the interests of spatial reuse on
the customer edge.

> Also, if the public every wises up and figures out they have spent a
> lot of money on TVs capable of 1080i or even the non-broadcast
> standard of 1080p, and figure out that most of the providers,
> especially cable providers are actually giving them 240 p, the poop is
> going to hit the air blowing device.

That's a big "if".  In the immortal words of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, "You
know how dumb the average guy is?  Well by definition, half the world
is *even dumber than that*".

I'm not sanguine about the public ever wising up, about anything.
Remember this is the same public who keeps electing the same gang of
idiots over and over to Congress, the same ones who reflexively vote a
party line like they were cheering for their favorite football team.

> I cannot believe the quality Comcrap sends to my home.  It is just
> dreadful, and it is dreadful on services such as News Channel 8, which
> has always been a 480i service, but they down convert it anyway.
> Watch the lips on the news readers!

It looks better if you take your glasses off.  Try it!

> Until we are going to really improve the bandwidth of the cable
> systems, and that includes FiOS, we cannot expect everyone to be able
> to watch video on demand at any kind of reasonable quality over the
> Internet.  Sure, YouTube quality will be there, but who wants to watch
> that?  It is worse than Comcrap.

As you and I have discussed previously, stacked transcoding is a major
factor here.  Cutting out the middleman and cutting everything down to
two encodings (raw -> mezzanine -> final distribution) is something
that is logistically painful, takes a lot of negotiation, and the
general public has no frickin clue.

As for YouTube, you can do amazingly good quality with YouTube.  Just
go direct from raw to final product.  High production value doesn't
hurt either.  Consider the following music video (which you'll
probably find amusing too) - change the settings to 1080p and zoom to
full screen before watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UFc1pr2yUU

Noisy old analog sources will continue to suck when encoded aggressively.

-r

> --chip
>
> On Sep 2, 2011, at 1:00 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 4
>> Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 10:39:10 -0400
>> From: Dan Romanchik KB6NU <cwgeek at kb6nu.com>
>>
>> If anyone can do it, Apple can.  Like the article points out,
>> though, prices for TV shows are going to have to come way down. I
>> might pay $30-35 per season for a new series, but I can't see paying
>> $20 for a season's worth of Gilligan's Island or Mr. Ed.
>>
>> They need to improve Apple TV, too. Every review I've read says that
>> Roku is better, and that's what I'm using right now, a Roku box
>> running Netflix.   (Yes, there are some other "channels" available,
>> but most of the content on the other channels are pretty lame.)
>>
>> 73!
>>
>> Dan KB6NU
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tacos mailing list
> Tacos at amrad.org
> https://amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos