Re: Ofcom says 4 national HD channels on DTT

Peter Hayes wrote:
"DAB sounds worse than FM" <dab.is@dead> wrote:

HD channels are only higher bandwidth versions of other live streams
at the end of the day, and 1 Mbps live streams of the BBC channels
are going to be launched later this year. You can see what's been on
the trial here:

http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/streams.html

1Mbps suggests the quality will be crap except in a YouTube sized
window.


That's obviously a gross exaggeration. In reality, the quality of 1 Mbps
H.264 is "okay" for watching on a computer. The bandwidths will go up over
time, just like broadband speeds will.


The internet isn't a very reliable delivery mechanism. Users won't
want their paid-for 2160 HD playout stalling. A few stalls and the
box goes back to Curry's.


The HD streams would be delivered via multicasting, where the ISPs
would each receive a stream directly from the broadcaster (as
opposed to receiving thousands of streams now with one stream per
user), and then it's up to the ISP to get that reliably to their
users. BT's 21CN next generation network that's being rolled out
nationally over the next 2-3 years will support multicasting
inherently, so presumably the ISPs themselves will also be able to
use multicasting to get the HD streams to the customers, with the
bottlenecks moved towards the customers' ends, and then it's up to
the ISPs to make sure that the quality of service is good enough.

Are you proposing the removal of the dreaded contention ratio that
slows the internet to dialup speeds at certain times?


You sound like frigging Agamemnon there. If the contention ratio is 50:1,
what are the odds that all 50 users are simultaneously downloading from the
Internet? It's so low that it's not worth thinking about. And Internet
traffic is inherently bursty in nature, because you request a web page, read
it, request another, read it. A lot of the people you share your DSLAM with
won't even be at home, others are at home but not on the Internet.

Basically, the contention ratio won't slow an up to 8 Mbps connection down
to dial up speeds - 8 Mbps divided by 50 is 3 times higher than dialup
anyway.

Slow speeds will primarily be due to things happening elsewhere on the
Internet, such as requesting info from a busy server or whatever.


50 users on one
"modem" all watching Coronation Street in HD (shudder) will kill
access.


Again, that is the kind of thing Agamemnon would come out with. Think of the
things wrong with that suggestion:

1. As well as the Internet there are terrestrial, satellite and cable, and
over 90% of people have these digital TV platforms.

2. Since when did every single user watch Coronation Street? Are you not
aware that there are 500 TV channels on Sky and 30 odd on Freeview?


The on-demand part of BT Vision is delivered over the Internet, and
Tiscali TV's on-demand part is also delivered over the Internet, and
I haven't heard any horror stories about these not working, so I
fail to see why other ISPs can't provide live streaming.

Perhaps these delivery channels aren't being used as much as their
proponents imagine, so the current infrastructure can still cope.


Do you have any evidence to back that up, or is it another Agamemnon style
hoping that it might be right?


The massive investment in new ISP and exchange kit will have to be
paid for by someone.


They won't give superfast broadband away for free, so if they don't want our
money then they don't have to invest any dosh. But if they do want our
money, then they'll have to shell out.


Joe Bloggs doesn't want to mess about downloading content on some
user friendly equivalent of a computer or AppleTV like device.


One of the things that the BBC is planning in relation to their BBC
iPlayer work is that they want to make set-top boxes available that
can handle BBC iPlayer content so that people can watch iPlayer
stuff on their TVs rather than on their computers. And there's
already a lot of IPTV set-top boxes available from the likes of Pace
and so on.

The Internet will become a TV platform in its own right over time,
and eventually it will kill off Freeview,

Freeview will be around for at least 25 years. Politically it'll be
impossible to kill off. And how do you receive TV in the caravan if
the only access is satellite or the internet?


25 years? Not a chance. 15 years tops. Freeview will be analogous to black
and white TV in 10 years from now, so people will have migrated away from it
in droves.

People will increasingly be using on-demand over time as well, which the
Internet is ideally suited to whereas Freeview can't deliver jack *** on
demand.


because people will just migrate to the Internet because all TV
channels can be in HD over the net whereas they ain't ever gonna be
on Freeview.

If it is to work it has to include all the features currently
available to the average viewer, simple one button channel (stream if
you prefer) selection, ability to timeshift and ad skip without some
arbitary DRM imposed restrictions, and zero additional cost.

Do you see all this happening? I don't. The content providers will
screw it up with their DRM paranoia for starters.


Once you've recorded a stream on a PVR they'll obviously allow you to skip
the ads and so on - why wouldn't they let you do this? We'll watch TV via
the net on set-top boxes just like we do on Freeview or whatever, it's just
that they're connected to the Internet rather than receiving a radio signal.


Joe Bloggs is used to "free" television. They won't take kindly to
paying ISP charges just to watch what was free.


It's not really like that though is it. You get an Internet
connection for everything, and watching HD over the net will just be
an additional think that's included if you choose to pay for
superfast broadband.

And if you don't choose to pay for superfast broadband? Or don't want
broadband at all? You'll be stuck with some free or paid-for satellite
SD/HD system.


No-one's forcing anybody to get superfast broadband, but I bet the vast
majority of Internet users will end up getting it. And what's wrong with
free or paid-for satellite? Why would you be "stuck with" it? It beats
Freeview in terms of free HD channels already and it'll murder it in future.


And that will be a disaster for many because they'll be asked to shell
out for quad or octal LNBs and receivers to replace the DVB-T kit
they've shelled out for to replace their analogue kit that worked
quite happily until DSO. See a pattern here?


But by the time Freeview can be switched off there'll be other ways of
receiving TV. The Internet is an obvious one that's not used for live TV
viewing much at the moment, and there's things like High Altitude Platform
Stations (lightweight aircraft with transmitters on them - like low cost
versions of satellites) that are under development.


Superfast
broadband is taking off in a massive way in Japan and Korea, so
they're obviously willing to pay the extra to get that, and once
you've got it then receiving an HD stream that takes up just 10% of
the mximum bandwidth (10 Mbps for an HD channel out of 100 Mbps
maximum connection speed) isn't even as high a percentage as
listening to a 128 kbps radio station on a 512k broadband connection!

We're going to get ADSL2+ nationwide once the BT 21CN has been
rolled out nationally over the next 2-3 years, and apparently
they're going to start switching on exchanges from early next year.
So we'll have fast enough connections to receive HD within the next
couple of years. And after that it's pretty inevitable that we'll
move to 50-100 Mbps connection speeds.

Everyone is overlooking DRM. The various devices currently in use, the
iPlayer etc, all attempt to impose DRM on the user. So by 201x or
thereabouts there may well be limited or no timeshifting, no advert
skipping, and certainly no stockpiling material for watching when the
user wants.


Since when did DRM stop you timeshifting stuff that you've recorded? If it
were impossible to skip ads if you record Internet streams then people would
simply choose to use a different platform which did allow them to do that.


For many people the heyday of FTA television is now. If your picture
of the future comes to pass we'll be looking back nostalgically at
the days of 20-30 free DVB-T channels that we could timeshift,
archive and ad skip.


No, we'll look back and laugh at the fact that we had to record things first
or else we missed them, because with on-demand you can decide to watch
something *whenever* you want. And already your view of DRM stopping
timeshifting is incorrect, because if you download a programme from 4oD you
can skip around in the programme to your heart's content - actually, don't
they even cut the ads out of the programmes on 4oD?


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info


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