[opendtv] Re: TV Technology: Netflix Users Watch 10 TV Shows a Week
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 08:18:34 -0500
On Nov 4, 2015, at 8:43 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The important distinction is not how the stream gets to the TV.
And those stats do not make that distinction.
Correct. And you conveniently ignored the fact that there ARE published sales
numbers for many of the devices that people are using to stream to their TV.
We're talking more than 100 million devices from Amazon, Apple, Google and
Roku. Tens of millions more when we add game consoles, smart DVD players and
smart TVs. Meanwhile multimedia PCs failed to grab much market share and
disappeared.
That's the whole point. When they quote the percentage watching online
streaming TV content on a TV, they do not specify how. When they quote the
percentage streaming to a PC, they are talking about people actually watching
on their sit-up-straight PC or laptop. That's why I said that streaming to
PCs and laptops is probably much more than the 25% figure they cited. Some
PCs and laptops are sending the images to TV sets (and they don't necessarily
need to be dedicated to this job).
Nobody is denying that you can stream to the big screen with a PC. We all know
at least one person doing this. But you are the only person I know that
recommends this approach.
So you have just confirmed what I was saying. First off, parenthetically, the
fact that cable companies have this huge installed base of obsolete equipment
is a problem of their own making. They resisted allowing standards-based
solutions for their STBs, preferring to rent pout their own boxes, so this is
the result. If they had not resisted, then obsoleting old content delivery
techniques would have been a lot easier.
Just a nit, but all of their boxes are standards based. They have an
organization called Cable Labs that develops the standards. I would also point
out that they chose to open up the market for DOCSIS modems.
They did not resist using standards based STBs, they resisted opening up the
security systems incorporated into these boxes. They resisted attempts by the
FCC to open up the market for these boxes by developing the Cable Card
standard, which did not support two-way services. Panasonic actually developed
a "tru2way" product, but dropped it because of the lack of consumer interest.
But the most important issue to consider is the lack of extensibility in
"standards based" TV products. The global cable industry standardized on the
current MPEG-2 infrastructure, and that infrastructure is still growing,
despite the fact that more advanced and efficient standards are now in use. In
the U.S., broadcasters are locked into a standard that is now out of date as
well, yet we must still pay for it when we buy a new TV.
How do we obsolete broadcast TV in the U.S.?
We either kill the service or start over again.
But most importantly, yes indeed, the reason many people are still using the
MPEG-2 TS broadcast streams from their cable, including using the PVR for
time shifting, is because that's all they have and that's all they know! They
are renting these boxes, month after month, and they have not bothered to
upgrade anything. But just as obviously, this is changing steadily, the stats
have told us unequivocally.
Clearly the new Internet infrastructure for streaming video is not constrained
from the standards and device perspective. This clearly demonstrates the
superiority of a market based approach and the advantages of an infrastructure
that is open, interoperable, extensible and scalable.
Unfortunately there is nothing standards and extensible hardware can do about
the content oligopoly, and the business models that continue to seek monopoly
pricing for popular TV entertainment.
Regards
Craig
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