[opendtv] Re: TV Technology: Netflix Users Watch 10 TV Shows a Week
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2015 09:21:32 -0500
On Nov 5, 2015, at 10:19 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
How do we obsolete broadcast TV in the U.S.?
It's trivially easy. In my home, it has all but already happened. Don't
confuse the non-technical use of the word with the technical use, though. You
seem to do this a lot.
You have completely lost track of the tread. You were complaining about the
fact that the cable industry did not deploy "standards based" set top boxes,
which I pointed out is not true. Both cable and U.S. Broadcasters use MPEG-2
compression with bits delivered via MPEG-2 transport streams.
BOTH ARE LOCKED INTO THESE STANDARDS TODAY.
On the other hand, when you use your PC to watch TV you are typically using
other standards that are not compatible with the ATSC tuner in your TV or most
cable STBs.
TiVo now offers a standards based STB/DVR, the Bolt, that works with both ATSC
and cable, and also supports OTT services. Better late than never...
The global cable industry is not about to obsolete their installed base of
MPEG-2 STBs. While the U.S. may be near a tipping point where MPEG-2 based
broadcast systems will be replaced with Internet OTT services, the rest of the
world is still years behind - many countries still do not have HDTV.
When I asked: "How do we obsolete broadcast TV in the U.S., I was talking about
the installed base of ATSC capable TVs.
The ATSC has already signaled that ATSC 3.0 will not be backward compatible to
ATSC 1.0. Thus the entire installed base of "standards based" TVs will need to
be replaced, or at a minimum upgraded to support a new standard. On the other
hand, we could just recover all the broadcast spectrum and move on.
The good news is that we will not need another government cheese program to
upgrade existing TVs. You are doing it now with your PC. And most U.S. TV
viewers are adding inexpensive HDMI dongles or boxes to access OTT services.
I wrote:
Unfortunately there is nothing standards and extensible hardware
can do about the content oligopoly,
There absolutely is! CBS All Access proves it. HBO Now proves it. Sling TV
proves it. When you have the general purpose, 2-way, neutral infrastructure
in place, you so-called oligopoly of content owners begin behaving a lot more
like competing companies.
So you are now paying for all of these services?
Congratulations!
The infrastructure may be neutral, just like public highways, but it is not
free, nor is much of the content it delivers.
You can drive to a store to rent or buy TV content. Now you don't need to get
in your car, you can just visit virtual stores along the Information Super
Highway.
Other than that, nothing has changed other than the form factor of the bundles.
That is, Unless you finally broke down and started paying the content oligopoly
to watch all the programming you cannot access FOTI.
Regards
Craig
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