
Why Intel's New IPTV Service Will Do What Google, Apple, and Microsoft Can't - kellyhclay
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/12/30/why-intels-new-iptv-service-will-do-what-google-apple-and-microsoft-cant/
======
fernly
I don't understand how the writer supposes Intel can acquire unbundled content
and sell it per-channel or even per-show.

Yes, that's the consumer's dream, to be able to subscribe to and pay for only
one's preferred channels (or even shows), but that well-known desire has been
consistently opposed by the cable and satellite systems. And content producers
have, I believe, always cooperated with the cable and satellite providers in
this. It's one more item for negotiation: "we'll charge less for our material
if you'll bundle us with a popular group of channels", etc. Hulu, iTunes, et
al only get to rebroadcast single shows only as reruns, so providing a trickle
of secondary income but never threatening the main cash cow.

So it seems highly unlikely that even Intel could acquire the right to
broadcast first-run material in competition with other systems. Also the cable
and sat providers have plenty of pricing elasticity acquired from years of
semi-monopoly, and could easily compete on price if they wanted to.

~~~
drakaal
Xbox and amazon both offer show subscriptions, why is it hard to believe that
Intel can't get the same deal?

Channel by Channel is the only "new" thing, and while it might be hard to
believe Scripps would unbundle all their channels, it would not be hard to
believe that BBC, and Nick, and Disney would be VERY happy to have their
channels not muddied with the offerings of "lesser" channels

~~~
fernly
Looking on Amazon I see you are correct in part, you can order a season pass
for the current season of, e.g., CSI NY.

However, "TV episodes are delivered as soon as possible after the episode is
aired by the network (usually the following day)" (Amazon's about-TV-passes
page). That's not at all the same as watching it in its "proper" time slot on
CBS via DirecTv or Comcast. If Intel offered show subs only on the basis of a
24-hr delay they'd be at a big disadvantage.

They could make up some of the difference by offering a really smart dvr-type
system with a clean interface (pay for all the Tivo patent licenses and go
beyond them), so their set top box knows what you want and gets it
automatically with no fuss -- but they'd still be selling yesterday's TV
today. And the cable and dish providers can play the smart dvr card as well,
with current content.

And in any case, there are times when you want this minute's content this
minute: news, commentary, sports. When Intel gets a contract to resell ESPN or
Fox Sports Net, live, I'll be a believer.

------
jpxxx
There is no check sufficiently large to convince a $130B industry to smash
their business model into bits. And the second they unbundle, half of their
content pipeline evaporates overnight.

~~~
drakaal
Cable companies like bundles more than Content providers do. And Producers
would like to cut much of the "pipeline" out of the picture.

Shows like Firefly would have done much better in a world where consumers paid
directly for the content, than a world where the networks determined air
dates, and messed with schedules.

~~~
dhugiaskmak
Shows like Firefly don't get made in a world where consumers pay directly for
the content.

~~~
loceng
Not yet..

------
josephlord
I'm pretty doubtful. Intel have been doing in-out dance for TV solutions for a
few years. They don't have consumer product experience or media market
experience. Would be stunned if this happened on a substantial scale.

~~~
thematt
Also, what clout do they have with the content providers? Why would somebody
release control to them rather than Apple, Microsoft or Google...which have
larger, more-established viewer bases.

~~~
josephlord
Well money talks and Intel could afford to buy content but I just don't see
the business case for them to outbid the existing channels and cable companies
for exclusive rights for premium content.

~~~
elemeno
And Apple can afford to buy content creators outright. Without any mention of
deals having been made with movie studios etc. the whole article is nothing
more than a pipe-dream.

~~~
drakaal
What planet do you live on? Even with $100B in the bank, you are going to buy
A (1) content creator out right, and not the biggest. Lucas Films which has a
few dozen properties, and a few hundred hours of content, went for $4b. It is
a VERY small content provider. Disney would cost in the neighborhood of $250B

Viacom just bought Bellator (MMA / UFC content producer) for $225M. So apple
could afford a few producers of a single show.

~~~
elemeno
Your numbers are way out.

Disney has a market cap of $87B and that gets you Disney, Disney Theme Parks,
ABC, ESPN, The Disney Channel, A+E, Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic, and
a hell of a lot more to boot.

News Corp has a market cap of $57B and that gets you 20th Century Fox, Fox,
and a long list of international broadcasters and producers.

Viacom has a market cap of $26B.

Any of those gives you pretty much all the content you can shake a stick at in
both TV and Film, as well as several broadcasting networks both in the US and
globaly and a long list of other assets that would likely be packed up and
sold off. Even accounting for a leveraged buy-out premium, Apple could buy
either Disney, or News Corp and Viacom and instantly be one of the worlds
biggest media companies.

~~~
drakaal
Market cap, an "price to buy" are not the same. Anyone who has been through a
purchase can tell you that. Why do you think Lucas was so expensive?

Market cap is the price of the outstanding stock, and doesn't reflect the cost
of the assets, or the will of the primary holders to keep their shares.

------
flyinglizard
This article doesn't say anything about where the content will come from.
Possibly Intel hasn't got that resolved, unless they will front for the
content providers as an independent initiative (you bring the hardware, we
bring the content).

Apple is just toying around the market. It's obvious for everyone that: a.
People would _love_ having a huge Apple display in their livingroom, playing
nicely with their mobile stuff and Apple-ized life b. When Apple goes into
this market, it will go with an entire TV set and not just a set top box; this
TV will not be bound to the low margins of mass market TVs, either

As for Google, they are the long term winner. You WILL need to feature Google
services if you want your product to be more than just a dumb streamer. Now
they are doing their little fiber experiment which, in my eyes, is just a
precursor to a massive rollout of infrastructure fast enough to support high
quality IPTV.

I'm sure we will see Youtube stuff coming to our livingroom in few years.

In my eyes, Intel got nothing to bring to the table here. The problem was
never hardware, that exists for many years now. The problem is content first,
software second, hardware in a very distant third.

~~~
disbelief
There is some hand-wavy mention towards the end of Intel going to "Hollywood"
with a bunch of money. Whatever and whomever that means.

~~~
flyinglizard
The only way I see it happening is if the content providers decide to do a
preemptive move and base their own STBs on top of some Intel platform. But it
will not be an Intel STB nor will it be marketed as such.

------
fuzionmonkey
Intel has been willing to work with Hollywood in the past. There was a lot of
controversy over their inclusion of "DRM" hardware in their Sandy Bridge
Chips.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/01/shows-over-how-
holly...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/01/shows-over-how-hollywood-
strong-armed-intel/)

[http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-
_wh...](http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-
_what_is_it_no/)

I'd love for more competition in this space. If real IPTV could finally happen
it would be great. I use a HTPC with Windows Media Center as my main TV, and
I'm tired of dealing with the issues. Cablecard is a pain, Comcast is a pain,
commercials are a pain. I just want to watch the few shows I care about.

The only thing stopping me from cutting cable and just watching shows on
iTunes is live sports.

~~~
senthilnayagam
one cheap price is more interesting for me, and if the content is available on
netflix, that would seal the deal for me

~~~
Ntrails
All I want is to replicate the experience I can currently get from uTorrent.
ie - high res content downloaded [not streamed and thus vulnerable to
buffering] to watch at my leisure around the time of initial cable viewing.

The price for doing this legally should probably be similar per episode to
what I pay for a song on iTunes.

I'm happy to pay for a netflix sub, but it doesn't do what I want. I hate
buying boxed sets (though I sometimes do) because playing DvDs on my PC is
worse than having a quality .avi file neatly filed and quickly accessed.

In fact (I've said this here before) my ideal world is where Steam holds all
of my purchased series and I can manage it all from there. It remembers stuff
I no longer want clogging up my HD to be re-downloaded, and downloads the
latest episodes of stuff I've bought automatically.

What I want will never happen.

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kierank
Eugh, more abuse of the term IPTV. IPTV is a standardised term requiring a
managed QoS network (i.e not the Internet) so you can match the QoS provided
by managed RF spectrum or dedicated cable frequencies.

~~~
drakaal
IPTV does not require mangaged QoS -Brandon Wirtz Google me I know more about
IPTV than you do. (or just about anyone on the planet)

~~~
kierank
If you knew more about IPTV than I did then you'd know that there are
internationally standardised definitions for what "IPTV" is designated as
compared to "Internet TV".

~~~
drakaal
QoS of the network is not a requirement for IPTV. IPTV is a definition for
Broadcast like experience to a Television display.

Several "IPTV Named Standards" work over Multicast and require "IP Traffic
Quality Metrics" this is not "QoS"

PS I authored many of those standards... (I was also on the committee for BD,
h264, VC1, and a few other SMPTE standards)

~~~
kierank
Now you're just splitting hairs about the definition of QoS, which again is
defined in standards and fits in with the standardised definition of IPTV. I'm
not going to quote it all because the chances are there is another standard
with slightly different wording that can be construed to mean something else.

It doesn't change the fact that the article is describing an "over the top"
network where content is delivered over the public internet which isn't
suitable for a broadcast-like television experience (start torrenting on
another machine and you'll see why). It also ignores the fact that the content
will almost certainly be delivered in low-bitrate/poorly encoded and half-
framerate (for full frame/field rate material) like every OTT service out
there. Try watching sports at 25/30fps on a television and your headache will
tell you that it's not a television experience.

~~~
drakaal
You are horribly ill informed. Xbox Live, Hulu, all of those are at bit rates
and quality roughly what a Sports offering would be doing, and work just fine.
I'm not splitting hairs, you just have never worked with a CDN, or done any
real work with a real budget. The tech and pipes to do this has been around
for 7+ years.

~~~
kierank
First of all that’s a lovely ad hominem based on absolutely zero knowledge of
the projects I have worked on. I have led teams for Pay-TV deployments on
satellite and OTA with budgets orders of magnitude larger than any live
streaming package and deployed hundreds of television channels. Of course you
make the same claim again which I’ve had time after time from engineers like
Microsoft, Google etc who think web is the be-all and end-all. I use the
following technical arguments each time to bring these guys back to earth.

First of all you totally ignore the point I made about high bandwidth usage
affecting the viewing experience. Do you really want to sit there on Patch
Tuesday waiting for the video on your TV to buffer because your PC in the
other room is downloading updates? At best you’ll see huge quality
fluctuations as the adaptive streaming tries to react. At worst you’ll miss
the goal waiting for the stream to buffer. A managed network gives you a
similar broadcast experience to licensed RF spectrum.

All the web services offering “HD” are based around a simple concept – you can
get acceptable quality at web bitrates when you’re delivering p24 content with
buffer times of around 5-10 seconds (the usual chunk length in an adaptive
streaming system), which gives you a huge VBV to work with and a huge keyframe
interval. Contrast this with broadcast and its ~0.5-2 second channel change
times. Good luck convincing users to wait 5-10 seconds to change the channel
(channel-surfing is part of a television experience). The fact is to deliver
p50/60 content for sports you need significantly higher bitrates than web
bitrates – with current bitrates you’re just watching blocks all day because
of the necessary smaller keyframe intervals and VBV. It is nowhere near to a
sports offering that people are paying the equivalent of a cable subscription
for - even more so on a larger screen. That doesn’t even take into
consideration the poor quality of web encoders.

Overall latency is nowhere near television-like. Web streams are 30s to 1
minute delayed compared to television streams thanks to CDN buffering and
adaptive streaming chunks. Different viewers in a household end up getting
streams that are hugely out of phase (demonstrated during the Olympics where a
race on one stream hadn’t even started when it had finished on another). Your
neighbours have already finished celebrating the goal by the time you see it.
The technology to deliver web streams to relatively small numbers of users has
been around but once you get to large numbers the capacity is not there – it’s
one reason adaptive streaming is useful; once your ISP runs out of capacity
you can be adaptively streamed to a low bitrate but still get a picture. In my
city (Bristol, UK) on cable, YouTube interconnects are congested and only 240p
works as result.

It’s no surprise live streaming OTT is provided as an add-on to Pay-TV –
operators know it isn’t good enough yet to charge for as a standalone package.
Some operators _are_ going to use streaming to deliver their channels because
of problems with multicast but they’ll be able to use DiffServ to maintain a
decent experience.

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TheAmazingIdiot
All the perceived problems that Intel 'solves' are all legal and copyright
issues. Tunnel technology just works. Hell, there's even an autodownloader for
TPB on one of the open source media players, so this stuff isn't theoretical.

I'm gueasing this is some sort of hackeneyed scheme to get DRM embedded in
more of our devices.

