Back in February I wrote about Microsoft's Lightspeed IPTV demo at CES and linked to BusinessWeek's skeptical coverage. Well, the magazine was just biding its time and this week they completely skewer the initiative (subscription required), highlighting the endless delays in commercializing it. It seems the impressive demo I saw at CES was real. The problem is that the technology doesn't work for millions of users at once, which is kind of important for the operators who want to broadly deploy it. Live and learn.
Still, TV over IP seems somewhat inevitable. Japan and Korea have DSL service 10x faster than what U.S. operators provide and at lower prices. I'd think that deploying dramatically faster DSL would both solve many of the technical problems with IPTV and at the same time provide the service justification for consumers to upgrade to broadband (or even switch from cable modems).
-avi
I always feel that the best entertainment on earth would be the ability for anyone to view anything. Ok, let’s put aside pornography or something related, we can assume that people like to see what is hard to be seen. For instance, you might just want to visit any country at any time without traveling there. I did mention before that what we can have is to organize a team of people acting as virtual tour guide and located at different locations. They will be equipped with VCR as well as video streaming capability to the Internet. What they would do is to wait for customer request and start shooting real time video.
http://brandonteohno1-it.blogspot.com/2005/07/real-time-entertainment.html
Posted by: Tech Blog | July 23, 2005 at 05:14 AM