Category Archives: IPTV

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:
What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?

—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Vividness and Interactivity

In the rush to IPTV that seems to be driving AT&T to acquire Bellsouth and Verizon to dump rural New England customers, telcos seem to be missing some dimensions. More than a decade ago, in 1995 in Wired, and in 1992 in Journal of Communication v42 n4 p73-93 Fall 1992, Jonathan Steuer pointed out that communication services could be grouped not only by vividness (for which old-style TV rates pretty high and HDTV rates higher), but also interactivity. Broadcast TV doesn’t rate very high on interactivity, no matter how high definition it is. Continue reading →

Fast Services?

Whenever I hear people talking about fast services that need broadband, they always seem to be talking about video, and by that they almost always seem to mean broadcast TV, as in a few producers and a few centralized distrbution points going to many consumers.

But what about podcasts, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? None of those are TV in that sense. Continue reading →

Bundles v. Choice

Telcos are so clever they seem to have slipped one past Doc Searls, here commenting on Robin Good’s IPTV post:
Well, here’s the first problem: Cable TV is “private delivery infrastructure”, and so is old-fashioned phone service. The mess Robin describes is not a conceptual stretch beyond Business As Usual — for telcos, cablecos or most of their customers. A few techies may know a line has been crossed, but that’s far from obvious to the rest of us.

Net losses, Doc Searls, 1 Feb 2007

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Most people won’t realize what’s the problem with what they’re getting, so they’ll buy the bundle. Continue reading →

IPTV Bundle Buyer Beware

Robin Good has a long post about how Americans are easily flummoxed by marketing into locking themselves into a telco IPTV solution at the expense of their Internet connectivity:
A telecom company, who is also a large Internet provider, needs only a little marketing campaign to convince its users and potential clients that with about $50 a month they can get the most unique offer to come around in recent times: super-high-speed Internet access, (the customer representative who called me to explain this offer and clarify any doubts said specifically 20 Mbps), home television channels with free and pay-per-view content including movies and live sports, and even a video-phone!

What they don’t tell you is that the moment you accept to do that, this is what will really happen:

IPTV And Home Television Offerings Are Telcos Best Stealth Solution To Bypass Any Net Neutrality Resistance: Wake Up Robin Good, 29 January 2007

Since Americans don’t know that real fast Internet means 50Mbps or 100Mbps in countries such as Japan or Korea that actually have it, they sell out for still slow 20Mbps.

Robin Good enumerates some gotchas in that “super-high-speed Internet access” offer. Continue reading →