TV Meets IP

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Bob Gorman writes:
| TV Meets IP
|
| http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2004/tc20041123_3012_tc184.htm

Interesting comments. Of course, people have been predicting this for
a decade, and so far it's always going to happen Real Soon Now.

An interesting case study is ComedyCentral.com, whose Daily Show  got
lots of attention before the recent election as being one of the best
places to get good political news.  But  their  web  site  is  hardly
usable.  Part of this is a strong MS bias, but even people running IE
on Windows report that their online video clips  "just  don't  work".
They  used to work on our Mac, but stopped working there a few months
back.

Funny thing is that lots  of  political  blogs  mirror  many  of  the
ComedyCentral  videos,  and they almost always work when you get them
from  the  blogs'  links.   What  seems  to  be  going  on  is   that
ComedyCentral  doesn't  give you links to their videos.  They want to
embed them in pages with ads, so their links download  an  HTML  page
that's mostly javascript. The JS attempts to download the video clips
and display them inside the page, between ads. And this usually fails
in  various  ways.   Most often, it tells you that you don't have the
required plugin.  If you believe this and reinstall, it  again  tells
you that you don't have the plugin.  Other times, it decides that the
plugin is present, but no video appears,  just  a  background-colored
rectangle (sometimes with audio).

An more curious semi-failure happens on our Mac: With some  of  their
video  clips,  you  get a popup telling you that it can't display the
video, but Windows Media Player might be able to.  When you click  on
the go-ahead button, WMP opens and plays the video.  (Of course, it's
really crappy video, with  lots  of  pauses,  loss  of  sync  between
picture  and  voice,  and all the other problems that WMP has, but at
least it sorta plays.)

I've done a bit of experimenting with trying to deliver content  like
this,  and  I have a lot of sympathy for the techies at ComedyCentral
who are trying to do the job the way  their  management  wants.   The
documentation  for  plugins  is crap; there are a zillion versions of
browsers and plugins out there that all work differently; there's  no
way to debug for all the combinations that customers have; and on and
on with all the ways you can do software wrong.

Anyway, from what I've seen, doing TV over IP  is  still  pretty  far
from  ready for prime time.  Unless the suppliers are willing to just
show you a list of simple hyperlinks that just download the file  and
hand  it over to a helper app, that is.  That works pretty well.  But
the Big Guys aren't likely to go for something so  simple  (and  that
doesn't use something proprietary to keep out the competitors ;-).

The only way I can see it being commercially viable given the current
mess  is to put together a TVoIP "appliance" that packages everything
and has no "computer" that's visible to a user. Even then, you'd have
a major debugging effort to make it work for what's out there. Or you
could just not allow access to web sites, and force customers to  get
shows  only from your own server.  That's probably what will be done,
using IP only as a transport, but not permitting any access except to
a single server.

Limited as this might be, it would still be an  interesting  advance.
Such  an  appliance  could work from anywhere on the Internet.  So it
could end the local monopoly of the cable company.   Cable  companies
might  slowly  become just ISPs.  They'd be (regulated) monopolies in
most places, but they'd just  supply  the  pipe  and  would  have  no
control over content.