Future of TV News

The BBC is leading a revolution that could replace broadcasting by downloading. A two-week UK trial of "Flexible TV" lets viewers watch any show broadcast in the last week, or scheduled for the next week. Trickle everything to your hard drive overnight, then to heck with the wondering what's on now. Skip the commercials. The technology works, and the BBC transmission cost is insignificant because it uses Bit Torrent style peer to peer instead of streaming. Jennie loves the BBC radio downloads; we can’t wait to get the tele as well.

Consumers worldwide are protesting high prices, switching to satellite where it offers savings and rejecting pay-TV in general across most of Europe. That opens plenty of room for new entrants, which could be BBC or Disney direct delivered peer to peer. Telcos are jumping in with great success, with Illiad/Free in France soon passing a million. Telcos needing HDTV, including most of the North Americans, face a dismal two years or so.

Thanks everyone who sent friendly notes and offers of help after the first Future of TV. We're having a great time writing it. We appreciate your continued support as we sell sponsorships and advertising. We'll be at the Entertainment Technology Alliance Summit in New York October 20 and at Voice on the Net in Boston that week as well. Say hello.

Email editor jennie@futureoftv.net and point the way for us. Just send an email with the subject "subscribe" for a free subscription - forward this to colleagues for them to subscribe as well.

Quick Takeaways: Streaming's got the buzz, with billions of dollars building networks. But the BBC is proving people may download instead of stream realtime, just like they do with MP3's. Microsoft's IP TV is winning major customers, but both MPEG4 and Windows Media 9 have two years of agony ahead, priced high until the chips are ready and 6 Mbps live HD TV works. China's satellite will probably add more users than any other the next five years.

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China’s Native Sky TV Versus 10M Illegals
China Satcom is launching an "official" broadcast satellite, but will need compelling programming to persuade the 10M+ illegal dish owners to switch. Satellite dishes are mostly illegal in China, but analysts estimate Chinese are buying 4M a year. You see few dishes in Beijing, but in Shanghai to the south the law is generally ignored and half the homes on some streets have dishes. If the police get active, they sometimes confiscate set tops but rarely go further. Replacing the set top costs less than $50. Hundreds of radio and TV channels are accessed from satellites in Asia and the mid-east. Some are free to air, while others, nominally protected, are easily broken.

Satcom potentially could reach hundreds of millions of viewers. As soon as the 22 transponder KU band satellite ordered from Alcatel is delivered, it will be launched on a "Long March" rocket. The growth in telephony has proven the potential; over 300M landlines and even more wireless subscribers, most in the last few years. Satcom President Zhang Hainan is also secretary of the Communist Party committee, a connection between carrier and government even closer than Italy’s Berlusconi TV. "Rupert Murdoch once infuriated China's leaders by saying that satellite-TV systems posed a threat to 'totalitarian regimes everywhere." Time Magazine reports, even today, China allows only limited deals with Murdoch and other international networks and has censored the BBC.

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"Broadcast is dead. Long live IP downloads”
Mark Pesce, broadcasting professor and web software pioneer, has nailed his thesis to the wall of the web. Who needs networks? With big hard drives and fast connections, most people will be able to download and watch want they want rather than viewing programs broadcast or streamed in real time. Are we mistaken assuming today’s “real time” TV will dominate the future? Pesce's paper is rapidly circling the globe, after Slashdot picked him up. DVRs have become the hot new commodity. "They're being adopted as if they were gasoline or electricity," notes Anton Wahlman who stood on a long line to pick up one from Time Warner Manhattan. "So few people are taking the set top without a hard drive they have to get them from the back room."

Jennie and I still doubt CBS, RAI, Comcast, or BSkyB will die anytime soon. We do agree with Brian Roberts that "more change is coming in the next five years than we seen in the last fifty." Football, news and other programming naturally belong in real time. Only 20% of the western homes have broadband, and at current rates it will be years before it's ubiquitous. Habits of a lifetime - sitting down and watching what's on TV - don't change overnight. Hollywood hasn't found a solution for wide spread piracy; but they may be able to put enough people in jail to slow things down. Existing stations, with tens of billions in value at stake, will fight hard to survive. A few months ago, we were part of a consensus assuming most IP TV would be streamed; Odlyzko and Pesce now have us really wondering. One of the toughest questions to answer today is what programs will be live, and what stored on the DVR or computer. The only certainty is some surprises are coming.

Odlyzko agrees: Streaming Video’s Time is Short
Andrew Odlyzko writes, "You appear to be stuck on the idea of streaming video. But as I discussed at Fast Net Futures, and more recently in the paper Telecom dogmas and spectrum allocations, faster than real time file transfers are not only likely to dominate, they already dominate (with MP3 files going over the Net far faster than their natural speed)." Read it at: http//www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/telecom.dogmas.spectrum.pdf.

It’s certainly possible habits will shift to watching shows you get in advance. Relatively few listen to internet radio; hundreds of millions download music. A 1 mbps stream of a TV show, downloaded at 15 mbps, comes across in 4 minutes per hour; even a movie can come over in minutes over the 100 Meg network on Columbia University’s campus. Originators could follow the BBC’s lead, adding downloading. That would change everything at CBS and Disney, but it’s already in the plans at Comcast and British Telecom.

Brian Roberts expects consumers to download some programming and watch others in real time, which seems more likely to us for the next decade. But Odlyzko’s ideas should be considered. He’s the one person who reality-tested the “Internet is doubling every 120 days idea” a year before anyone else. He was right.

One of our goals is to create a collaborative archive of scenarios. We’re working on one in which low cost, off-peak downloads dominate, and will be asking for your ideas.

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Sony’s Ultimate DVR Can Record Everything for a Week
Seven tuners and three 250+ gig hard drives in the new Sony Vaio X can simultaneously record six channels for an entire week. That’s perfect for the Japanese market, where Martyn Williams reports most homes get six or seven free channels. A little intelligent selection, and you could, for example, set it to record a half dozen favorite shows for a month as well as all the movies on dozen channels. That would cover 90% of what our home watches. The $4,700 price will come down, and capacity will only go up as drive prices come down, of course.

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Remedies for Telecom Recovery:One Year Later, October 29, 2004 (psa)

BBC Great Radio Program Giveaway
We love the BBC Radio with access to seven channels free on the net. It’s easy to listen to a live stream or access a comprehensive archive that goes back a week. BBC web casts news, drama, and storytelling of all kinds.

Dave stumbled across BBC Online radio while looking for new sources to satisfy my insatiable desire for bedtime stories. Since then my ideas about streaming online broadcasting and the future of media on the net have been transformed. Kudos to the BBC for finding a way to send TV over the net and for using peer-to-peer technology to bring down their network expenses. It will be free in the UK, where the BBC collects a fee from every TV. We’d be happy to pay to watch here in the States. . PBS are you listening?

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MPEG4, WM9: Not Quite Ready for Prime Time
MPEG4 and Windows 9 are the future, but in 2004 are expensive and far from delivering their promise. The delays are challenging carriers around the world, who need the advanced compression now, not in three years.

Microsoft IPTV Big Buzz in U.S., Canada
"It looks to me that Microsoft has made a clean sweep. Every major North American telco is not heading to MPEG 4 but instead to Windows Media 9 for video over DSL," writes one who knows. Telcos relying on Microsoft is amazing, since they hate being dependent on a sole-source supplier. SBC even testified in the Microsoft antitrust case, but now they are Microsoft’s lead customers. Bell Canada's tech crew was infuriated when Microsoft was chosen over their heads. One day, Microsoft will turn on the full SIP capabilities built into Windows making VOIP calls easy and eating away the telco base. Funny how telcos react when another monopoly shows up; the note above began, "The Borg have arrived."

Many carriers are making a pragmatic decision accept Microsoft droit. Telcos want what Microsoft is promising, a complete IPTV system that integrates the set top, TV guide, internal network management, middleware, and server. They wowed Wall Street with demos at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. "There are twice as many TVs as computers in the world," Microsoft notes. "That's why we're investing so heavily in a system to serve them." The dreamed of market is big enough to pump up even Microsoft's stock price.

There's still another year (at least) before the system is proven. Bell Canada's Trevor Anderson likes what he's seeing, but it's still lab trials. While Swisscom has a few test customers, rollouts should be limited till the second half of 2005 or later.

A year ago, MPEG 4 was set to dominate, but now is likely to split the market with Microsoft. An engineer who supports both tells me MPEG avc is currently ahead of WM9 in terms of spec maturity, license terms maturity and set top box availability. His guess is that the telcos will first roll out using the MPEG4 coding, even if they use the other functions of Microsoft IPTV. Satellite, a huge market, is committed to MPEG 4, cable in most countries leaning that way.

High MPEG 4 royalties combined with chip delays raise doubts, while Microsoft effectively sold their integrated system to several important customers. Other competitors are too small to reach scale economies, except possibly the Chinese. Open source Dirac from the BBC is encouraging, but still far from production.

MPEG-4 AVC/Windows Media 9: Late, Costly, Still Disappointing
MPEG 4 advanced is more than a lab curiosity, but what's being delivered today is far from the achievements network customers expected. The current pricing is brutal, twice to three times the cost of MPEG2 equipment. Engineers still project a 200-300% improvement over 2002 era MPEG2, eventually at competitive costs. For the U.S. Bells, DSL Prime separately reported the result is "Two years without solutions." ADSL2+ with 2005 compression and costs is a tough sell. Cablecos going 100% digital may move slowly as well, waiting for MPEG4 set tops under $100.

10-12 Meg HDTV, not 6 meg
"We're going to get HD down to 6 meg or so, but today a live encoded stream requires 10-12 meg." Harmonic, Tandberg, and Tut, the world-leading encoders are all saying the same thing. Talking heads are easier to encode, but the customers want live football. The key exception is pre-encoded movies for video on demand, which Microsoft demonstrated at 6 Meg in Geneva almost a year ago. The quality looked great at 6 but still not the same as the 19 Meg MPEG 2 I had a chance to compare it with. Pre-encoding is fine for video on demand, but the set tops are too expensive if that's your only service.

Talking to an engineer involved is revealing. Marketing speaks of getting to 1.2 meg for MPEG4 SD, three times as good as traditional MPEG2. But that same company’s current working encoder requires about 2 meg. Meanwhile, he and others have improved MPEG 2 to 2.7-3.0 meg for comparable quality. He's confident he'll get that down to 1.2 to 1.4 meg, but not in 2005. He can deliver samples well under 2 meg, but today’s production systems have to sacrifice quality to get to the bit rates for many programs.

$300 for a $100 Set Top Box
On the decode side, lack of an integrated chipset means MPEG4 AVC and WMP set tops cost three times as much as MPEG2. Michelle Abraham of Instat reports MPEG2 STBs with appropriate features can be found for less than $100 today. Simpler ones sell for $35 in China. But the MPEG4 AVC boxes just reaching the market are at $300 if you can get one. Sal D'Auria of Tut sees that dropping to under $200 in 2005, as more integrated chipsets hit the market from ST and Broadcom. Ed Graczyk of Microsoft calculates the bill of materials in 2004 at about $150. It still requires both a decoder and a high end processor.

D'Auria expects the assembled set top box to drop to about $200 in 2005, and under $100 in later years. That corresponds to Conexant's announcement of a 2005 decoder chip for $45, and Graczyk's estimate of a $50 material cost in 2007. But with Comcast projecting MPEG2 set tops with a good feature set at $50 and $70 by then, the MPEG4 price may still be an obstacle. Broadcast quality realtime encoders are similarly high priced, with costs easily double MPEG2 in 2004 and probably 2005.

Microsoft, MPEG: Who’s in
Microsoft's current team includes Lucent and Juniper for system integration, Tandberg and Harmonic encoders, Thomson for set tops, and ST and TI for chips. Lucent to continue in the lead will need to get the new Stinger out the door, because the old model is not designed to compete with today's non-blocking DSLAMs. The complete system is creating enough buzz that all the other players are considering joining in. Motorola, with a big Verizon win, and Scientific Atlanta, traditional competitors, Siemens and Alcatel, all have to consider whether to join in. Jeff Paine of UTStarcom has a major contract at Yahoo BB to jumpstart their surprisingly comprehensive system, and his low Asian based costs should open some doors in the West. Huawei, Samsung, and ZTE also have their eye on the world market. All have to decide how much to support MPEG4 itself, or whether to lean to its virtual clone, Windows 9. One small vendor, mPhase, may have a strategic advantage in a Microsoft world. Lucent Bell Labs under contract designed their system, which is optimized for Stinger.

We also hear interesting things about Sigma Designs, Equator, Broadcom, Conexant, Amino, and the importance of the Chinese manufacturers including Ambit and TCL.

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Verizon’s Babbio on open nets
"It's better for us to have more people on our network than fewer. ... I would seriously consider opening up the network to all comers, “ said Babbio speaking at PFF in Aspen. When Dave got up to raise the question Babbio joked "Here comes the hand grenade.” But for once they agreed that Verizon is actually building the network others are just talking about.

Babbio says fiber will change everything. “We’re going to transform the network, drive ultra high speed capacity.” Verizon’s strategy includes upstream speeds that will make interactive TV, video conferencing, video chat and gaming possible as well as provide the bandwidth to offer video on demand and HD channels. Delivered at speeds fast enough to offer customers living across the street from the Time Warner building their choice of programming of the BBC, RAI, Canal+, Disney ESPN direct, or even the Echostar or Cablevision package.

We need more speed for voice, more speed for data. We need to be able to integrate video onto our network,” says Babbio spoiling for a fight. Telco vs. cable and satellite will be a battle royal but Babbio is ready. “I need to get video out of the home,” he says. I don’t want them taking the telephony business away from me.

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Briefs

As we went to press, Harmonic and C-Cor reported disappointing sales for the quarter. We’re in a growing business, but the road is rocky and disappointments frequent.
France Telecom is selling 2,000 Liveboxes a day for video over DSL, as well as lowering prices to compete with Free.
mPhase is funding $1.2M of research at Bell Labs/Lucent on video soft switches, including the development of a pure IP product for mPhase by late 2005. Phil Thompson, mPhase VP, worked 23 years at the Labs and knows where to find world-class research. There's an enormous need for the product; I constantly hear "We need to bring down the price of video headends," and switching to less expensive IP gear is part of the solution.

Headlines August 2004

Contracts
· Motorola is likely to win the contract to supply set top boxes and headends for the largest new video network in North America, Verizons fiber system. Wahlman, whose predictions are almost always well-founded, believes Motorola has this one. Moto has a close relationship with Verizon Wireless, and with Quantum Bridge almost won the initial contract for the complete fiber system. Apparently, Moto was the first choice of Verizons technical team for the overall fiber contract, ultimately snatched by AFC. Wahlman thinks Verizon will suffer choosing Moto over Scientific-Atlanta. From the interactive program guide to the DVR, S-A has been to Motorola's what a big Mercedes is to a lousy Oldsmobile.

· Herman Rodler beamed telling me about the Belgacom contract for Siemens Surpass interactive digital television, and not just because Belgacom is the first European telco to roll out a VDSL network. Belgacom is going with IP-TV, not the modified analog system of the first generation Bell fiber. Rodler attributed the decision to his product, but it must also have taken a remarkable sales job to beat Alcatel in their home country. Myrio, nCube, Verimatrix and Tandberg are sub-contractors. Siemens VOIP gear is in Cablevision and they have some surprises to come.
A final word, from Henry Blodgett, Merrill Lynchs fallen star "We can guarantee that our opinions, conclusions, and predictions will sometimes be wrong. ... Sometimes [errors] will result from mistakes, ignorance, and/or idiocy. ... We may express initial reactions and then conclude that these reactions were wrong."

Keiko Harvey's Challenge Provide The Best Video Service in the World
"We're going to be absolutely competitive with cable on video," Keiko Harvey trumpets. Verizon's spending $3B on fiber in 2004 and 2005, with literally $20B planned to finish the job. Ivans crews are digging as I write in Texas, California, and Florida and Rockland County, New York. Harveys first goal, a basic video offering like current cable, is keeping a large team busy. That's not nearly enough. "Good enough" simply isn't. To profitably pull customers away from cable, Verizon will have to use the fiber to be dramatically better, not just cheaper. Brian Roberts at Comcast, battling satellite, will constantly be raising the bar. Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner understands; he's actively exploring what he can do with switched video.

Verizon's Ultimate Weapon: Open Choice Video
Verizon engineers are working on how to blow away cable with an extraordinary offering: an open net that includes everyone's programming. No decision has been made, and the goal will probably require the next generation equipment due In 2006. A Verizon fiber customer might have the choice of a Verizon package, DirecTV, Echostar, BskyB, Akimbo African movies, 14 different branches of Christian programming, 40 different college football games every Saturday, every local government meeting, and Hindi, Hebrew, Greek or Spanish with multiple channels in each. There's no technical reason why Verizon fiber couldn't offer Time Warner cable programs near Cablevisions Long Island headquarters, and Cablevision programs across the street from the Time Warners amazing 55 story castle.

The engineering isn't trivial, and the network will need more robust switching and peering. This isn't what Verizon is buying today, although key suppliers getting ready if Verizon says go. It's proven at small scale in Europe, and coming to Amsterdam and Utah. (Bravo, UTOPIA.)

Behind the news: Stakes rising in U.S. three-player game
Satellite beat the pants off cable Q2, which actually lost subscribers. They will have to accelerate upgrades. Brian Roberts of Comcast tells wall street he'll offer 50 and 100 megabit cable modems, PVRs to everyone, and video on demand servers with the capacity to timeshift 70% of all programming. That technology all is available today, but the street will not be happy with the capital spending. Higher profits and more cash may be the telco trump card.

Ben Verwayen: "Stupid for a Telco to Do It All"
"We'll provide the networks and technology. That's what we know." British Telecom's Chairman is very clear "We build networks as well as anyone in the world. We can service customers and bill them. But we don't know how to create movies or television programs, and if we try are likely to fail. We'll partner with people who do know. If we make our network open, and provide the tools to make it easy to reach our customers, they'll create a far richer offering than we ever would."

BT's massive server network, code-named Sky ++, will be open to every producer, channel and creator. If they live up to their promise, and price the service for a fair profit, it will be a natural home for all the video going to Britain - and maybe the rest of the net. If they price too high, they may earn more per each program, but will only have a small market. Unlike the U.S., BT has only limited cable competition, so they may be tempted to act like a monopoly. Future of TV hopes Reynolds, Verwayen, and Danon can look further than that, without needing a shove from the regulator.

My TIVO is Obsolete - So is Yours
Expansion is the new essential. Every unit delivered is essentially inadequate from day one, because users will want more storage space, ability to copy, wireless home networks, and what the future brings. I'd like to go to CompUSA, buy the $129 USB 120 gig drive, and plug it in. Thomson is ready, with PVR/set tops with USB and ATA expansion connectors. I'd also like to add wireless networking, with an 801.11g unit now down to $30. But .11g is sometimes unreliable for video, unlike the 802.11n coming next year or later. When I can afford it, I'll go HD TV. I certainly don't want to have to replace everything. The ideal: upgradeable software, some extra memory and processing power, and USB, ATA, and or firewire.

Smart carriers dont want to lose the customer next year if Rupert Murdoch offers a better set top. A box the consumer can upgrade herself can stay current for years and keep your CFO happy.

Bill Smith's 57% Solution
For video, double DSL speed with an extra line. Three TV channels require 10 Mbps with current compression, which with HD will jump to 20 Mbps or more. The new ADSL2+ is designed for "up to 24 Mbps", but often wont reach that in practice.
BellSouth CTO Bill Smith has an answer. "We are only using 43% of our copper." he said at SUPERCOMM. "The industry has been building for years to 2+ lines per home and expected line growth, but that's changed. Bonding 2 lines will often be the cheapest way to get video speed." SBC is thinking similarly.
Bonding 4 or more lines is already in use, providing 10 meg and more for businesses. George Hawley predicted years ago it will spread to the consumer market, and BellSouths interest is inspiring companies including Adtran to make inexpensive gear.

Editorial: Let the Sunshine In
A rainbow revolution of 5,000 programs in every color and flavor is actually the best business choice in a bundled market. Opening your network costs some video sales, but lets you win profitable customers for voice and data. Both BellSouth and SBC are on track to lose several billion on re-marketing satellite and walled gardens, just to protect their voice base. They may never recover those initial losses.

Offering your customer what she wants, not what you want to sell is ultimately the smart move. Anton Wahlman is electrifying wall street and the cablecos arguing there isnt interesting money on video. Hes urging investing enough to make sure you offer the best broadband connection. This would be the ultimate win for the internet, and the end-to-end principle. May the better, bigger pipe win.

From the Press
Videophones: transforming or a big laugh?
· CNETs new broadband blog, has John Borland citing novelist David Foster Wallace's "future history of videophones' rise and fall." In summary People loved them, then realized they looked grungy, so started dressing up to be on the phone, then started wearing beautiful-person masks, then started putting little caps over the camera that showed beautiful apartments with beautiful people in them - and then people realized that nobody was actually using the video after all, and videophones went the way of the dodo." CNETs Jim Hu talks of the freedom writing stories on the blog.
· Chris Rhoads in the WSJ has MIT's Andrew Lippman taking the opposite view, "It's transformative when teleconferencing becomes casual, intimate and instantly available," Lippman asserts. ""What happens when eBay goes broadband?" he adds. To sell a BMW take interested buyers for a virtual test-drive shot from a Web cam in the car, he suggests. "People will be making their own commercials from home."

Wall Street

· Innovation flourishes when tech funding is available, but even before the Google IPO fiasco the market was worried. Pip Coburn, UBS Global Tech Strategist, is "battening down the hatches ... getting even more defensive than we had gotten in our late-July Dark Side of the Moon report." He's redesigning his portfolio to "better endure a storm."

Contracts

· Motorola is likely to win the contract to supply set top boxes and headends for the largest new video network in North America, Verizons fiber system. Wahlman, whose predictions are almost always well-founded, believes Motorola has this one. Moto has a close relationship with Verizon Wireless, and with Quantum Bridge almost won the initial contract for the complete fiber system. Apparently, Moto was the first choice of Verizons technical team for the overall fiber contract, ultimately snatched by AFC. Wahlman thinks Verizon will suffer choosing Moto over Scientific-Atlanta. From the interactive program guide to the DVR, S-A has been to Motorola's what a big Mercedes is to a lousy Oldsmobile.
· Herman Rodler beamed telling me about the Belgacom contract for Siemens Surpass interactive digital television, and not just because Belgacom is the first European telco to roll out a VDSL network. Belgacom is going with IP-TV, not the modified analog system of the first generation Bell fiber. Rodler attributed the decision to his product, but it must also have taken a remarkable sales job to beat Alcatel in their home country. Myrio, nCube, Verimatrix and Tandberg are sub-contractors. Siemens VOIP gear is in Cablevision and they have some surprises to come.
A final word, from Henry Blodgett, Merrill Lynch's fallen star "We can guarantee that our opinions, conclusions, and predictions will sometimes be wrong. ... Sometimes [errors] will result from mistakes, ignorance, and/or idiocy. ... We may express initial reactions and then conclude that these reactions were wrong."

News

Headlines October 12, 2004

Briefs

Headlines August 2004

Wall Street

Contracts