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Internet TV: IPTV and net TV

Posted on 9 Mar 2007 at 11:59

This may change. As broadband speeds increase to ADSL2 levels and BT upgrades its network in line with its 21CN programme, the need for such severe compression may be alleviated. In addition, the BBC has been trialling a technology called multicasting since February last year (official trials have ended, but the service is still live). For multicasting, the BBC works with ISPs, providing them with a broadcast feed they can then transmit to their customers. As a technology, its application lies more in the simulcast element of iPlayer than in the more exciting on-demand aspects, but by sharing the bandwidth burden multicasting allows the BBC to raise bit rates and therefore picture quality to something closer to standard digital TV.

These TV-to-PC services are about building brands and audience loyalty, not replacing regular channels. As Benjamin Lehmann of Jupiter Research points out, the BBC has a duty to make its content more widely available. "From its point of view, if it gives people more opportunity to see the content, regardless of the effect on anyone else, that's reason enough." According to Lehmann, services such as iPlayer or 4oD "are really experimental initiatives. They're testing the water and are designed to see if people are interested in consuming content in this way or not".

A boost of Joost

Two other services have more radical plans. The much-hyped Joost (www.joost.com), from the team behind Skype, and a lesser-known rival service, Babelgum (www.babelgum.com), are effectively live multichannel television feeds distributed using peer-to-peer technology. In some respects, you can think of them as doing for video-based media what RSS does for text-based publishing, offering a huge choice along with personalisation and community features. Their biggest draw is the way that, unlike more conventional TV-to-PC services, you can switch feeds with only a five- to ten-second wait, and browse through a huge variety of programming using simple mouse-driven menus. To this, Joost adds other interesting features, such as programme-sensitive online chat and the option to overlay discrete newsfeed or clock plug-in widgets. Babelgum, meanwhile, plans to combine TV and PVR functions with social networking.

Question marks hang over both services, however. The biggest one is content - Joost's beta has been running a mixture of US and British content, heavy on material from MTV and Much Music, but the company will have its work cut out persuading other producers to get on board, even with the promise of DRM compliance. Babelgum's current offering is even less compelling. The second problem is that picture quality is distinctly poorer than standard-definition TV, particularly in the case of Joost, with obvious artefacts and a generally fuzzy image apparent in our beta test. It's watchable full-screen on a monitor, but if you want HDTV quality you may be in for a shock.

Yet, that's nothing compared to the shock ISPs and viewers are in for should TV-to-PC take off. On one hand, ISPs benefit from internet TV because it pulls users towards high-speed, high-capacity services they can charge more for. On the other, ISPs have serious concerns about bandwidth demands. Joost, for example, is reckoned to use a minimum of 220MB per hour of viewing, and frequently much more. Stretch that to an average of just one hour per day for a month, and you're nearing 7GB - higher than the caps of many ADSL services. It's a problem for ISPs and users. The BT Wholesale network most ISP offerings are based on was built and priced with relatively low-bandwidth applications - email, web browsing, the odd music download - in mind. More intensive applications force the ISPs to buy more capacity from BT, but how can they do that and keep subscription fees low? "The Wholesale network and its economics fundamentally don't work with internet TV," said Neil Armstrong of ISP PlusNet. "ISPs, and therefore customers, are in for a very interesting time". Armstrong talked of a "crunch point" arising, "where customers are going to have to realise that 'all you can eat' doesn't work anymore".