Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

[LorenS]

Re: Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

With LTE the cellular providers are now able to bring broadband to your house, though they still have capacity issues.

There are other wireless technologies that can provide internet access to your house and with the new spectrum allocations at 60,70 and 80GHz these options could expand.

[flintlock]

Re: Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

All these 1st world "problems"!

I have an Apple TV, PS3, and Roku so I can always stream something somewhere in my house. Netflix is good for documentaries, but the movie selection lags a bit. Luckily documentaries are about all I watch. I can't help but think they will always find a way to extract our hard earned pay for entertainment. Be it through high cable rates or high internet access. But really, we should have had a la carte TV long ago. So much garbage out there.

[c1ue]

Re: Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

Your problem was likely one of the following:
* They lied to you about distance from DSLAM
* The quality of your cable to the DSLAM was degraded (i.e. too much RF interference, crosstalk, grounding, etc issues). These are fixable, but cost the telephone company $$ to fix, and they can't really charge you to fix their own lines.
* You may have had internal home wiring issues degrading your service. Your telephone company could have fixed these for you, but very likely for a hefty fee.
* The DSLAM and/or your modem was misconfigured
* There was excessive backbone saturation / oversubscription of available bandwidth , and/or certain IX (Internet Exchange) peer points were congested.

All of the above are wrong - I switched to a different service and immediately got better results. Most likely the primary reason was limitations imposed by AT & T - especially since they sell 'higher performance' packages.

Even so, the up vs. down differences are dramatic. Were I to switch to webpass, I would supposedly get 60 to 100 mbps both ways as opposed to the 0.8 mbps I get now for upload. Not a big deal for most people, but a problem for me.

Raw? Perhaps , but that's why we have video codecs (coding / decoding compression software) . Many HD channels today are encoded with H.264 , which your set top box has hardware chips to decode on the fly.
According to this chart (not sure how reliable the source is though), we can do full 1080p (FHD) between around 1 to 4Mbits. I recall off the top of my head numbers around 2.5Mbits for 24 frames/sec * 1920x1080p. So 15Mbits is more than enough for 2 simultaneous HD channels + relatively fast internet surfing.

Encoding isn't a magic wand. H.264 = MPEG4 is supposed to be able to handle 50 or 60 to 1 compression without measurable losses:

http://www.kanecomputing.co.uk/pdfs/...s_of_thumb.pdf

For 1080p at 30 frames/second (standard), that would be 63 megapixels per second. If 1 megapixel = 1 bit, then the numbers you quote above might make sense, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. For one thing, there are the colors. Then there's the error handling. Then no doubt some overhead for format. If these add up to say, 12 or 24 bits per pixel - compression by 50 or 60 still yields 12.6 mbps, with upside well into the 30 mbps range. This makes the 15 to 20 Mbps number previously quote seem more likely than the number you posted.

Perhaps you can put up a link?

I should add, that there's already more advanced codecs than H.264 that vastly improve video compression; however, they are not as of yet widely available as there's costs associated with changing out all the hardware chips to support these new codecs.

No doubt. I do wonder, however, just how much improvement can be had. As a former CPU guy - there is only so much you can do with parallelism, larger words, etc.

MPEG2 is 3x better than JPEG, MPEG4 is 1.66x better than MPEG2. This seems to imply a lower return on performance improvement with progress, but time will tell.

The rules would not keep ISPs from charging more for faster access.

The law you state is correct, but the gigantic loophole is highlighted above. All a cable company has to do in order to phase out competition is to impose either metering or bandwidth limits. This is the problem Hulu, Netflix, and so forth all face. Note also that the rest of the world uses metering; internet in the US is better only in this one respect (so far).

I got an AppleTV and have been very happy with Hulu Plus for $10 a month, watching unbelievable numbers of full length BBC PBS etc documentaries, and renting a new movie once in a while.

To my understanding, AppleTV and what not don't stream at anywhere near 1080p. It is thus basically only somewhat better than viewing Youtube on your computer directly.

[jk]

Re: Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

i recently switched from dsl to cable internet, with a 10x speed improvement. the installer mentioned he'd recently been at a meeting at which someone asked the bigwig how they'd deal with people streaming content instead of buying tv packages. the answer: "don't worry, we'll get 'em on the bandwidth."

[lektrode]

Re: Intel to 'destroy' CATV market with 'ala carte' box ?

....someone asked the bigwig how they'd deal with people streaming content instead of buying tv packages. the answer: "don't worry, we'll get 'em on the bandwidth."

thats just whats happening - at least appears to me to be happnin...
i dropped TW's deluxe/digital w dvr pkg a year ago, went down to basic level, with '10mb/sec' roadrunner service - bought a streaming box and first thing eye noted was that i wasnt getting any where near 10mbs - at least not via netflix (choked all the time, typically just as you get interested in the movie, to add to the frustration factor) - so - upped the roadrunner to 15mbs for another 10bux/mo

and what happened?
very rarely do eye ever see more than 8-9, but at least it doesnt choke as often

sure, if i goto one of the speedcheck sites, it'll show the download at something above 10, maybe even close to 15mbs - but thats just tween the NAP/TW and my house, right?

my take is that they dont want netflix to work too good.

but i would rather drop cable tv altogether and take my chances with 'rabbit ears' than to knuckle under and pay them so much as one dime more for 500channels of near constant commerch interuption - give me a couple of the 'big 4' and PBS and they can shove CATV

and why am i NOT surprised that it was one of our 'finest' limosine liberals that helped create this mess ???