SBC & Microsoft To Provide TV On High-Speed Lines

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/technology/17soft.html?oref=login&oref=login' target='_blank'>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/technology/17soft.html?oref=login&oref=login</a><br /><br /></div><i>"SBC Communications, as part of its effort to compete head-on with the cable industry for television subscribers, plans to announce today that it will pay $400 million to Microsoft for software used to deliver TV programming over high-speed data lines ... SBC plans to deploy Microsoft's software to encode television programming before it is sent to subscribers and then decode the same programs on TV set-top boxes in customers' homes. Most important, the software compresses digital signals so that video programs can be sent over high-speed data lines."</i><br /><br />I know that Microsoft has been testing IP-TV for some time now outside of the US, we posted on this some time ago. SBC plans to start selling programming through its fiber and copper network from the satellite provider, EchoStar, by the fourth quarter of 2005. If the reliability is anywhere close to VOIP (which I like very much) and there isn't any loss in the quality of programming, I wouldn't mind trying this out at all.

[Felix Torres]

What I find interesting is that *everything* is provided on-demand.
So the full bandwidth of the pipe is available, as opposed to a fraction on traditional cable-tv systems.
This allows for multiple HD streams alonside the regular data service.
Depending on how long they cache broadcast content on the back end, the tech allows for some very interesting publishing approaches to tv content. As in, being able to watch last week's episode of a given show or last month's...

And of course, the technology is transmission medium-agnostic so the broadband over powerline and even regular cable companies could sign up for it.

Slowly but surely, *everything* is getting packetized onto IP...