Why Intel's New IPTV Service Will Do What Google, Apple, and Microsoft Can't

Market cap, an "price to buy" are not the same. Anyone who has been through a purchase can tell you that. Why do you think Lucas was so expensive?

Market cap is the price of the outstanding stock, and doesn't reflect the cost of the assets, or the will of the primary holders to keep their shares.

First of all that’s a lovely ad hominem based on absolutely zero knowledge of the projects I have worked on. I have led teams for Pay-TV deployments on satellite and OTA with budgets orders of magnitude larger than any live streaming package and deployed hundreds of television channels. Of course you make the same claim again which I’ve had time after time from engineers like Microsoft, Google etc who think web is the be-all and end-all. I use the following technical arguments each time to bring these guys back to earth.

First of all you totally ignore the point I made about high bandwidth usage affecting the viewing experience. Do you really want to sit there on Patch Tuesday waiting for the video on your TV to buffer because your PC in the other room is downloading updates? At best you’ll see huge quality fluctuations as the adaptive streaming tries to react. At worst you’ll miss the goal waiting for the stream to buffer. A managed network gives you a similar broadcast experience to licensed RF spectrum.

All the web services offering “HD” are based around a simple concept – you can get acceptable quality at web bitrates when you’re delivering p24 content with buffer times of around 5-10 seconds (the usual chunk length in an adaptive streaming system), which gives you a huge VBV to work with and a huge keyframe interval. Contrast this with broadcast and its ~0.5-2 second channel change times. Good luck convincing users to wait 5-10 seconds to change the channel (channel-surfing is part of a television experience). The fact is to deliver p50/60 content for sports you need significantly higher bitrates than web bitrates – with current bitrates you’re just watching blocks all day because of the necessary smaller keyframe intervals and VBV. It is nowhere near to a sports offering that people are paying the equivalent of a cable subscription for - even more so on a larger screen. That doesn’t even take into consideration the poor quality of web encoders.

Overall latency is nowhere near television-like. Web streams are 30s to 1 minute delayed compared to television streams thanks to CDN buffering and adaptive streaming chunks. Different viewers in a household end up getting streams that are hugely out of phase (demonstrated during the Olympics where a race on one stream hadn’t even started when it had finished on another). Your neighbours have already finished celebrating the goal by the time you see it. The technology to deliver web streams to relatively small numbers of users has been around but once you get to large numbers the capacity is not there – it’s one reason adaptive streaming is useful; once your ISP runs out of capacity you can be adaptively streamed to a low bitrate but still get a picture. In my city (Bristol, UK) on cable, YouTube interconnects are congested and only 240p works as result.

It’s no surprise live streaming OTT is provided as an add-on to Pay-TV – operators know it isn’t good enough yet to charge for as a standalone package. Some operators are going to use streaming to deliver their channels because of problems with multicast but they’ll be able to use DiffServ to maintain a decent experience.