Intel Streaming Media Service Faces An Uphill Battle for Bandwidth 82
Lucas123 writes "Intel this year plans to sell a set-top box and Internet-based streaming media service that will bundle TV channels for subscribers, but cable, satellite and ISPs are likely to use every tool at their disposal to stop another IP-based competitor, according to experts. They may already be pressuring content providers to charge Intel more or not sell to it. Another scenario could be that cable and ISP providers simply favor their own streaming services with pricing models, or limit bandwidth based on where customers get their streamed content. For example, Comcast could charge more for a third-party streaming service than for its own, or it could throttle bandwidth or place caps on it to limit how much content customer receives from streaming media services as it did with BitTorrent. Meanwhile, Verizon is challenging in a D.C. circuit court the FCC's Open Internet rules that are supposed to ensure there's a level playing field."
Free market my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why we can't have nice things.
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Not A Good Summary (Score:4, Informative)
"This is why we can't have nice things."
I think all the actions described by OP as a way ISPs may try to limit the service are already illegal.
(1) They can't legally discriminate based on source.
(2) They can't legally charge one outside source significantly more than another because that would violate (1).
(3) They can't legally charge more for services that are not their own. (There is a Federal law specifically prohibiting that.)
I suspect OP is much ado about nothing.
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I think all the actions described by OP as a way ISPs may try to limit the service are already illegal.
Some of the things in the list they are already doing. For example, Comcast does not count use of their video streaming service against your monthly cap but does count use of other streaming services.
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"Some of the things in the list they are already doing. For example, Comcast does not count use of their video streaming service against your monthly cap but does count use of other streaming services."
But there *IS* a law against it, and they *ARE* in court over it. And I think it is pretty obvious that they will lose.
Return of the guilded age (Score:3, Interesting)
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This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians, how the fuck can you keep babbling on about "the free market" when there is NO free market, has NEVER been a free market
Why not listen to the fucking libertarians next time.. they were the ones that told you that telecom wasnt a free market. You are blaming the libertarians for what you big government fucks created.
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Why not listen to the fucking libertarians next time
Because the smart people who mentored them in Liberalism, their college professors perhaps, told them that Libertarians aren't worth listening to or ought to be ignored and these people, being intellectually lazy themselves, decided to follow that advice instead of thinking for themselves as Libertarians are fond of doing. The Liberals claim to be tolerant and open minded and yet in my experience that's only true if you agree with them.
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I do however, not enjoy hypocrisy of far right libertarians or tea partiers who want the government in my private life
It's not accurate, in my opinion, to characterize the Tea Party groups as libertarian. While it's true that some positions of the Tea Party platform lean libertarian, taxes for example, there are many other issues on which they are much closer to the neoconservatives. For example, I doubt that you would find much support within the Tea Party for ending the War on Drugs or allowing gay marriage.
It's worth it to note though, that the government had to step in precisely because the market was so fragmented that they were causing dangerous conditions with all the lines they were running without any unified standard and people generally refused to share line capabilities.
It's the classic example of natural monopoly, the regulated utility. Even most libertarian leaning people, with the
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This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians,
I think that your rage is misplaced. The telecom business, upon which the ISPs depend, is a natural monopoly which requires some regulation to properly align interests due to the physical impracticality of allowing competition to emerge organically in the marketplace. After all, there's only so many rights of way for digging trenches and laying fiber or setting up antennas on towers. However, a single counterexample, which amounts to a special case, does not invalidate the entire thesis of free market capit
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Show me ONE functional free market system
How about the market for crude oil? There you have a commodity that just about everyone wants and for which there are always willing buyers. You will notice that even the Iranians, who are supposed to be under economic sanction, are still able to find buyers for much of their oil, albeit at a somewhat reduced price and increased difficulty transporting it to markets. Does not oil flow almost to whomever will pay the most for it? Isn't that how markets are supposed to work, rationing based upon who will pay
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Regulations are nice and all, but in a free and competitive market (please note that these may be mutually-exclusive in some cases) it still sorts itself nicely:
Person A: "I need to find Internet for my new house. I'm not sure what to pick."
Person B: "Don't get $ISP. Netflix doesn't work very well with it. I've been using $competitor, and it works great."
Person A: "Ok, thanks!"
$ISP's subscriber base drops, $competitor gets more business, and $ISP is forced to change their ways or leave the party.
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The solution to the RIAA and MPAA problem is for powerful companies such as Google to BUY member companies and use their content for their own revenue models while giving them appropriate marching orders to relax content controls.
Google alone makes far greater revenue than all RIAA members combined. Buy a few member companies, fragment the enemy and profit thereby, then press on.
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Really?
Thats just dumb.
Net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
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My conversation with Anna Baughman at the F.C.C. - (see this mod5 comment for the GoogleFiber/NetNeutrality/USNavyInformationWarfareOffice context http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643919&cid=43438341 [slashdot.org] )
Incoming from 717 338 2772 to 785 979 7723, 13:26CDT 2013/06/12
--
A: Anna Baughman, FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs
D: Douglas McClendon
--
A: Hi, it's Anna from the FCC, how are you?
D: Hi, I'm OK, uh, I don't suppose I could call you back in 5 minutes
A: Well, Um, Actually I'm leaving here in 5 minut
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honestly on my end, it was in part due to the fact that I had had to immediately end a #2 ahead of schedule to take the call. On her end, my best guess is that it could betray a slight sense of non-straightforwardness that is not hidden by the fact that the complaint has remained live, and unanswered with a single sentence of explanation for 9 months now. And how it might relate to the interrellation between my complaint and it's fight to enable U.S.A. citizens to host their data on their own services on
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You should break up these large multi-faceted companies. Keep ISPs and content providers separate. It's a huge conflict of interest and leads to a bad deal for consumers.
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...it's almost like all of the relevant acquisitions that lead to the creation of these monsters should have been supressed by the FTC to begin with.
You're asking the same entity that allowed this nonsense to happen to fix this nonsense. A bit like letting the fox guard the hen house.
I am sure slashdoters objected to many of these mergers when they happened in the first place.
Set Top Box going nowhere (Score:2)
Intel's larger problem will be that as soon as it is widely recognized by the public and the press that their set-top boxes have build in cameras and microphones their market will dry up instantly. There is already a bill in congress to put a stop to this sort of thing [slashdot.org].
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The average consumer is smarter than the 15 year old gamer living in his parent's basement.
Re: Set Top Box going nowhere (Score:2)
It is 25-35 year olds.
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You have something to back up that statement?
The full Wal-mart parking lot that I drove by this morning is evidence that the opposite is true.
Radical Change (Score:2)
It is time to allow multiple cables into a home. There is simply no excuse for allowing one company to control cable access. I am aware that technology is allowing cable to carry more and more data or content but allowing one company to set rules, speeds, limits or prices is wrong. In my home only one miserable TV channel can be had without cable. Home dish services generally do not have good reputations here. So why not have five separate cables running into a home? Many areas can support such a
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Would the five separate cables be maintained in some sort of coordinated way, or would they each dig up the street whenever they felt like it?
If maintained in a coordinated way, what's the advantage of literally running five cables in the same trench, instead of running one cable but having it owned by a neutral entity, like a municipality or regulated utility, which sells access on equal terms?
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>If maintained in a coordinated way, what's the advantage of literally running five cables in the same trench, instead of running one cable but having it owned by a neutral entity, like a municipality or regulated utility, which sells access on equal terms?
This!.
Allowing cable companies to own/be content providers was a huge mistake. One it will take years to overcome. ]
It was a stupid mistake.
Local loop ownership by municipalities might work. but I would expect the religious wackos and budget cutters would ruin that
in short order. Something along the lines of a new Public Utility District with specific legal protections and firewalled from political entities
is needed.
But in the mean time, pulling multiple fiber to the neighborhood (if not actually to each h
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But the physical monopoly, always backed by protectionist laws, is bad for the user and bad for the market.
FTFY
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How different is this than Netflix or Hulu, other than the inclusion of a set top box? Many smart TV's now include Netflix and Hulu capibilities.
The question is will Intel license the tech to TV manufactures to include it along with Netflix and Hulu. If so, what is the future of a dedicated settop box along the lines of Boxee? http://www.amazon.com/Boxee-D-Link-Streaming-Media-Player/dp/B0038JE07O [amazon.com]
Will it be able to include Hulu and Netflix? If not, I suspect the sales of a single supplier solution for
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There is no reason you have to pay for $50 bucks to EACH provider if you mandate cafeteria pricing of each channel.
Less than a Penny per day per channel would become the norm.
But more to the point, bundling all on-demand video on top of the TCP/IP internet is probably not sustainable.
A separate stream for each viewer in the household is simply more bandwidth than the internet can handle well.
Do the math. You can't even handle that on the local links, let along the national backbones.
We really would be bett
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It is time to allow multiple cables into a home. There is simply no excuse for allowing one company to control cable access.
We tried that already. http://www.newswise.com/images/uploads/2009/08/26/Broadway%20and%20John%20St%20Manhattan%201890.jpg [newswise.com]
redefining broadcast engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
After years working in broadcast engineering on the development end I do have to say this would cause a paradigm shift. The provider of the hardware wants to enter the commercial space for television? As much as Intel would want to remain a separate entity many more operations would adapt to their practices inevitably. Rather than challenge Intel I think these telecom companies should allow Intel to offer their services and really put the customer in control. Everyone should be able to choose what they want when they pay for television and internet services it shouldn't be the provider who makes that decision for you.
In Canada, Cable HDTV is a usability disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
In Canada, the HDTV transition has been an usability disaster. The cable boxes are simply to complex. If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the cable companies are dead. It might take a while, but almost anyone can put together a device with more commercial appeal than a Canadian Cable Company or Telco.
My Dad has Alzheimers and cannot remember anything. The Cable companies' HDTV remote is impossible to use. It has two different methods of adjusting volume. Powering on/off the TV takes 4 button presses. 6 different buttons can be used to change channels in various ways, and each way is inconsistent. For instance, pressing "up" will either increase or decrease the channel number depending on which up-button is pressed. With the old analog TVs, things were so much simpler: Power On, Volume Up/Down, Channel Up/Down - easy.
In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.
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Dont forget in Canada once you move to "digital" the local cable company (Rogers in my case) is very fast to cut the analogy signal.
Now you have to pay to rent super-secret decoder boxes for every TV, and an "extra outlet" fee for good measure.
All my TV's are "digital ready" but that is basically a sales scam since they wont decode anything.
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in canada you can buy the box and most systems have no outlet fees for at each the first 3-4 boxes
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clear QAM = may need to use traps and traps are not very flexible to move stuff to different QAM slots. Some cable systems do put the old analog line in digital SD qam + the local HD channels in clear QAM and some systems due list the qam numbers. But that does make have less flexing in moveing stuff to make the best use of space.
Also satellite tv needed boxes for years. and direct moves channels to differnt satellites transponders quite a bit and uses at home don't have to do anything to keep viewing them.
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If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the cable companies are dead.
If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the internet itself is dead.
Fixed it for you.
There isn't enough bandwidth on the internet to even remotely handle on demand streams for every viewer.
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And that's why big cable has veto power over new entries.
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Nobody uses multcast because it won't handle on demand viewing, and since the WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY seems lost on you, the control over local caching is EXACTLY why new entries to the market, like Intel, are essentially frozen out.
You have a forest and trees problem, son.
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Nobody uses multcast because it won't handle on demand viewing,
There are a whole series of algorithms to use multicast IP to deliver VoD, for example pyramid broadcasting [emory.edu].
No one uses multicast on the Internet because in general there is no carriage of multicast over the Internet (mainly due to security and stability concerns). But multicast IP is used for VoD within closed networks, such as inside a hotel.
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The problem is there are simply not enough Multicast IPs allocated to cover every possible program demanded by a large number of users at any hour of the day.
Yes it works in small situations with small numbers of available programs such as you might find in hotels.
But it doesn't scale well to the internet, which is precisely why is it virtually never used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast#IP_multicast [wikipedia.org]
There are serious limitation in layer 2, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast#Layer_2_deliv [wikipedia.org]
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> You could record on a Win7 DVR, compress to Mp4, and then feed those to the AppleTV through itunes.
Or you could just skip the strange and unecessary step of trying to marry an AppleTV to WMC. Your proposal would probably fail for the target demographic even harder than a conventional WMC setup.
For a pedestrian user that has no interest in multi-room viewing, a solution that requires no PC and neither of the big PC vendors would likely be the most logical option (namely, get them a Tivo).
Alternately, ju
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In comparison, an Apple TV box has a much simpler user interface. However, the main problem with Apple TV is that it won't receive cable channels. If I could purchase a set top box that simply displayed a few key channels - then it would be game over.
Fortunately for them (if Canada is anything like Australia and the US), the utter stranglehold control the cable companies seem to have on all the content will ensure that they can continue to peddle their crappy wares and not have to deal with competition.
Our main cable provider here in Australia recently was able to stop iTunes [delimiter.com.au] from carrying Season 4 of Game of Thrones. They have some exclusive license to HBO content and are leveraging their weight (I assume by throwing giant bags of money at HBO) to sto
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In Canada, the HDTV transition has been an usability disaster. The cable boxes are simply to complex. If someone puts an easy-to-use HDTV-over-internet product together - the cable companies are dead.
Unfortunately, unless things are quite different a few hundred miles to the north, this just won't be the case because for many of us, the cable company is also the ISP . Unless and until cellular data plans become faster and much cheaper.
Corporate Censorship (Score:2)
So in one type of place the internet content is controlled based on political affiliation, the other by company fiefdom.
It's hard to see a major difference. Hopefully the courts will realize this and through these suits out on their arse.
they also own of alot of the channels as well as l (Score:2)
they also own of alot of the channels as well as local sports channels as well.
Just look at the low uptake of channels like CSN Houston and CSN NW.
Oh, this is just adorable. (Score:2)
It's like somebody in their boardroom thought that just making boneheaded decisions about their processors wouldn't make AMD competitive enough, so he invented a massive boondoggle that nobody has any need for.
Are ISPs really throttling bandwidth? (Score:3)
Lots of talk about how ISPs could do this to protect their own video offerings. But are they really doing it? My current ISP is Comcast, previous was AT&T U-verse. In both cases I did not subscribe to their TV option - just to internet and voice.
I have had no problems streaming video from Netflix, Amazon or Hulu+ through my Roku box. Base bandwidth to maintain a video stream is only 5 Mbits or so, so it would seem to be increasingly difficult for ISPs competing for customers in the Mb/s battles to throttle things so much as to prevent streaming video.