There is a lot of money being spent trying to turn internet video into something its not. Its not TV. It's certainly not going to be HDTV. What is shocking about the entire attempt to turn the internet into a tv/HDTV distribution medium is how much people lie to themselves about what is actually happening.
First of all, 100pct of the internet video that you see offered on the net as HD, is not HD. Plain and simple. What is HD video ? HD Vidoe is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say..."that looks good, almost as good as it can get ". What is currently being passed as HD, is video that looks pretty good because its being played on a small PC or Laptop screen and for the big timers, even a 17" screen. Well guess what, everything and anything coded at 2mbs and above is going to look good on a small screen. But looking good on a small screen doesn't cut it. In fact, video that looks its best on a 27" TV is not going to cut it. For those of you who don't see it that way, do some research on fhe history of Fox's Wide Screen broadcasts and see how owners of HDTVs 40" in above felt about those broadcasts compared to what they got from other networks. In a nutshell, WideScreen is gone. The quality wasn't good enough.
I'm not going to go on my 19th nervous tangent about why video over the net has problems and HD over the net is not going to happen. Instead, I will give the quick and dirty on what should happen.
There are already multiple digital distribution systems in place that distribute video, in SD and HD to our homes in place. Not only can they get the signal to our home with 99pct uptime and zero buffering but there are any number of systems in place that allow the signals to be distributed around our homes. In other words, Tv as TV works.
Which leads to the solution.
Move the video cloud to the node and encode and insert into the traditional video distribution systems.
Rather than Hulu sending its video directly across the net to your PC, and let the end user figure out how to watch and distribute from there, it should send it to a box hosted by your cable/telco and possibly even satellite provider, which then transcodes the video and places it on the existing TV distribution system and sends it across a channel branded with your name and the name of the file to your TV.
The net result is that having subscribed to this "Internet Video to your TV" system for a buck or two per month, you will notice that on your electronic programming guide there is a subset of channels with your name on them. When you click on a video at your favorite site, that video can easily be rerouted to the server at the node, transcoded into the right format and shown on your TV's programming guide as "mark cuban channels" - 001 Diet Coke and Mentos -002 Cat Flushing Toilet 003 - Softball game, etc. All you have to do is watch cable/telco/sat TV like you have always watched tv. Watching video anywhere in your house will be that easy.
Of course it will take coordination between the video sites and the video distributors, but that really should be easy. Even FTP would get it done.
This approach should result in a far better use of capital for them, and more importantly, it moves video off of the last internet mile, where bandwidth is constrained, to their new Switched Digital Video last mile , which is far less constrained now, and should quickly become completely unconstrained for long tail content.
if done right, it could also replace all local DVR storage. If you think about it, its pretty stupid to have redundant storage in every home. Paying for those ever growing hard drives, even with falling cost per bits, adds up to a lot of money . Moving that storage to a video cloud at the node or even on the backbone would make set top boxes smaller, cheaper and more flexible. The Network DVR , with space for remotely loaded internet video should be the way of the future.
In addition, this approach could expand our ability to customzie our TV viewing experience. Why cant we create playlists of our favorite shows? I personally would love to create a playlist, customized with a picture of my daughter, her name as the channel name, with a playlist or on demand list of shows that are appropriate for her. When there are videos of group activities like her ballet recitals, it would be great if we could mark the video as sharable with others we designate, or other parents could do the same, and we could easily watch them on our TV.
The video distribution networks already in place are designed to move gigabits of data simultaneously to millions of homes. As these distribution networks go to IP and Switched Digital Video, they will be able to integrate back to internet sites and to interact and offer more advanced customization and cloud based applications with far more sophistication and flexibility than the internet and the web can offer around video. As middleware like Tru2Way becomes more popular, and more TVs support it, the applications on our TVs will multiply quickly.
There is no reason to re invent TV over the net when TV distributed as TV works, and all the technology is in place to move video from the net to TV distirbution networks.
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(Page 1)2. This approach is exactly what Multicast to Storage is doing. Pushing personalized content from non-linear sources to the STB-DVR. The same argument for internet video exists for VOD as well, why stream an HD unicast stream in real time (and peak time). Just push what the user wants to the DVR making it available for on-demand viewing. The cost of storage is cheap enough...
Posted at 2:07PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Noam Bardin
3. "Moving that storage to a video cloud at the node or even on the backbone would make set top boxes smaller, cheaper and more flexible."
I've been saying this for more than a year. It makes a lot more sense to eliminate redundancies and move the storage to the node. The end-user will be able to access it virtually as quickly as if it were on his set-top box, and it'd be a great way to eliminate multiple copies of the same mainstream content.
Posted at 2:11PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Keith Peffer
5. Is there a direct correlation between video reviewed and monetizing that content? Are there other factors limiting video sites like YouTube's ability to monetize video?
Posted at 2:39PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Tye D
6. Mark, I'm a regular reader of your blog and always look forward to hearing what you have to say, but had to ask this question after reading today's post.
Hulu provides a service to me where I'm able to fire up my laptop and watch the television shows I choose regardless of where I am and what time it is. As a business analyst/consultant, I often keep odd hours and generally stay in hotels Monday-Thurs. Currently, Hulu works great for giving me a way to watch the shows I want, when I'm available to watch them. I'm not sure if this issue is addressed in the proposed set up in this blog. Would I still have the ability to do this? Because honestly, thats a nice little service as it stands now.
Posted at 2:40PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Ben
9. YouTube is certainly far from HD quality, but some of the movies I have been able to download are of very high quality and look good on a 30" HDTV (that's as big as I have, so I can't test higher). I use my Xbox 360 as a media server and it works great, though I would love to have my content stored somewhere that it was backed up (my collection is far to big now to backup without investing in an expesive tape backup system).
My prime motivation for Internet TV is that I already pay for Internet, if I can use it to get rid of my cable, that's a significant savings every month. Considering that I only watch about seven of the 70+ channels that I get, even if I had to just subscribe to feeds for these seven channels, it's a considerable savings. That's why I like Internet for TV... cable/satalite keep cramming tons of channels (and subsequently higher costs) onto me when it's really only a few shows that I acctually watch, I hate paying for stuff I don't want.
10. TV playlists would be great!
Posted at 7:20PM on Jul 14th 2008 by NYC
11. I would say that this makes sense, except for one thing.
No one is going to take the time to coordinate an effort like this because Australian researchers have just invented a method to achieve internet speeds of 640 gb/s at no extra cost.
If 640gb/s is streaming to your laptop, desktop, whatever, it can solve all your HD needs and with nothing more than an S-video cable, you can access and display in ultra-high quality internet video with the "black box" being your computer and the extra fee associated with the service being "0".
Posted at 9:00PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Graham Langdon
12. Cablevision tried to implement a network DVR with the storage in the cloud. The content owners cried foul because Cablevision was making additional use of their content without paying them additional fees and filed a lawsuit. Cablevision lost. That was the end of the network DVR concept. In short, it's cheaper and easier and more legal to keep the storage at the consumer's settop box rather than negotiate new license agreements with all the content owners to keep the storage in the cloud. Check out the March 22, 2007, issue of Multichannel News.
Posted at 11:09PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Glen
13. Great idea, but it's the same problem. You only move the bottleneck from the home PC to a broadcast system. This means rather than streaming several hundred million video combinations to several hundred million personal computers via the Internet, you're trying to send several hundred million video combinations down a distribution platform that supports 400-500 non-HD channels at most.
The Internet (unicast) is terrific for VOD-type services and TV/satellite (broadcast) is terrific for pre-programmed services, but the two will not cross unless new technology comes out that allows TV/satellite programmers to multiplex millions of streams into their feeds--we're talking many many many petabytes of data. Some companies like Sirius allow their users to help suggest what the pre-programmed feeds look like, and I think this works well for audio, but television programming is more difficult to do in such a dynamic way.
I think we will see that the Internet will continue to grow to a point where bandwidth is cheap and available enough to support the googles of video bits sent each day with zero buffering and that Internet video and broadcast TV will coalesce into a market of devices that will seamlessly shuffle between the thousands upon thousands of feeds using state-of-the art video experience technology.
Ten years ago we couldn't do video on the Internet. Today, video is enjoyable on the Internet. Ten years from now, I'm pretty sure we won't be able to tell the difference between broadcast and the Internet.
14. Mark, the HD movie rentals from Apple playable on Apple TV look very good on a 46" HDTV. Not quite as good as the Good Charlotte concert I watched on HDNet last night (see, I do know what I'm talking about here), but better than DVD. They have wider variety than Cox On Demand. Cox On Demand has no HD content in my area. It's less that 1 minute until it is ready to play. Further, I do this with a $200 box and don't have $30 discs to buy, store, and dispose of packaging.
HD downloads are typically just a couple GBs for a full length movie. Now, if you're concerned about the bandwidth, I think you have to amortize that against the time it takes to watch and the number of movies one could watch (or afford to watch) in a month. A prolific HD movie renter would barely approach the typical BitTorrent video sharer that we blame for clogging our networks. We ought to encourage this paid use of content, not discourage it.
Posted at 2:33AM on Jul 15th 2008 by Brad Hutchings
15. What would it take for the content owners to agree to this? BigMedia would rather go under than give users open access to content.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070315_001831.html
16. Mark,
You write this latest blog entry like you have all the answers and can't act on them.
You're a money man now...get into it, capitalize and increase your bottom line.
It sounds like you got this down pat brother!
Have you ever thought about getting into businesses that don't just increase your bottom line, but also do good for the planet.
A smart guy like you should be able to solve our energy crisis.
Could you possibly get us off foreign oil by the time your next post comes out?
Thanks "cubes"!
g
17. Mark, good point about HD not being HD over the Internet. However, I have yet to see a cable company or sat company with real HD, either. Most of those 6-8mbs streams become blocky with fast motion. Even HDNet isn't 19mbs HD, at least not where I live in Indiana.
REAL HD does look that good. Too bad antenna is the only place you can get it, and you're SOL if you're too far from the source.
18. Sounds a lot like the Roku Netflix Player and Apple TV. Just yesterday Microsoft announced it would stream Netflix through the Xbox 360 in a similar fashion.
People may start caring more about true HD after that's all they see, but right now it's so new that most people can't tell the difference between "streaming HD" on their computer and a high-end home theatre system playing a new Blu-Ray disc. For now, HD is just whatever's better than what you get over the air or can capture with your cell phone.
19. Hey Mark,
Interesting idea, putting these vids on the local cable. But two problems that mean that the internet might be a better distribution point as opposed to cable.
IP rights and speed.
If I have a yen to watch the old Mad Max movie, it just might be on Comcast. It might not. Having watched that, if it was available, I might want to watch Mad Max 2 or Beyond Thunderdome just for laughs but... not available.
I might watch the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica through their partnership with Sci-fi Channel, but I can't watch it from start to finish or pick/choose episodes to try to re-look for hints of who was a cylon in earlier episodes...
Despite Comcast being able to provide classified ads and real estate listings via their digital service, it's dog slow. Even trying to sort through their area for movies or music videos from their service... slow. Also, no search function. The cable boxes would have to work more dynamically, like a computer, like Youtube for this to work out.
But... the cable companies also want to be the gate keepers of content and bandwidth (lol, see: net neutrality). What incentive do they have to make even their own service fast and worth while? Have a friend with Comcast? Go to their house. Go to their "searchlight on demand" area. Put yourself in my shoes if you were looking for a new job. Which would you rather do:
a) use search light on demand job listings or b) use craigslist, monster.com, etc. Now, this is simple, simple stuff here. TEXT. It shouldn't feel like I'm surfing on a 14.4 modem or worse.
So I can't imagine giving all of this content to the cable companies when they already fail with what they have. They can't get the deals in place to have a huge/giant library that I might actually want to use. What if there was a library that was more like iTunes, but for movies, but on cable, and fast? My cable prices aren't worth it, but I can't get satellite due to trees and such in my area. If Comcast was fast and worked more like iTunes, but for movies, that I wanted to watch whenever - the costs would actually be justified.
Posted at 2:01PM on Jul 15th 2008 by Scott
20. so few people talk about bandwidth .... all these streaming services, the i-net will slow to a crawl unless such ideas as yours are adopted.
Posted at 2:44PM on Jul 15th 2008 by gregory
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1. Great ideas! We can only wish though, right? Hulu on my REAL HDTV would be sweet!
Posted at 2:04PM on Jul 14th 2008 by Real Estate Investments