According to this indepth Cnet article “2004 is the last year when people consider video an exotic application for broadband,” (Peter Barrett, CTO Microsoft TV).
So the Baby Bells are spending billions to become TV providers. “Voice is a dying business” and the bites from cable are costly. “If we are going to build the IP (Internet Protocol) pipe, we want all the revenue streams. The great thing is that several technologies are coming together now. We’re very happy about that” (Ralph Ballart, VP Broadband, SBC Laboratories).
The key is services, since most customers already have cable or satellite and are unlikely to change unless service offerings are more compelling. And bandwidth constipation is a real issue when dealing with poorly compressed poorly produced Internet video. “Digital video technology is in flux as technology providers develop potential replacements for the current standard, known as MPEG-2, which would require substantially less bandwidth to transmit video without loss of picture quality. A new standard, known as MPEG-4, would slash bandwidth requirements by about 75 percent, giving TV providers room for additional channels and high-definition transmissions, but it is still largely a work in progress”.
It’s not a “work in progress” at ExecProducer – we’ve been producing media of the Internet, by the Internet, and for the Internet for years, and continue to innovate on end-to-end quality, bandwidth resource allocation, and TCP/IP infrastructure issues along with production issues. So I suppose it’s just a “catch-up game” for those other guys. All aboard!