The Wall Street Journal’s Dionne Searcey reports that AT&T has begun offering IPTV service to several hundred customers in San Antonio.
Initially, the service will look much like regular cable TV, with a few new features. Customers will be able to view one channel while flipping through others in a “picture within a picture” format, and channel surfing will be much faster than with regular cable TV, company officials said.
For now, AT&T will offer 200 channels, though it expects to offer 1,000 or more channels when it expands the service to other markets in about six months…Several hundred video-on-demand movies are being offered…AT&T’s initial TV service lacks features such as high-definition channels, which are commonly offered by cable companies. The company won’t reveal the price of its service but said it was competitive with other cable-TV offerings in the area.
Searcey says “[c]ustomers will receive three set-top boxes with built-in digital video recorders.” That’s a pretty significant investment in CPE.
Phil Harvey at Lightreading provides some additional details:
The carrier’s first IPTV customers will have their homes outfitted with a 2Wire Inc. residential gateway on the outside of the home and up to three DVR-equipped set-top boxes on the inside. AT&T will use Motorola…and Scientific-Atlanta…set-tops later on. It is using Tatung products right now. As the service ramps, says [AT&T spokeswoman Denise Koenig], customers will get several dozen more channels and the ability to enjoy “whole-house DVR” — a service where a program recorded by one TV is watchable on any other TV in the house.
Interestingly, AT&T still hasn’t settled on a single compression scheme to get all its video bits down the last few feet of copper pair to the customer’s house. This initial market entry in San Antonio uses “either MPEG-4 or VC-1,” according to Koenig. VC-1 is Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 Series codec for creating high-quality video at lower data rates.
According to Searcey:
Company officials say users of AT&T’s Internet television eventually will be able to program their digital video recorders with cellphones and will be able to choose among various camera angles while watching sports events. AT&T also wants to let consumers watch on a cellphone shows stored on a home digital video recorder.
Om Malik cites a research note by UBS analyst John Hodulik:
We do not expect, AT&T to offer HD over its IPTV platform until 2007 due to bandwidth and compression limitations. We believe that questions remain over the scalability of the IPTV platform and currently expect AT&T to end 2006 with roughly 95K video subscribers, which represents 1% of expected fiber qualified homes.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:45 PM | Print | Comments (1)
Mike at Techdirt and Om Malik pick up on a key detail buried in the WSJ’s story on Google’s rumored announcement of expanded video plans, which Om was the first to report.
Mike says:
[T]he really interesting point isn’t even being covered by most of the media. The Associated Press version and the Reuters version don’t even mention it, and the original Wall Street Journal version of the story buries it as the last sentence: “Google has developed its own digital-rights-management software to protect downloaded videos from piracy.” Google obviously felt it needed to do so to convince the big content companies to take part — but what it probably means is that we now have yet another incompatible copy protection system that is likely to lock people in (while also opening up new security holes). Hopefully, the actual details won’t be as bad, but hearing that the company has gone out and built a totally separate copy protection system (which, of course, will be broken quickly) makes it sound like Google’s taking a lesson from Apple in trying to exert extra control on a market.
Though Mike’s (and Om’s) skepticism is warranted in light of DRM’s history, it would be great to see Google come up with a creative approach to the gnarly problem of securing content, an arena plagued by complication, incompatibility, risk and unintended negative side effects. It seems unlikely, but we can hope.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 11:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)Washington Post writer Leslie Walker helped alleviate the guilt I feel for sitting out CES this year in a funny column about the crazy efforts by vendors to capture media attention.
The Big Pitch for the annual Consumer Electronics Show starts earlier every year and involves phantom products that may never reach store shelves along with real gadgets being shown for the first time. Over the past two months, I’ve read more than 400 pitches inviting me to a private showing of some “life-changing” device or offering access to a “highly exclusive” party where such devices will be celebrated.
Walker catalogs some of the insane products pitched at her (“the world’s first washable lamp designed to be sewn into clothing”), the hideous size of the exhibit space (two dozen football fields) and the inability to move anywhere via taxi or public transportation (“a nightmare”).
Walker wraps up her humorous griping by saying
Oh, did I tell you about Loc8tor, the pocket fob that lets you find anything if you remember to stick a postage-stamp-size tag on it in advance? I just might start with that. If I plaster myself with Loca8tor tags, maybe I can keep track of my senses amid the marketing lunacy engulfing the Consumer Electronics Show.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
It’s not exactly a major step forward for movies-over-the-Internet, but two struggling online film distributors, Akimbo and Movielink, announced yesterday that Movielink will distribute some of its Hollywood films over Akimbo’s set-top based service. Akimbo also announced that it has partnered with Thomson to manufacture a co-branded $199 (after mail-in rebate) Akimbo player.
To date neither Akimbo nor Movielink, which is owned by a coalition of Hollywood studios, have made much of a dent in the video-over-Internet market. Movielink, which the studios shopped around this year in an effort to jettison its once-promising effort to pioneer legitimate film distribution over the web, hasn’t caught fire because, first, consumers aren’t that willing to watch full-length movies on their PCs and secondly, Movielink is only available for viewing on the PC — no distribution to hand-held devices or TV sets. It doesn’t help that Movielink’s line-up grows weaker over time and that the service costs $10/month.
Akimbo suffers from a double-whammy: the upfront cost barrier of the box needed to view Akimbo’s offerings and content that is very limited in its appeal. Most of Akimbo’s content falls into the extreme niche category (Korean soap operas, second-tier cartoons, obscure DIY and so forth).
The San Jose Mercury News, however, ran a piece today that played the pairing as a real competitive breakthrough. My favorite quote from the article:
`”It’s a big step for us,’” said Jim Funk, Akimbo’s vice president of marketing. `”A lot of people have asked us, ‘When can we get the latest movies?’ Now we can offer the latest movies — and Turkish television.”
My second favorite quote from the article:
“It will expand the number of choices for consumers,” he [Forrester Analyst Josh Bernoff] said. “And it will put more pressure on the cable operators.”
Um, something tells me that the alliance between Akimbo and Movielink will barely register on cable’s radar screen.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:21 PM | Print | Comments (0)The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Google is, in fact, planning to announce both a pay-per-view video service and a new downloadable bundle of PC software on Friday at CES. According to the piece by Kevin Delaney and Nick Wingfield,
Under the major upgrade to Google’s video-search service, consumers will be able to pay to download and view videos, such as television shows, on their computers from Google content partners such as TV companies, people familiar with the matter say. Google plans to announce partnerships with some major players tomorrow, including CBS Corp. and the National Basketball Association, these people say. By virtue of Google’s huge presence online, the move could place Google in competition with other emerging powers in Internet distribution of video such as Apple Computer Inc.
The downloadable bundle of software is called the “Google Pack” and will contain the
Firefox Web browser, a version of Norton AntiVirus software from Symantec Corp., Adobe Systems Inc.’s Reader software, RealNetworks Inc.’s RealPlayer multimedia software, Trillian instant-messaging software from Cerulean Studios and Lavasoft AB’s Ad-Aware antispyware software. Google Pack will also include Google’s own desktop search software, Google Earth satellite imaging and maps software, Picasa photo-management software, Google Talk instant-messaging program, its Toolbar add-on for Web browsers and screen saver software.
According to the piece, Google is presumably doing this to take a swipe at Microsoft’s share of the software market and head off a Microsoft run at Google’s search business; but, more importantly, this bundle could make it easier for consumers to use Google services. Both of these developments make sense, but I can’t help but think that there is something else that Google plans to announce — just tossing out a downloadable software option seems a little incomplete for Google. The WSJ piece says the software may ultimately come preinstalled in new computers and a spokesman is quoted in the piece as saying Google will have “a number of exciting announcements” during Larry Page’s keynote presentation on Friday.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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