Comments on: Will TV Everywhere Swamp Cable Networks?

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:37:36 +0000

All Comcast has to do to ensure that TV Everywhere doesn’t swamp their pipes is cache the stuff at all the appropriate places, and they’re clearly smart enough to do that.

Most of the Comcast engineers I know are actually pretty good at arithmetic, as strange as that may seem.

By: Cheese

Cheese — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 02:27:34 +0000

Hmmm..will comcast overburden their own pipes following some IPTV pipe dream? Not likely. Technical underpinning apart, this article fails to inspect the business logic of comcast’s move. Comcast can no longer be faulted for not offering an on-demand service. Comcast can try to get some money for content they now store in their shelves – content that is potentially monetizable, but they cannot because their video pipe is filled with other (more monetizable) content. Comcast can now gain some brownie points against the hulus of the world. Ofcourse this business logic can fall flat if all of comcast’s customers sign up for this service and all of them switch to seeing TV Everywhere at the same time. Comcast will ofcourse guard that this will not happen, by making sure that the content on this service is not as compelling as the one on their video pipe – for example, they wont screen live sports events on this service. Nor will this stream contain american idol or contemporary news items. So, if you want to watch a 90s oscar winning movie, you could save yourself a trip to the DVD rental (or a subscription to netflix/roku) and watch it on TV everywhere. If you want to watch the game, you just watch plain old tv.

By: dvrman

dvrman — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 05:32:12 +0000

This article is not well thought out. Tv everywhere is no different than Hulu and will just add more content. It will be 2 years before all of the industry and all of the content is available and even when it is no one is going to stream to a PC at rates much above 1.5 mbps. Even if 50% more people start using it , it will actually spread the bandwidth around between cable/ telcio sites like comcast and TWC and AT&T and between content guys like Turner and Discovery. A large share will be sure to go to Hulu and all of the people downloading bit torrent aren’t going anywhere.

By: Dieter

Dieter — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:35:34 +0000

Two errors in this posting. First, “Internet” video isn’t typically encoded and delivered as
at 2-3 mbps (mpeg-2 is typical for most cable providers). It is more likely the delivery system
would use a more modern codec designed for PC use, or H.264. In either case, it would
be reasonable to expect the delivery bit rate to be closer to 1 mbps. For example, 700 kbps
looks like fine on an iTouch.

Then in the Motorola link, that also assumes the cable industry standard of
3.75 mbps for SD video on demand.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:01:05 +0000

Comcast announced DOCSIS 3 a long time ago, did you miss that? If their current tools don’t cut it, they can transcode as well. The engineering problem w/ TV Everywhere isn’t particularly difficult.