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Why Intel's New IPTV Service Will Do What Google, Apple, and Microsoft Can't
- josephlord 14y agoI'm pretty doubtful. Intel have been doing in-out dance for TV solutions for a few years. They don't have consumer product experience or media market experience. Would be stunned if this happened on a substantial scale.
- thematt 14y agoAlso, what clout do they have with the content providers? Why would somebody release control to them rather than Apple, Microsoft or Google...which have larger, more-established viewer bases.
- josephlord 14y agoWell money talks and Intel could afford to buy content but I just don't see the business case for them to outbid the existing channels and cable companies for exclusive rights for premium content.
- elemeno 14y agoAnd Apple can afford to buy content creators outright. Without any mention of deals having been made with movie studios etc. the whole article is nothing more than a pipe-dream.
- drakaal 14y agoWhat planet do you live on? Even with $100B in the bank, you are going to buy A (1) content creator out right, and not the biggest. Lucas Films which has a few dozen properties, and a few hundred hours of content, went for $4b. It is a VERY small content provider. Disney would cost in the neighborhood of $250B Viacom just bought Bellator (MMA / UFC content producer) for $225M. So apple could afford a few producers of a single show.
- elemeno 14y agoYour numbers are way out. Disney has a market cap of $87B and that gets you Disney, Disney Theme Parks, ABC, ESPN, The Disney Channel, A+E, Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic, and a hell of a lot more to boot. News Corp has a market cap of $57B and that gets you 20th Century Fox, Fox, and a long list of international broadcasters and producers. Viacom has a market cap of $26B. Any of those gives you pretty much all the content you can shake a stick at in both TV and Film, as well as several broadcasting networks both in the US and globaly and a long list of other assets that would likely be packed up and sold off. Even accounting for a leveraged buy-out premium, Apple could buy either Disney, or News Corp and Viacom and instantly be one of the worlds biggest media companies.
- drakaal 14y agoMarket cap, an "price to buy" are not the same. Anyone who has been through a purchase can tell you that. Why do you think Lucas was so expensive? Market cap is the price of the outstanding stock, and doesn't reflect the cost of the assets, or the will of the primary holders to keep their shares.
- fuzionmonkey 14y agoIntel has been willing to work with Hollywood in the past. There was a lot of controversy over their inclusion of "DRM" hardware in their Sandy Bridge Chips. http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/01/shows-over-how-hollywood-strong-armed-intel/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/01/shows-over-how-holly... http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/ http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_wh... I'd love for more competition in this space. If real IPTV could finally happen it would be great. I use a HTPC with Windows Media Center as my main TV, and I'm tired of dealing with the issues. Cablecard is a pain, Comcast is a pain, commercials are a pain. I just want to watch the few shows I care about. The only thing stopping me from cutting cable and just watching shows on iTunes is live sports.
- senthilnayagam 14y agoone cheap price is more interesting for me, and if the content is available on netflix, that would seal the deal for me
- Ntrails 14y agoAll I want is to replicate the experience I can currently get from uTorrent. ie - high res content downloaded [not streamed and thus vulnerable to buffering] to watch at my leisure around the time of initial cable viewing. The price for doing this legally should probably be similar per episode to what I pay for a song on iTunes. I'm happy to pay for a netflix sub, but it doesn't do what I want. I hate buying boxed sets (though I sometimes do) because playing DvDs on my PC is worse than having a quality .avi file neatly filed and quickly accessed. In fact (I've said this here before) my ideal world is where Steam holds all of my purchased series and I can manage it all from there. It remembers stuff I no longer want clogging up my HD to be re-downloaded, and downloads the latest episodes of stuff I've bought automatically. What I want will never happen.
- jpxxx 14y agoThere is no check sufficiently large to convince a $130B industry to smash their business model into bits. And the second they unbundle, half of their content pipeline evaporates overnight.
- drakaal 14y agoCable companies like bundles more than Content providers do. And Producers would like to cut much of the "pipeline" out of the picture. Shows like Firefly would have done much better in a world where consumers paid directly for the content, than a world where the networks determined air dates, and messed with schedules.
- jpxxx 14y agoI do agree such a world would provide clearer signals. But while I admit that I am speaking well out of my depth, I don't see much evidence that people currently value television above 'Free' or 'Unlimited After Monthly Subscription'.
- alexqgb 14y agoMost people don't value anything unless they pay for it, and they don't pay for it unless they absolutely have to. That's an Iron Law of Humans.
- dhugiaskmak 14y agoShows like Firefly don't get made in a world where consumers pay directly for the content.
- loceng 14y agoNot yet..
- alexqgb 14y agoSure dude, and where are you going to get the development budget for a show like Firefly? Kickstarter?
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoAll the perceived problems that Intel 'solves' are all legal and copyright issues. Tunnel technology just works. Hell, there's even an autodownloader for TPB on one of the open source media players, so this stuff isn't theoretical. I'm gueasing this is some sort of hackeneyed scheme to get DRM embedded in more of our devices.
- kierank 14y agoEugh, more abuse of the term IPTV. IPTV is a standardised term requiring a managed QoS network (i.e not the Internet) so you can match the QoS provided by managed RF spectrum or dedicated cable frequencies.
- drakaal 14y agoIPTV does not require mangaged QoS -Brandon Wirtz Google me I know more about IPTV than you do. (or just about anyone on the planet)
- kierank 14y agoIf you knew more about IPTV than I did then you'd know that there are internationally standardised definitions for what "IPTV" is designated as compared to "Internet TV".
- drakaal 14y agoQoS of the network is not a requirement for IPTV. IPTV is a definition for Broadcast like experience to a Television display. Several "IPTV Named Standards" work over Multicast and require "IP Traffic Quality Metrics" this is not "QoS" PS I authored many of those standards... (I was also on the committee for BD, h264, VC1, and a few other SMPTE standards)
- kierank 14y agoNow you're just splitting hairs about the definition of QoS, which again is defined in standards and fits in with the standardised definition of IPTV. I'm not going to quote it all because the chances are there is another standard with slightly different wording that can be construed to mean something else. It doesn't change the fact that the article is describing an "over the top" network where content is delivered over the public internet which isn't suitable for a broadcast-like television experience (start torrenting on another machine and you'll see why). It also ignores the fact that the content will almost certainly be delivered in low-bitrate/poorly encoded and half-framerate (for full frame/field rate material) like every OTT service out there. Try watching sports at 25/30fps on a television and your headache will tell you that it's not a television experience.
- fernly 14y agoI don't understand how the writer supposes Intel can acquire unbundled content and sell it per-channel or even per-show. Yes, that's the consumer's dream, to be able to subscribe to and pay for only one's preferred channels (or even shows), but that well-known desire has been consistently opposed by the cable and satellite systems. And content producers have, I believe, always cooperated with the cable and satellite providers in this. It's one more item for negotiation: "we'll charge less for our material if you'll bundle us with a popular group of channels", etc. Hulu, iTunes, et al only get to rebroadcast single shows only as reruns, so providing a trickle of secondary income but never threatening the main cash cow. So it seems highly unlikely that even Intel could acquire the right to broadcast first-run material in competition with other systems. Also the cable and sat providers have plenty of pricing elasticity acquired from years of semi-monopoly, and could easily compete on price if they wanted to.
- apinstein 14y agoThis is what I was wondering, too. It's basically the critical step in being able to make TV a viable product for any* company (cable companies included). The only thing I noticed the writer saying along these lines was that Intel offered billions in long-term commitment to the industry while Apple/Google only offered tens/hundreds of millions. I am not sure I buy it; both Google and Apple know what that market would be worth if tapped (20-30% * enormous number) so I don't think it was a lack of money at the negotiating table. Rather I think the TV is going to be stuck in neutral for a long time due to the complexity of making that work. In music and mobile phones, the N in the N-party negotiations for acquiring a critical mass was much smaller than in the TV business. Unlike the music and mobile industries, there are many more exclusive and long-term contracts that make it hard to maneuver around. The TV problem is certainly not a technology, bandwidth, or market-size (available devices) problem as of the last 2-3 years. Is it possible Intel cracked this nut? Yes. Likely? No.
- wmf 14y agoThe only thing I can think of is that they're going to sell TV below cost to get people to switch, then try to renegotiate later.
- drakaal 14y ago
- flyinglizard 14y agoThis article doesn't say anything about where the content will come from. Possibly Intel hasn't got that resolved, unless they will front for the content providers as an independent initiative (you bring the hardware, we bring the content). Apple is just toying around the market. It's obvious for everyone that: a. People would love having a huge Apple display in their livingroom, playing nicely with their mobile stuff and Apple-ized life b. When Apple goes into this market, it will go with an entire TV set and not just a set top box; this TV will not be bound to the low margins of mass market TVs, either As for Google, they are the long term winner. You WILL need to feature Google services if you want your product to be more than just a dumb streamer. Now they are doing their little fiber experiment which, in my eyes, is just a precursor to a massive rollout of infrastructure fast enough to support high quality IPTV. I'm sure we will see Youtube stuff coming to our livingroom in few years. In my eyes, Intel got nothing to bring to the table here. The problem was never hardware, that exists for many years now. The problem is content first, software second, hardware in a very distant third.
- disbelief 14y agoThere is some hand-wavy mention towards the end of Intel going to "Hollywood" with a bunch of money. Whatever and whomever that means.
- flyinglizard 14y agoThe only way I see it happening is if the content providers decide to do a preemptive move and base their own STBs on top of some Intel platform. But it will not be an Intel STB nor will it be marketed as such.