surrealization.com

IPTV

Tuesday, March 14 2006

Ars has a good introduction to IPTV and points out one major problem that has me wondering how useful the technology will be to the average multi-television home: simultaneous streams. IPTV won't similar to cable in that all channels won't get pushed to your house. Instead, only the channels you request will get sent to your house. This means that your phone line's bandwidth is the limiting factor in how many channels you can receive at once.

There are people on tivocommunity.com who frequently talk about having a dual-tuner DVR in their bedroom and two on their main television (and I'm sure they have a TV or two elsewhere) and record on all of them at once. That's up to five simultaneous streams and it's not necessarily going to be possible, considering the bandwidth required for each stream. Plus, if any of the shows are HD signals, then that will cut out 2-3 additional SD streams that can be received.

Even Fios and other fiber-to-your-door services that can achieve much greater speeds than people are used to with standard phone lines aren't fast enough to support the kind of television that the cable companies have gotten everyone used to (both kids watching TV in their room, the parents watching a show in the living room and recording another).