This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 21:14 and is filed under Internet, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
My major complaint with TV is the 300 plus channels of junk I have to weed through for the handful I do want. With digital cable and satellite using all digital technology, ala carte shouldn’t be a problem to order, but contracts the companies make with the networks forbid that from happening. Thus, many are now flocking to the Internet for that Goldie Locks just right television. IPTV. With such offerings like Democracy (read our previous post on that) and MediaCentral (posts, review), IPTV is much easier to do on the computer but still lacks on the standard boob-tube. There was hope that Apple TV would bridge that void, but with its out-of-the-box support only for iTunes content, that didn’t happen.
Fortunately, SES Americom is putting together IP-Prime. It just announced today that it has signed on Comcast, Fox Cable, NBC Universal, Showtime, and Turner to the party to bring the channel total to 350. If you’ve never heard of SES Americom, it gets its popularity in the satellite field having 36 of them floating around our blue ball in outer space right as I type this. It has the know-how and money to make this IPTV stuff work, but it’s Bill Squadron, senior vice president of media partnerships, comment that scares me, when he says, “SES AMERICOM is very close to the historic commercial launch of IP-PRIME, we have field trials underway and in the works with Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 telcos, and a growing number in the queue anxious to offer top-notch television to their customers.” Telcos. The same guys that have been kicking and screaming about VoIP. The same guys fighting Net Neutrality. And yes, the fact that cable companies are involved in all this, too, doesn’t sit well either.
I really want IPTV to be a reality in which I have the choice of what I want and when I want it. If IP-Prime can pull it off this fall when it plans to go live, that would be great. If it just sees this as another avenue to charge $50 to $100 a month as it does off the wire or the dish, then IP-Prime has killed IPTV before it’s even really started.
