Microsoft Leading the Pack in an area where apple should be excelling

DJ Rep

DJ Rep

How Interesting...
Three words...Video on Demand or IPTV as it has become to known is nothing short of stunning, if anyone watched the CES keynote where the Senior Vice President of SBC Broadcasting came on and demonstrated the ability to rent videos directly to your tv, have upto 4 videos in one screen at once, mutli angle sports channels, programming/preview anywhere from your cell phone, HDTV support...the list goes on it was unbeliveable I was actually very impressed and the funny thing is that microsoft technology is driving the whole thing. Apple needs to watch this, it may have got ahead with the online music industry but if it doesn't introduce some kind of major IPTV service I can see MS ruling the roost, IPTV is probably an even bigger potential digital explosion than online music so apple get off your ass and do something quick!!!
Oh and btw for ms the way that it worked was actually suprisingly simple.
My thoughts are that apple with the advent of H264 being integrated into quicktime in tiger will bring along a iFlix video store, this may happen, but it will not be enough. MS and SBC already have a better solution as shown at SBC, the ability to rent and buy movies from the comfort of your sofa is not to be sniffed at, and it's instant HDTV. What apple will have to do is to release a Media Edition Mac - or they will be out of the game altogether, the mac mini is a perfect potential for that but unfortunatley is the wrong type of hardware, it is very much a mac not a PVR or Media Box, perhaps when tiger is released they will release another mac mini with a hardware H264 video decoder, HDTV support, 7.1 Digital Optical sound, and some glorious software to power it all, but I can't really see this. What _may_ happen though would be that SONY would produce the STB to compliment the media stored on the mac, apple would provide the VOD, the interface and the technological ins and outs, and sony would create the box that would interact with the mac getting content from the mac as well as connecting to the apple VOD service, saving the movies in the box or on you mac like a PVR and having the hardware H264 decoder and the above mentioned connectios and en/decoders. Anyway thats enough rambling it's just that I was stunned how far ahead of the field MS are in this
 
I was equally impressed with the stuff Bill was showing at CES. Then I realized, if this takes off, it's going to be compatible with only Microsoft stuff and you will only be able to take advantage of it with Microsoft media center boxes, Windows XP, etc.

I hope Apple does something like this as well because Microsoft has a leg up on them as of now.
 
Dude!

Just wait for Apple to announce thier Tiger + Mac Mini + Sony TV based TiVo/NetFlix killer...

You can cobble the peices & parts together today, but Apple will make it simple enough for grandma.

The guy from Sony was not at MacWorld for nothin'...

;)
 
I have a suspicion that Apple has something planned that has not yet been announced. Mr. Jobs announced this as the year of HD yet at present very few Apple systems can play HD. We have editing software but it is a little weak.

I do not know what, but I suspect something hardware related will be released around the time of WWDC to help Apple along the theme of "the year of HD". Nothing directly in Tiger seems to point to any surprises on the software front unless core video or QT allows something not in the current beta release.

On the other hand, just to play Devil's Advocate, Apple was late to the portable music player market as well...
 
Hmmm... makes you wonder about that rumored "Asteroid" project... from what I've heard, it's a Firewire-Audio breakout box, but perhaps it'll have video support as well... we can hope!
 
One of the most facinating features of IPTV is Video on Demand. The whole experience is video on demand, which means higher quality than cable or satalite combined. This also means you can watch WHATEVER WHENEVER. And this technology is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER:

"SBC Labs has been testing an IP-based television service built on the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform since June 2004. SBC companies and Microsoft will begin field trials in mid 2005 and plan commercial availability of the IP-based television platform in late 2005."
http://www.microsoft.com/tv/content/Press/SBC04_IPTV.mspx
Click to expand...
 
Guys... be careful with making assumptions about where Apple is with their programs. I'm a huge Apple fan and big hater of Microsoft... but you can't dismiss them. Microsoft has prodiced the best game system (xbox) on the market, and had the absolute best DVR device EVER in their now abandoned Ultimate TV. It's been years, and Tivo and all of the other players STILL have yet to make something better... It has me worried.
Jobs has never been a TV guy... it'd be real easy for him to overlook this.
 
Opus66 I agree, as much as MS is vilified they have upon occasion been innovators. Personally I don't even dislke Windows, though I have rarely used it for the last 3 years in favor of Linux and recently OS X.

It is quite possible that Apple has been caught napping again but something does not seem to add up about the "year of HD". Why make it a major part of the keynote and invitate the President of Sony otherwise? It might simply be politics or smoke and mirrors like the whole "year of the Laptop" which really did not amount to much I suppose.
 
Captain Code said:
I was equally impressed with the stuff Bill was showing at CES. Then I realized, if this takes off, it's going to be compatible with only Microsoft stuff and you will only be able to take advantage of it with Microsoft media center boxes, Windows XP, etc.

I hope Apple does something like this as well because Microsoft has a leg up on them as of now.
Click to expand...

Captain Code is totally right. My questions are, What is going on at apple? What are they going to do about it?

It was video who killed the radio star! so will this MS IPTV kill the iTunes star?
 
No new medium has ever vanquished an older one completely. We still have papers, we still have radio. So: No, MS IPTV is certainly not a replacement for downloading songs off the 'net. (And how would it...)

I guess, right now, it looks like Apple's not the least interested in TV. At all. It's been a long, long, long time since Apple last had a TV tuner card in a Mac.
 
It's hardly "leading the pack" when they don't have a product, only a demonstration.

The IPTV group has been doing the rounds for a couple of years now, and I doubt that Microsoft are going to be the big name when it does take off, but rather that it will be a standard picked up by a number of companies.

Sony and Apple's open support of the open-standard H.234 would suggest that both of those companies will be sticking with that standard as opposed to anything Microsoft has to offer. And both the BluRay and HD-DVD groups are supporting H.234 as well, in the latter case abandoning an MS owned codec aout 6 months ago because it "did not meet the needs" of HD-DVD.

That means that big name video equipment companies like JVC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Panasonic and others are all backing the open standard - H234 - as opposed to Microsoft's yet-to-be-released offerings.

Believe me, if the HD-DVD group had stuck with MS's codec, Bill Gates would have been giving the speech about how 2005 will be the year of HD, and Steve's MacWorld speech wouldn't have even made mention of video codecs.

Also, if you stop to think about what we can expect in December this year - Sony's Playstation 3 being released more than half a year before the XBox 2 is ready - it seems likely that Sony will have the advantage on this market. We already know the PS3 will have a G5-derived Cell processor, and will support video transfer to the Playstation Portable. Anything else is speculation, but I won't be expecting MS to have any impact on the market until they actually release a product!
 
but the real thing is that they did have a product, did you actually watch the MS CES Keynote? It was there, working (the bits that i'm talking about) they were there with SBC demonstrating all these VOD demand and IPTV features live, it doesn't matter whether High Def DVD are supporting H264 (not H234 btw) becuase if MS gets this in everyones living room first it doesn't matter whether their it's Blu-Ray or HD-DVD becuase everyone will be using the easier option that MS has of VOD and the point is that MS and its partners have a system that Just Works. Where as apple has a system that Just doesn't exsist...yet.
 
If Apple has something ready to be released soon, I think it will be at this show: http://www.nabshow.com/

As far as video on demand goes, well my cable company already has that. One of the satellite providers is adding this. Of course this isn't all HD yet.

But here's the problem: how is someone going to get video on demand, courtesy of this M$ product? It will have to come through their broadband connections, which is either through their cable company or DSL. Compression aside, all of that will take bandwidth. Have any of you seen what happens to cable internet access during peak hours? Can you imagine what will happen if you have video downloads (even compressed) added to that load? Have you tried driving on a major road at 5 p.m.?

Even more crucial to all of this is the creation of HD content. As a current HDTV owner, I can tell you there isn't much out there yet. HBO HD and others don't give much, if any noticeable improvement. Why? Well unless the movies were shot digitally (and most aren't yet), you are either limited to DVD quality, or it's an analog to digital conversion from fill, Bleech!

That is why the creation of content has to come first, which is where Apple is heading. I recently attended a demonstration of Final Cut Pro HD and one of those Sony HD video cams. Impressive. There were some from local TV stations there who are under a conversion to digital deadline. They were floored.
For the cost of a PowerMac, the Sony camera, and Final Cut Pro HD, they have a video editing system that is much less than the cost of an Avid system.

Well that's my two cents.
 
Well, they are rolling it out this year in SBC territory over ADSL2 which provides 24Mbps. That is enough for 3 or 4 compressed HDTV streams at once plus one standard def. tv stream.
 
symphonix said:
We already know the PS3 will have a G5-derived Cell processor, and will support video transfer to the Playstation Portable. Anything else is speculation, but I won't be expecting MS to have any impact on the market until they actually release a product!
Click to expand...

Sorry to go a little off toopic but the Cell is not a G5 derived product. The PPC core used in the Cell is a 64bit processor with VMX but it was based on a different project from the G5 with different design considerations.
 
Captain Code said:
I've read it's based on the POWER5 processor, not the G5.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell1.html
See the "The Processor Unit (PU)" part.
Click to expand...

Correct, that was what I said... I think. Well not quite since it is not Power5 based either. That was a misconception based upon the patent application that was not cleared up till the ISSCC last week.

Further reading for those interested:

The "simple" version
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars

The not so simple version
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT021005084318

Mr. Blachford's article is interesting and approachable as well. He based his on the patent applications and is a little too enthusiastic at times but other than that it is pretty good stuff. The two articles above are based on the information released at the ISSC conference early last week.

EDIT: Go to the "POWERPC Processing Element" section of the realWorldTech article. That section is only 2 paragraphs long and a fairly easy to understand explanation of what the PPE is derived from.
 
Captain Code said:
Well, they are rolling it out this year in SBC territory over ADSL2 which provides 24Mbps. That is enough for 3 or 4 compressed HDTV streams at once plus one standard def. tv stream.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. You are fortunate to be ahead of many areas. Maybe the market for this will expand sooner than I thought. My DSL provider, Bellsouth, has been one of the more aggressive providers. Their ads imply that this is in the future. Perhaps this future will be here sooner than I thought. Great.

This could be very good for Apple. They are in a good position to become a major player in content development. All that capacity is going to need programming.

Besides, I wouldn't mind being able to ditch Time Warner Cable. Their service sucks locally. <I won't get started on that.> But my DSL is always up, except during a general power outage. I wouldn't mind getting video from Bellsouth too.
 
Aparently I don't have the same idea of what "video on demand" is as the rest of you...

The implication here is that it is some sort of real-time bandwidth-intensive streaming process.

I tend to think it's more like a dowloadable version of Netflix... i.e. you have "queue" of movies, and they are downloaded and stored on your TiVo-like DVR. These could download overnight .vs in realtime... (Faster than shipping DVD's via US Mail, but slower than "real time".)

The machine can always be 2-3-4 steps ahead of you in your queue... meaning the movie might already be downloaded, and just waiting to be "unlocked". This could enable very close to real-time, but not require streaming.

Combined with both a Cable TV and Internet connection, this device could record both "broadcast" television (TiVo) as well as download internet content (NetFlix).

This is why I think the Mac Mini with a digital (DVI) connection to a Sony TV could be the Netflix/TiVo killer... This is also why I think they are not bothering with keyboard/mice for these machines... They'll just have some sort of nice Bluetooth remote control.

My 2 cents...
 
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