John Linton
I met with the company with whom we are working to provide streaming TV and VOD services yesterday to progress what we might be able to do in terms of offering such services.
They demonstrated their latest streaming software that provided pretty good definition and very clear sound at 340 kbps compared to the 1.2 mbps that TVB insist must be used to deliver their services.
While I quite like the concept of 340 kbps to deliver streaming video it isn't much use if the major TV stations insist on 1.2 mbps - which, anecdotally, I don't see them moving from. However it was always going to be more difficult and more time consuming to complete an agreement than appeared possible some 6 weeks ago so I'm not really surprised.
I looked at the current TPG streaming TV offering and wasn't very impressed with the constant buffering which indicated that there were major network capacity constraints in delivering it. Also the free content was a mishmash of the free content widely available from any number of 'content providers' and, I would have thought, was very unappealing to the majority of Exetel's customers.
I still believe that offering specifically targeted 'foreign language' content will be commercially viable and that offering a wide range of 'special interest' content will also be viable but this process is going to take 2 - 3 years to fully implement and getting away from the 'set top box' concept so entrenched in many content provider's understanding of copyright protection will only impede the implementation.
However, we continue to make progress on solving the various technical and process issues of delivering multiple channels cost/effectively (both to us and the end user) and the content options continue to evolve so it will be interesting to see how it eventually turns out.