HDTV Reviews

If you currently own a V-Box from BT Vision and love sports, you will be happy to hear that BT has launched its sports package, which football matches available from £1.99. The BT Vision sports package enables you to watch near live broadcastings of Barclays Premier League matches. Unfortunately you will have to watch these on the same day, but after 10pm, but BT does offers a months worth of near live matches for only £4. Read more

Microsoft today have announced that they have renamed Microsoft IPTV to “Microsoft Mediaroom“. Their new IPTV (Internet TV) and multimedia platform looks very impressive and pushes IPTV a further step. The new name comes from the enhanced media functions making the Mediaroom much more than just IPTV. Several new features include networked home media sharing and dynamic MultiView (multiple picture-in-picture) allowing you to have up to 16 Picture-in-picture windows on a single screen. Read more

There has been recent news at the IPTV World Forum which is reporting good news for HD IPTV in the near future. Second generation MPEG-4 video encoders (based on the H.264 compression standard) which provide better compression and use less bandwidth plus cheaper manufacturing costs.
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BT Vision, BT’s IPTV service has been launched, a TV service that combines Freeview terrestrial broadcasts with on-demand content delivered over broadband. The viewer would be able to view over 80 Freeview channels along with on demand content via the broadband connections. Read more

AT&T have launched it’s HD service and has begun to broadcast HDTV as part of it’s U-verse IPTV offering. AT&T says its San Antonio customers can now buy a package of 25 HD channels for an extra $10 a month. Local rival Time Warner Cable Inc. says it’s offering 24 HD channels.

The service launched earlier this year initially only offered standard definition channels. At the time of the launch the company promised to add HD. Now AT&T will offer more than 25 HD channels. AT&T is offering a two month promotion for new HD customers to receive free HD service for two months. After that, the service will be $10 per month.

“We’re pleased with the progress we’re seeing from our customers in the field,” says Microsoft TV spokesman Jim Brady. “Right now AT&T and [Deutsche Telekom] are offering commercial HD services with the platform. IPTV is a better TV experience that will get increasingly better and more differentiated over time.”
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SaskTel says it will be the first provider in North America to commercially deploy High Definition TV as part of an IPTV offering with the introduction of 27 Max HD channels, one of the largest HDTV line-ups in Canada.

SaskTel’s capital investment in its Next Generation Access Infrastructure (NGAI) program will be $136.5 million in 2006 and an estimated $310 million over the next five years.

“The network upgrade is bringing fiber optic cable closer to the home and in addition to enabling HDTV, it will result in the ability to provide faster high speed internet connections, more television streams, VoIP technology and other emerging services,” the company said.
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Microsoft trotted out a team of system-on-a-chip set-top partners Tuesday that will assist the software giant in reenergizing the surprisingly slow rollout of IP-based pay-TV.

The Redmond-based software kingpin announced that set-top box makers Cisco Systems, Motorola, Phillips, and Tatung are all marketing system-on-a-chip (SoC) set-tops, a development that will generate more low-cost, flexible HD-ready set-top devices.

SoC technology distills the components of a system such as a set-top box into a single chip, more or less. That distillation reduces development time and the cost of multicomponent devices such as set-top boxes.

Set-top technology can then be easily embedded into more complex multifunctional devices. For instance Philips has introduced a hybrid IPTV-DTT (digital terrestrial television) set-top box supporting Microsoft IPTV Edition with high-definition TV and digital video recorder functionality based on a chipset from Sigma Designs.
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Motorola Inc. has acquired Vertasent LLC, a developer of IPTV and HDTV software applications.

The move follows Motorola’s midsummer acquisition of Broadbus Technologies Inc., and indicates the degree Motorola intends to augment the customer-premises TV business of the former General Instrument Inc.

Vertasent (Colmar, Pa.) uses open programming standards at the core of its Integrated Resource Management suite, which allows control of live, video-on-demand and IPTV networks through common hardware. The software allows video programming to be streamed to various client devices in a networked home.
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Zhone Technologies and its partners Tut Systems and Amino Communications, will be unveiling high quality HDTV broadcast using MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) over xDSL as part of a working IPTV demonstration at IBC.

Zhone will feature its MALC Broadband Loop Carrier (BLC) access system for delivering enhanced IP services, including IPTV. Both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard definition and high definition video services will be demonstrated using ADSL2+, VDSL2 and Active Ethernet from a single MALC platform. High speed data and VoIP services will also be included as part of a triple play solution. Zhone will also show its high performance CPE products including ADSL2+ and VDSL2 routers and an Active Ethernet ONT to terminate services at the subscriber.

“The Telco industry has long awaited a practical implementation of HDTV over DSL using MPEG-4 compression”, commented Steve Klein, Director Video Solutions for Zhone Technologies. “Zhone is delighted to be among the first to publicly show a fully functional and working demonstration at IBC. The availability of MPEG-4 AVC compression of HDTV over IP alters the playing field in favor of telephone carriers who can now position IPTV over DSL against cable and satellite operators, who have used HDTV as a competitive weapon.”
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Internet HDTV: The Internet is about to deliver beautiful high-definition TV to your PC. Matrixstream of Vancouver, British Columbia, has introduced technology for streaming real-time, interactive HDTV signals to home computers over the public Internet.

Today’s PCs are more than capable of decoding and displaying both standard-definition TV (with a resolution of 480 pixels vertically and from 640 to 720 pixels horizontally) and high-definition TV (720 to 1,080 pixels vertically and 1,280 to 1,920 pixels horizontally). Indeed, media organizations have been using digital video processors and the Internet’s underlying communications standard to send TV signals over private networks for years — a practice called Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV.

Still, it may be hard to imagine the Web offering high-definition video, which has as many as 1,080 lines of vertical resolution, when sites like CNN.com and YouTube still deliver TV pictures at a measly 320 by 240 pixels of resolution. Delivering HDTV signals has always been the province of cable and satellite TV companies and over-the-air broadcasters, all of which own or license private, dedicated, high-bandwidth channels to get their shows into consumers’ living rooms.

The challenge is how to get high-definition TV signals into a computer, short of hooking it directly to a subscription cable line. One solution is to translate a TV signal into standard Internet Protocol packets — IPTV — and send it to homes via broadband Internet connections, which are increasingly common. As of March 2006, 42 percent of U.S. homes had broadband Internet connections via DSL or cable modems, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
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