HDTV Reviews

BT Vision IPTV Video on Demand service will be based on Microsoft TV’s IPTV Edition middleware, on Philips custom digital terrestrial/ IPTV set-top boxes with an 80Gb capacity.

BT will offer Freeview service via the DTT reciver and Video on demand content will be on a pau-per-view basis. The box will be conbined with the BT Home Hub to enable more services such as VOIP.

BT has also partnered with Octagon CSI who produce sports programming and will see a development of content for TV, mobile, and broadband. Octagon produce and distribute content for the English FA, Coca-Cola Football League, and the England and Wales Cricket Board. It’s hailed as another step towards BT becoming the heart of digital media.

The box is free, but customers will need to pay a £30 connection fee and £60 engineer installation fee.
Films start at £1.99 while Replay TV content is available from 99p per episode. Customers can also take out a monthly TV subscription package for £6 a month, Replay TV for £3 and Music Videos for £6.

CFO Rick Lindner touched on the progress of “Project Lightspeed“, and the company’s “U-Verse” IPTV service. AT&T is currently only marketing the upgrades to some 6,200 homes, and 10% of them have signed up for service.

Lindner also touched on the company’s HD-schedule briefly: “The major milestone that is front of us yet is completion of the testing and approval of the next software upgrade and the final set-top boxes which will give us HDTV capability.” Fitting quality multiple HD streams on an already limited VDSL pipe has been the primary concern of many analysts when it comes to AT&T’s plan. Some believe AT&T will embrace FTTH before long.

Soon to be acquired BellSouth had slated their IPTV service launch for late 2006 or early 2007, and intended to deploy fiber within 5,000 feet of 50% of their customers by 2007 (at an average cost of $150 per home). Both AT&T and BellSouth plan to use Microsoft set-top software and MPEG-4 compression for IPTV over VDSL or better.

Meanwhile one of the telco giant’s future competitors in the HD space, DirecTV, has yet again delayed its MPEG-4 based HD-DVR. Forbes today noticed the delay; which has been the talk of Internet message boards for more than a month now. DirecTV does currently offer a Tivo based MPEG-2 HD-DVR.

Europe’s first high definition Internet TV service went live in the Netherlands during the FIFA World Cup.

IPTV set-top box firm Amino has been selected by Lijbrandt Telecom BV to supply its STBs for the first ever high definition (HD) IPTV service in Northern Europe.

The service was rolled-out in time for World Cup football matches and as well as HDTV, the service will also offer triple-play functions such as Internet access, TV and telephone services via a broadband connection.

Lijbrandt has created a network for this service with investment of €150-200m. It hopes to have 120,000 subscribers within three years.

“With World Cup matches attracting the interest they do, it was a great time to be able to roll out our service,” said Niels Jonkman for Lijbrandt Telecom.

Lijbrandt’s service shows more than fifty channels, three of which are currently in HD (including World Cup coverage). However, this Autumn, the BBC will provide three more channels – The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and the National Geographic channels, all in HD.
Read more

We’ve already got TV via broadcast, cable, and satellite, but now the phone companies are elbowing their way into the mix as well. AT&T is planning to expand its Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, network, which delivers TV signals via a broadband connection along with standard Internet service. The upshot is a virtually limitless number of channels with on-demand and DVR-style features. One issue still being resolved is HDTV, which gobbles up huge chunks of bandwidth. Instead of relying on expensive fiber-optic cable strung right into peoples’ homes, Verizon’s FiOS service, AT&T’s IPTV network relies on compressing signals over existing phone lines, which may not be enough to offer reliable high-definition streams. Read more

Siemens set-top boxes deliver HDTV quality to the screen.

Siemens Home and Office Communication Devices is presenting a family of IP set-top boxes (IP STBs) for digital television over the Internet (IPTV). The devices also enable many other applications, such as video on demand, time-shift TV or surfing in the Internet. Both Gigaset IP STBs support high-definition television (HDTV), thanks to new compression standards such as H.264.

The greater compression of video data thanks to standards such as H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) and VC-1 reduces the bandwidth required for transmitting data and optimizes utilization of network capacity – something that is necessary for transporting broadband-hungry services such as HDTV over the existing network infrastructure. The conventional standard format can also be received.

The Gigaset HD360 IP and 860 IP are designed on the “system on a chip” concept, in which all the main components of the IP set-top boxes – including the main processor, video and audio decoding units and peripheral components – are integrated on a single chip.

A hard disk with a capacity of up to 250 GBytes, a smart card reader or two DVB tuners can also be built into the Gigaset HD860 IP. This creates a Read more

Envivio is shipping 4Caster HD3, a real time, high definition (HD) encoding system. It provides video at a flexible range of target bit rates between 6 and 12 Mbps.

The system compresses content for immediate distribution to air or can save files to an onboard hard drive for VOD (video on demand) content creation. 4Caster HD3 implements advanced MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 features, enabling telcos to deploy HDTV on their existing network infrastructure. The constant bit rate (CBR) implementation maintains the steady stream rates required for efficient video delivery over IPTV networks, according to the folks at Envivio. The system also provides capped variable bit rate (VBR) encoding for multi-channel broadcast applications.

4Caster HD3 supports the Pure IP transport mechanism, a structure for video over IP applications. It also supports MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) over IP for integration with traditional infrastructures. 4Caster HD3 also features a one rack unit (1RU) form factor, remote web-based system control, and compression support for 720p and 1080i broadcast content.

Even before subscribers could grasp what triple-play convergence was all about, it morphed into quad-play but, spare me a byte, isn’t it multi-play now? Nowhere is technological transformation as rapid as it is in telecommunications, with service providers facing the challenge of embracing the change to enhance revenues and engineer growth.

Triple-play services fundamentally spin around voice, data and video offerings in convergent packages that include high-speed Internet, telephone and TV, with quad-play getting that extra punch through mobile telephony. But in an environment where challenges multiply and technology keeps pace with it, even quad-play is too limiting a description. Hence came the all-encompassing term of multi-play, spanning multiple converged permutations within the three key areas of communication. This gives broadband subscribers the ability to receive a suite of services with only a single connection.

IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), though still in its infancy, is at the heart of this evolution, leveraging broadband connections to deliver a range of video services such as high-definition TV (HDTV) and video-on-demand (VoD).In a nutshell, with IPTV, broadband subscribers will be able to receive high-quality content on their television sets using a set-top box with the Internet Protocol (IP) serving as the transmission mechanism.

Clearly, consumer entertainment is a strategic component of this multi-play bundle. Video over broadband is the engine that is set to power growth for telephone service providers, applying pressure on cable and satellite TV operators to revisit their strategies and get inventive. But it is not all about movies as IPTV possibilities are endless and can involve a slew of high-quality digital content — video conferencing/streaming, live/interactive TV, digital video recording, HDTV, gaming, video-based distance learning, video-blogging, instant messaging from the TV and what not!
Read more