Some thoughts on IP-TV

Since I'm the luddite (or one of them at any rate) being called out by Howard regarding SBC's Lightspeed project (a triple play; voice, data and video all wrapped up in one service) I decided I should at least speak up and defend myself.

Time shifting is a wonderful thing and I'll admit to not knowing it as well as perhaps I should, but I don't see live TV as ever fully going away. A presidential press conference (or maybe just the state of the union address), live sporting events and the really popular programming can set their own time schedules and lot of people will watch them as they happen. When a major event happens, people are going to want to watch live, and record another channel (or maybe more than one... who wouldn't love to have multiple tuners?) and converse with one another online (perhaps even trading spippets of things they saw).

I just can't see how this works out when we're talking about a service which is going to cost $99 per month and deliver one HD channel (or four SD channels) with a 1 Mbps data channel to 5,000 feet. Given that I'm almost 11,000 feet from the CO, I'm even more dubious, but that's my problem.

Today (not two years from now), my relatively crummy cable company will allow me to pull one HD feed while recording another on each of the two boxes in the house while also allowing as many SD live feeds (on the channels not protected by the box) as I might wish to capture or view and a 3 Mbps downstream data connection.

If we use the numbers from the most recent analysis I've seen in DSL Prime that would require 46.5 Mbps [(4 x 9.3 Mbps) + (3 x 2.1Mbps) + 3Mbps]. That's just not happening over DSL and yet somehow SBC thinks they can compete against the cable companies this way.

Verizon's FTTH is at least a better prospect (I don't care if it's to the curb or even the sewer line, I'll pay for the last 50 feet if needed, I've already done it once). As David Isen mentioned (more here), Verizon may be making a mistake (PON versus Gigabit PON), but either way their approach seems a lot more forward thinking that hoping everyone in the US will move closer to the CO's and squeezing every last dime out of the copper already in place.

Is IP video coming? Yes! Is SBC going to be the one who delivers it? I don't think so, at least not in a way that's going to make people a lot of money. As Dave Burstein pointed out back in November the smart money thinks fiber is the way to go. When you've got all the video you can eat along with your voice data and 10 to 50 Mbps of headroom left over, then you'll see the true next generation applications happen. What those will be is anyone's guess but it should be fun if we ever get there.