Sling TiVO and IPTV

At Spring 2006 VON in San Jose, CA this week, Jeff Pulver and Sling Media got together and offered free Slingboxes to the participants of the show. Aside from the obvious waves a $249 product for free makes, the intent was to usher in the age of IPTV with much fanfare. While ahead of the curve as Jeff Pulver always seems to be, I think the Slingbox combined with a TiVo gets more to the heart of what IPTV is going to be than what most of the people at the show seem to be talking about.

Everybody always seems to think of IPTV as something that will replace broadcast. Given the strengths and weaknesses of the Internet medium, I don’t see that at all. Sure anyone can have their own TV station on the Internet, but as Christine mentions in her coverage of an IPTV session at VON, it’s all about bandwidth! Being a major broadcaster means almost infinite bandwidth. Overlaying the one to many broadcast model over the Internet medium is just crazy. It’s not going to work without system-wide changes on the protocol level such as the mbone system proposed years ago. And a change like that is just not going to happen.

Now the strengths of the Internet medium are in it’s 1 to 1 broadcast capability. Just like TiVo, my show should start when I want to watch it, not “when it’s on” like it is on TV. I think the Slingbox tied with a TiVO is probably one of the best examples of the way IPTV will eventually manifest itself. I’ve been listening to Jeff Pulver talk about watching shows from his Slingbox in New York while on a flight somewhere over the Middle East though I’ll admit I didn’t see the true usefulness in the Slingbox till he gave me one! But there is still a missing component.

I think the dawn of IPTV will come simply when the roadblock of bandwidth gets taken away. And I see that happening when a solution arises where P2P (Peer to Peer) networking like BitTorrent is rolled into one easy to use 2-way TV application. Anyone can broadcast and anyone can watch. But not everyone can pay the massive bandwidth bill, so make the price to watch be some upload bandwidth. Then everyone watching becomes a source of bandwidth and the scale issue is solved!

Thinking of IPTV as a replacement for broadcast TV is a bad idea. Think of IPTV as a big P2P network where anyone can create content and anyone can watch whenever they like as long as they donate bandwidth. Until some application comes out that somehow combines TV viewing with P2P distribution, I think IPTV will remain a holy grail.

(Thanks for the Slingbox, Jeff!)

Comments (2)

Anders from RTP

Actually, if you think about it, Apple is perfectly positioned to do this. iTunes could easily be turned into a mass P2P platform to distribute large content files like movies and TV shows. All they need to do is put it in the next version and require it's download to be able to watch movies.

Whatever it is, though, it has to be 2 way. Content users have to be able to be content creators as well. Apple including Podcasts in iTunes was half the battle. Software that creates and hosts podcasts is the other half. Hopefully they won't make that mistake with movies. The 2-way web is so much better than the read-only one way web.

Anders from RTP

This is interesting, MacOS Rumors is running a story where a system similar to what I suggested above back in March will actually be part of Apple's next release of OS X. Apparently they are creating an encrypted P2P network in the OS. If you enable it and let Apple use your idle bandwidth, you get sharing points possibly redeemable for iTunes credit or free minutes on the much rumored iPhone cell phone.

It might make more sense to make it part of iTunes instead because then you get a far larger base of users (Windows users mostly) but the logic must be to keep it in the OS so nodes are more reliable. Operating systems are usually run longer than the iTunes application.

http://macosrumors.com/20060429A.php