Video On Demand Almost Here For San Franciscans

BeatlesForum.com writes: "Looks like San Francisco-area folks could be in for a taste of video when you want it, according to this article from Reuters. The article mentions that we will be able to start and stop the on-demand stream whenever we want. Kinda sounds like TiVo now, except you still have to fit around the broadcast schedule. Interesting statistic quoted from the article, though: it is expected that 5.5 million homes will have VOD by the end of the year. Imagine being able to pull up 2001: A Space Odyssey at 2:38 a.m.."

Yes it's excellent....

[Lumpy]

And it's all brought to you by AT&.... oh wait... Comcast.

Really cool stuff. I've played with the motorola DCT that does this for 30 days now. and it is really cool.

Orlando...

[cirby]

Supposedly, we're getting VOD on Time Warner cable this spring. Some areas had it here about five years back, in the big experiment that Time-Warner ran. Movies on demand, news on demand, restaurant reviews on demand (all through streaming video). I worked in the control room for the local production arm, and it was a pain in the ass (we had a dedicated video compression rig based on a Sun workstation).

The server farm was a large room full of SGI hardware. They said it was the biggest data storage center in the southeast (lots of terabytes involved when you start serving movies). At least, until they gave up on the test and sold it all at auction...

VOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I work for a major cable company on VOD, and I'd like to clear up some issues you guys are talking about...
1. Price. VOD is simalar to PPV. expect to see movies costing about $3.00 (more for porn) you have the movie for 24 hours, and can stop rewind, fast forward, and watch it as many times as you'de like in 24 hours.
2. Quality. Digital cable picture quality is really really good. bit rates run about 3.5-4.5 Mb/s. this is just about where the average bit rate of a DVD falls (although DVDs peak higher) Now, if you operator's plant is fucked, your picture quality will suffer... I've seen AT&T systems that macroblock constantly.
3. Advertizing. its like PPV. content providers get a cut everytime a movie is watched. (same with the operator) avertizing never even enters the picture.
4. Content. currently the plan is to roll out servers near the customer with commonly viewed content, and less requested content will sit in a main library. whjen obscure stuff is requested it streems to the systems near the consumers, and then played out. ive seen systems right now with 500 titles. HBO is about to provide their content soon. Sapranos any time you want.
5. Porn. porn far and away is the biggest money maker.

Why does it have to be in real time?

[netringer]

There's one thing I've alway though about: If the program is going from source to storage and not being viewed why does the video feed have too be in real time? Why can't you say double the bandwidth going to your TiVo and halve the transmission time? Send a two hour movie in one hour. Or send it 4x in 1/4 of the time.

I've always thought it was waste to have all those fringe shopping and infomercial feeds and TV preachers tying up a whole satellite channel for so long.

How about it?

Don't get you hopes up (yet)...

[jschmerge]

I work in the ITV industry and I have to say that this will not happen overnight. Most digital cable plants out there broadcast over a 27 Mbit pipe. This pipe is not wide enough to accomodate more than a couple of channels of really low quality VOD (they lower the quality of the mpeg compression to accomodate the bandwidth).

In order for most cable plants to offer true high quality video on demand with more selections than this, they have to upgrade everything from the equipment in the cable plant to the wire running into your home. Given the speed at which Cable Companies change the technology that they use, I give this five to ten years before we actually see it.

Sorry to burst everyone's bubble.