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Television Media The Internet Technology

Local Internet TV Takes Off In Austria 110

Posted by Zonk from the has-to-be-better-than-fox dept.
Cyrus writes "The BBC reports on an Austrian village that is testing technology which could represent the future of television. The pilot has been so successful that Telekom Austria is now considering setting up other projects elsewhere." From the article: "The hardware and software to turn video footage into edited programmes has been provided by Telekom Austria but this equipment, following training, has been turned over to the villagers. Any video programme created by the villagers is uploaded to a Buntes Fernsehen portal that lets people browse and download what they want to watch. "
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Local Internet TV Takes Off In Austria More

Local Internet TV Takes Off In Austria

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  • Select titles: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Saturday March 26, 2005 @08:52PM (#12057242)
    • Betty Milks her calf... naked.
    • Village Girls Gone Wild! Volume XII
    • Down Under.

  • I can see the benefit... no wait.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sveiki_neliels ( 870930 ) on Saturday March 26, 2005 @08:53PM (#12057255) Homepage

    I can see the benefits possible with on-demand television. Downloading what you want to watch and watching it. The idea has been proposed before and is not really new.

    What seems to be new here is the local production and upload of television programmes. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I don't see this being adopted worldwide. Consider something like this being implemented in a large city. Not only would you possibly now have thousands of options to download in varying degrees of insanely crappy quality, but I'm sure you'd also fill up these "portals" with tons of crap uploaded by people thinking they are doing a public service.

    Unfortunately, if this kind of idea takes off, we wouldn't be able to just limit it to places that need it, like rural areas that otherwise don't have their own coverage. I'm no fan of the news media industry, but there is a reason people go to school for journalism and don't become newscasters simply by living in an area where news is made.

    • Downloading what you want to watch and watching it. The idea has been proposed before and is not really new.

      What's new is the fact it's being done. Had they said "this is old stuff, it's been suggested before" about landing on the moon, no-one would have been excited when America did it. Yes, America was the first to do it, but they weren't the first to suggest it.

    • Re:I can see the benefit... no wait.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "There is a reason people go to school for journalism and don't become newscasters simply by living in an area where news is made."

      As a former journalist, editor I can tell you this: going to school of journalism does not make you a journalist. I helped several talented people to become journalists, although they did not take any formal education in that field. It's more like writers, actors, painters, singers: you are either gifted or not. Obviously, being gifted is just the beginning, you need to learn
    • Sure there would be a huge amount of drek produced. But that's whay reviews and ratings are for, because you know there are thousands of people that really DO have the time to scan through every single crappy show ever made on such a system to rate them.

      • there are thousands of people that really DO have the time to scan through every single crappy show ever made on such a system to rate them.

        The only problem with that is... I really don't think I'd fully trust ratings made by people who have nothing better to do all day long but sift through the inane drivel that our society would produce if given free rein.

        I don't think one could live through it with a sense of taste (among other things) intact.

    • there is a reason people go to school for journalism
      exibit A Slashdot Editors.

      Just kidding. This is why Moderation would be key. See, there about a million other people who have said stuff like this about other mediums (photography, written news, etc). Given, Video is HARD, but so was photgraphy until about 1970. Will it replace ALL Pro's? Obviously not. But if the tech is there people will do it as a hobby. (see news people with degrees working for shit jobs at crapy local stations for next to no money, i

    • Re:I can see the benefit... no wait.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by interiot ( 50685 ) on Saturday March 26, 2005 @10:25PM (#12057699) Homepage
      Are you trolling, or not?

      It seems obvious that there are very direct analogies to the current text/audio portions of the internet. Yes, anybody can put up a crappy site or post inane babble on their blog. However, if you post good stuff all the time, a lot of people will watch you often. If you post good stuff once in a while, then the top-dog people will link to your best stuff, and people will still be interested in what you do.

      Also, while there are professional journalists, who write stuff on websites that have millions invested in them, there are still a decent percentage of urban people who realize that this means there's a much smaller pool of talent to draw from, and it's beholden to advertising interests, and so sometimes people even actually PREFER the grass-roots stuff over professional/mainstream journalism.

  • It'll never work in the U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 26, 2005 @08:53PM (#12057257)
    This will be outlawed in the US faster than you can imagine. The Republicans and the Democrats have already been bought out by the various conglomerates (**COUGH** Disney **COUGH**) for copyright extention, I can't imaging them allowing something like this to flourish. They'll say it smacks of Communism or something.

  • Hey this could be fun! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Com2Kid ( 142006 ) <com2kidSPAMLESS@gmail.com> on Saturday March 26, 2005 @08:56PM (#12057274) Homepage Journal
    Take a valid indie video stream, encode pirated data stream inside of it, hey, instant government sponsered w@rez trading!

    granted the large file sizes would make this somewhat problamatic, but hey, the servers are paid for, and I assume the server's bandwidth is too, and over modern broadband (500KB/s to 1MB/s), downloading even a 1gb release for 500 or so MB of data isn't too bad if you save time by not having to crawl all over the internet trying to find the file in the first place!
    • Yeah, but if it's really local... You could just walk to your neighbor and ask burn a copy... Costs you five minutes and maybe he'll give u a beer ;)

    • Re:Hey this could be fun! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What is wrong with you? Here is an example of people working for a little decentralization of their media, perhaps in an effort to lessen their reliance on a bloated, politically and economically motivated old guard, and all you can think of is a trading channel for Warez? Get some perspective, man!
      • all you can think of is a trading channel for Warez? Get some perspective, man!

        Exactly! They could encode some pron into it instead. "No honey, I'm not downloading porn. I'm just downloading the 6:00 news."

  • Did you notice? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by LokieLizzy ( 858962 )
    There wasn't a mention of BitTorrent anywhere in the article. Despite the naysayers, it *is* possible to synergize television and the internet (and the subsequent distributions of tv programs) *without* using BT. I found that rather interesting.
    • Yes, it is possible for a village of 8,000 to broadcast TV on demand to everyone worrying much about the distribution infrastructure.

      Just wait until their little village TV server gets Slashdotted.
    • that's not to say that it wouldn't be more efficient using it.
    • 1) Don't say "synergize", it makes geeks cringe. 2) Yes, it's possible, by funding a huge amount of unicast bandwidth. However, that seems easier for this project because they're all in a small geographic area (a town of 8000), and the project in general has a lot of funding for professional video equipment and such, so some of those funds are undoubtedly going for bandwidth as well.
      • Also, it may be pay-for-play as well, which is an obvious and uninteresting/undesirable alternative to BitTorrent:
        • The Engerwitzdorf scheme is an outgrowth of Telekom Austria's online TV channel Aon which lets people watch programmes on their PC.

        • Aon ... has a pay-for-download section that lets people watch what they want when they want to watch it.

      • Haha. Yeah, I didn't want to say Synergize either (believe me, I've read the Dilberts and I've seen Office Space), but, ironically, it was the only word I could think of when I made the post :^)
    • Despite the naysayers, it *is* possible to synergize television and the internet (and the subsequent distributions of tv programs) *without* using BT.

      Yeah, but consider the bandwidth required as the number of viewers increases. Consider a situtation with ten thousand simultaneous downloads. That's a situation that could easily occur if you were distributing a new episode of a popular television program. Without BT, your poor server(s) must distribute 10,000 copies of a single file. Let's say it's an hour-

  • So Essentially... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BuddyJesus ( 835123 )
    they've just made Public Access Television: Internet Edition
    What good is it? Face it, because it's made by a local village, and unless said village is home to TV broadcast crews, it's essentially PAT on the internet. I don't see why anyone would care.

  • the catch. (Score:4, Informative)

    by virtualone ( 768392 ) on Saturday March 26, 2005 @09:07PM (#12057338)
    there is a big problem with this whole issue: under their current pricing scheme, it it impossible to watch more than 1 hour of tv per month.
    they charge about 5 cent per MB for downloads above their limit of 1 GB/month.
    if they would introduce a fair pricing scheme, some people would be able to use broadband technology is a meaningful way.
    in austria, alternative providers are only slowly gaining ground.

    • Re:the catch. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      in austria, alternative providers are only slowly gaining ground.

      Not quite true. I've been using chello (in Innsbruck/Austria) for nearly 5 years now, and transmit between 20 and 100 GB per month (don't ask ;)). So, viable alternative providers have been around for a long time, at least in the "bigger" cities.

    • in austria, alternative providers are only slowly gaining ground.

      What he means is that in really small towns and rural areas there's no alternative to Telekom Austria if you want *broadband* access. Many places do, of course, have one or several alternative broadband ISPs.
    • I suppose Telekom Austria will eventually exempt traffic for their web TV services from the monthly limit, as it is within their network. They could distribute it to a number of servers across the country first and then distribute it locally to clients. I read that this has been done by webfreetv.com during the dotcom bubble (they were producing web TV for the masses, but are now pursuing a different business model).

      happy easter!

      • I suppose Telekom Austria will eventually exempt traffic for their web TV services from the monthly limit, as it is within their network.

        This does make perfect sense, since Telekom Austria's measly bandwidth allowance is probably related to their costs for trans-Atlantic bandwidth.

        But on the other hand, this would amount to charging "long distance" on the Internet - one rate for local connections, and a higher rate for everywhere else. Is that a can of worms we want to open?

        • If you like to compare it to the phone system...
          I think it would rather be like charging nothing for calls to the phone provider's hotline than "long distance" versus local. It would certainly put Aon TV at an advantage over other web TV services. I don't know where they meter the traffic-maybe it is even easier not to charge for web TV content if it is distributed in the way I outlined.

          I can't say whether the costly bottleneck is the transatlantic connection or the regional connections. If they run a re

    • (Disclaimer I work on Buntes Fernsehen - whow saying that on slashdot feels nice =)

      The download from aon.tv and buntesfernsehen.tv don't add to the trafic count. So you can watch as much Buntes Fernsehen as you like ... if you like seeing the people you see every day for hours at home. And now there isn't even a monthly fee for Buntes Fernsehen itself.

      b4n

  • Adverts (Score:2, Funny)

    by rescendent ( 870007 )
    Do they come with adverts as well or are they an optional add in? Perhaps you could even choose the type of ads you want to interupt your programs...
  • awesome.
  • If other companies would follow this example, perhaps WKNO (Public US Broadcast station) would start offering their content for immediate online review or download, and perhaps start forcing other megaconglomerate companies to start offering some other similar-in-quality shows for their dedicated people. And if it's offered for download, for free, at anytime, technically (Please correct me if I am wrong) But once offered for public consumption, it should remain in public domain, correct? Can't sue me for ha

  • goooood morning Austria! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (ok, so it's 08:35 here in Austria (we just switched to that awful DST some hours ago), we celebrated the fact that some cool guy who was dead suddenly left his grave, and I'm really tired, so excuse me if what I say doesn't make much sense.)

    Things you should know, before cheering about this "empowerment of the public" et c.:

    "Telekom Austria" is our telecommunication monopolist. Since about 10 years there are competitors, but they don't stand a chance. The dinosaur "Terrorkom" has much more money for ads,
    • The Aon stuff is not part of the monopoly. Many other offer broadband access.

      It's the job of every corporation to make money. So that can't be used as a defintion for good or bad.

      Yes the news aren't the best. But as you can't spell the name you aren't reading it anyway.

      b4n

  • How is this going to be much use in the USA... Won't the pictures be upside down?

    This is the sig of sig's - so go ahead and crucify it.... please.

  • called HomeChoice.They provide Delayed TV and Movies on Demand.

    However the real thing will be Aunty Beeb's program download service which may launch end of this year.

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