IPTV

Jan 13 2009   1:18PM GMT

IPTV or Internet TV?

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Internet, IPTV, cable television, communications, CIO, Internet TV

When I selected IPTV for today’s Word of the Day, it was in response to seeing articles about iTV (Internet television) and assuming — silly me! — that it was the same thing.

Uh. No, as it turns out, they’re two competing delivery models. IPTV is like a replacement for cable TV and typically offered by the same carriers. And it isn’t always delivered over the Internet, as this Crash course in IPTV explains. However, I think I can say confidently that Internet TV is always delivered over the Internet. Robin Good explains the difference between Internet TV and IPTV in this post.

If this all seems unnecessarily complicated and difficult to untangle, maybe you should just wait. According to many Industry watchers, the two will eventually converge into a hybrid of some sort. What that will look like is still up in the air. Or will it be online?  

Aug 7 2008   4:31PM GMT

How you can watch the Olympics live online (and what sysadmins can do about it)

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Microsoft, media, Technology, Web services, video, YouTube, Internet, multimedia, useful, cool, free, feeds, event, resource, participation, wiki, IPTV, interactive media, streaming, howto, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, hacking, communications, Web applications, government

After years of buildup, the Olympics are about to kick off tomorrow in Beijing. As Shamus McGillicuddy reports, streaming Olympics video will drain corporate bandwidth. This year’s games are going to put substantial, perhaps even unprecedented, strain upon the Internet backbone. NBC plans to to stream more than 2,200 hours of live video coverage online.

CBS took a similar approach to “March Madness” this spring, streaming all 64 games of the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament.  Network administrators have similar challenges now in deciding where and whether to block users from accessing NBC.com, capping bandwidth use or engaging in a little proactive traffic shaping.

Personally, I like the suggestion made in Shamus’s story by Eileen Haggerty, director of product marketing with NetScout:

“An IT organization could set up a PC with a large-screen monitor in the office cafeteria that would run streaming video of the games. Instead of having 15 people sitting at their desks sucking up bandwidth individually, a savvy network administrator could bring all those people together to watch the Olympics during their break.”

Let’s assume for a moment, however, that you aren’t a bandwidth-conscious CTO and would like to be able to keep current on the standings in your favorite events or athletes. (Or that you believe setting up a few televisions is a handy low-tech hack.)

Thanks to Gina’s post on Lifehacker,Watch the Olympics Online, I found Wired’s excellent How-To Wiki for Watching the Olympics Online. (As you might expect, this link has been climbing the charts on the most popular page at delicious).

As the wiki notes, you can catch up to four different livestreams and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand at NBCOlympics.com.

World-wide, there also many other websites streaming Games footage:  CCTVOlympics.com in mainland China, BBC Sports in the U.K., Yahoo7 in Australia or CBC Olympics in Canada.

There’s a catch, however, to the livestreaming, on-demand video goodness: In most cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the footage on any site but NBC.

If you’re savvy enough to follow the advice at Metafilter by setting up a proxy server or using Anonymizer, you should be able to get around location restrictions.

It’s a cinch that the millions of broadcast viewers will be recording and uploading events to YouTube on their own, of course.  NBC has tried to get out in front of the inevitable wave by partnering with Google, with plans to provide 3 hours of highlights and wrap-ups to a dedicated channel onYouTube.

As the authors of the Wired wiki note (nice work, applian, apardoe, mosesofmason and snackfight!), BitTorrent is also an option for watching events after the fact, though P2P files sharing on your corporate network may land you in more hot water than simply streaming the video, given the various serious security risks involved.

What the wiki doesn’t note is what is lying under the hood over at NBCOlympics.com. NBC has partnered with MSN to stream the Olympics using Silverlight, in what will be far and away the biggest test for Microsoft’s alternative to Flash to date.

Anyone that wants to watch the Olympics will have to download and install the Silverlight plug-in, a process that certain to test out exactly how ready for “prime time” the technology is for streaming rich media online. Of special note is the fact that Silverlight encrypts a videostream, which will make recording the events considerably harder (if not impossible).

As a result, tech pundits, geeks and network executives will no doubt be watching the race to crack the streams and distribute unauthorized video nearly as closely as the games themselves.

Enjoy the Olympics!

May 16 2008   9:21AM GMT

Screencast: Learn how to watch video on Ubuntu

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Linux, applications, operating systems, video, multimedia, learning, freeware, screencast, IPTV, interactive media, howto, demonstration

This screencast from Ubuntu.com shows how to play media, like online movies and DVDs, in Hardy Heron and other versions of the Linux operating system.

Learn how to add codecs automatically, play video embedded in a browser and how to install a Flash Player plugin or the Miro video platform.

Apr 18 2008   9:16AM GMT

Video: Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Net neutrality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, video, YouTube, Internet, commentary, free, academics, IPTV, traffic, streaming, politics, controversy

You might remember this fellow — he invented the Web, after all. Sir Tim Berners-Lee offers some thoughts on the issue of Net neutrality in this video.

You can read Lee’s post on Net neutrality, which largely mirrors his statements on camera, over at his blog. You’ll note that the post and video date back to 2006, when the issue first entered a wider conversation online. These days, the U.S. presidential candidates have taken stances on it (Clinton and Obama are both for Net neutrality, McCain opposes it). Accusations of traffic shaping and the uglier-sounding “bandwidth throttling” are flying at ISPs like Comcast, sometimes justified and other times based upon mistaken conclusions.

We’ve asked you before — have you opinions changed? Private networks and corporations have good reason to restrict bandwidth to memory hogs like like IPTV. On-demand streaming of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament caused massive traffic spikes, for instance, resulted in massive traffic spikes. The security risks and bandwidth challenges presented by employee use of P2P networks like Bittorrent are an issue as well.

Once Internet use leaves the office, however, the question remains: Should ISPs be able to institute a two-tiered Internet for private citizens?

Let us know what you think in the comments or by writing in to editor@whatis.com.

Apr 7 2008   10:28AM GMT

Video: Oversi presents its overcache technology for P2P and video delivery

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, business, media, data, Technology, video, YouTube, Internet, IPTV, interactive media, streaming, demonstration

Oversi’s technology is designed to help companies deliver video over the Internet.

From the shownotes on YouTube:

This presentation shows how Oversi’s platform works; enabling service providers to manage the huge increase in traffic, enhance customer satisfaction and increase ARPU (average revenue per user). It also discusses the way that service providers can benefit from the new revenue streams of digital media, rather than be mere bandwidth conduits with no financial gain.

Jan 7 2008   12:29PM GMT

Bill Gates says farewell at CES: His potential, our passion. Our laughs, anyway.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Microsoft, news, software, Technology, video, culture, interesting, futurism, downloads, IPTV, gadgets, trend, humor, interface, geek

Last night, Bill Gates gave his swan song keynote at CES 2008. Before his speech, which as always enjoyed blanket coverage from the tech press, the outgoing chairman of Microsoft played a hilarious video.



(Thanks go to the Future Shop for the video.)

Gates was able to pull in celebrities from all walks of life to participate: Speilberg, Clooney, Bono, Hillary, Al Gore, Obama, Jay-Z and a particularly hilarious bit with Matthew McConaughey. Even you didn’t make it to CES, this one’s worth adding to your lunchtime video snacking. It turns out that Bill balances funny with brilliant, though not so much on a fitness ball.

Aside from the humor, Gates orated at length about the next “digital decade,” where we can expect vast improvements in hardware and software to drive media to places it’s never been, though he painted in broad strokes rather than introducing many specific products or services. He outlined three major themes : high definition displays with 3D, multiple devices always connected to Web-enabled services ( so-called “cloud computing,” a trend we and others are documenting) and the power of vastly improved natural interfaces. To that end, Gates managed to get through a successful demonstration of snowboard design software using the Surface I/O platform without a single crash, an improvement on past experiences. Gadget geeks, epitomized by the Engadget and Gizmodo crowd, took note of the Windows Mobile 7 (Photon) image that snuck into the presentation, promptly linking to leaked interface designs for the OS that might show up on an upcoming Palm/Treo handset.
It looks like the iPhone’s multitouch interface spurred Redmond to improve on the feature-laden but complex interface of Windows Mobile 6.

The nascent Silverlight platform also scored a big win, as Gates announced that MSN would be NBC’s exclusive online provider for the 2008 Olympics in Bejing. That means that if you want to watch the Olympics online, you’ll need to download the player and install it on your browser. Well, legally, anyway. I’d be shocked if NBC wasn’t chasing .torrent files around the Net or YouTube mashups. I had to install Silverlight to watch the slive last night, actually, with a few bumps along the way. Version 1.0 of anything always worries me. You can watch the entire Gates CES keynote here.

Nov 15 2007   9:11AM GMT

The IT Room: Streamingly funny IT humor coming to a tiny/medium/large screen near you

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Web 2.0, podcast, fun, video, new media, blog, culture, free, feeds, social publishing, downloads, IPTV, community, interactive media, buzz, humor, Dell, geek

Thank to its ubiquitous advertising spots on BoingBoingTV, I’ve discovered the IT Room. Clearly, I’m part of the target audience of this new take on tech support humor, ’cause I found the trailers and initial 4:22 minute webisode (embedded below) hilarious.

Download link

If you like it, you can watch it online or subscribe with iTunes or RSS – or even via email. Folks, we’ve left the old ways of watching TV in our living rooms at a set time far, far behind.

The IT Room has ambitions to be more than just a series of webisodes created by Motiv Studios, written by a group of writers in a snark-laden conference room. The producers want the audience of IT geeks (and perhaps a few end users) to submit their own IT horror stories, which they can then use to create further episodes.

Is it a way of dodging the ongoing writer’s strike? Perhaps. We’ve had some luck with getting users to submit their own IT bloopers in the past, though we haven’t assembled a crack comedy team to make them into video shorts quite yet. The monkey promises to give the best written IT horror story a Dell Latitude, so there’s some extra incentive in there, too. The site gathers submissions in a transparent and decidedly techie way — you contribute the story as a blog post, visible to all.

Cleverly, there’s a Digg button next to each post, a move that the rather more old media Wall Street Journal just made as well, leading to wide spread speculation that Murdoch might be interested in acquiring the social news site. (That move also allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the WSJ’s content on Digg– neat!)

The cynic in me notes that Motiv works on marketing programs for Dell, though this is obviously more than just extended commercials. There’s no Dude getting me a Dell (instead, he’s offering me a pint), happily, but until I see a battery meltdown or a frustrating tech support mobisode focused on relentlessly calm Indian associates offering scripted responses, I’ll be a tad suspicious…. even as I snarf my coffee a bit when I tune in.

Oct 4 2007   10:05AM GMT

IPTV update: Free classes from UCBerkeley on YouTube; BoingBoing goes to online video

Posted by: Alexander Howard
fun, video, new media, Internet, podcasting, multimedia, blog, cool, culture, college, courses, free, academics, public domain, resource, IPTV, gadgets, information, humor

As reported by the AFP, the University of California at Berkeley has created a dedicated channel on YouTube for more than 300 hours of classes and events. Videos include peace and conflicts studies, bioengineering and “Physics for Future Presidents,” though I wonder how much that last is a dig at former or current POTUSes. Given that Berkeley s a famously liberal institution, you can draw your own conclusions. You can find the courses at http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Tech fans may find gems like “SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life,” with Google’s Sergey Brin, to be of particular interest:

If that doesn’t meet your bar for online video goodness, you might try BoingBoing TV, a new IPTV feature hosted by cybergoddess Xeni Jardin and BoingBoing’s co-creator, Mark Frauenfelder.
The 3-5 minute segments will also feature cyberpunk author and digital copyright maven Cory Doctorow and gadgets editor Joel Johnson. The debut episodes featurethe usual mix of pop ephemera and geeky art, including a piece on Listography.com, an remix of an industrial movie from the 1960s and a robot covering Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

All Things Weird and Wonderful, here I come.

Apr 23 2007   3:24PM GMT

Democracy Player: An easier way to watch IPTV, video podcasts, .torrents and more

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Web 2.0, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, podcasting, innovation, aggregator, cool, feeds, portal, interesting, downloads, IPTV, interactive media, blogging, RSS, directory

Democracy Player is a free, open source IPTV platform. That may sound a bit vanilla, but Wired Magazine called it “the future of Net video.” Though the vlogosphere may still be in its infancy, the explosion of Internet video over the past two years has made it challenging for even the savviest netizens to keep abreast of new feeds and shows.

Using Democracy, a user can search within YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and others video aggregators. Democracy also works as a BitTorrent client, so users can search, download and watch torrents from within the same interface. The application plays most video formats, including Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI and XVID.
In fact, the Democracy platform’s engineers state that they have created a new approach to building a cross-platform application using open source technologies like Mozilla, XUL Runner, VLC and Python. The player runs on OS X, Windows XP/2000, Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian platforms.

The code for the Democracy platform is released under the GPL by the Participatory Culture Foundation , a 501c3 non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Using the fluid GUI, you can subscribe to more than 1000 video RSS feeds using a built-in channel guide. Popular vlogs like Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja and Ze Frank sit next to lesser-known vloggers, geeky screencasts, MSM netcasts, independent warvloggers and YouTube auteurs. While both Google Reader and of course iTunes can be configured quite easily to subcribe to video Web feeds, Democracy has a number of alluring features.

For instance, the Democracy player supports full screen playback, including HD support for those lucky enough to have a PC hooked up to a HD screen, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. GetDemocracy.com, where Democracy is available for free download, has been translated into more than 18.

Apr 11 2007   2:37PM GMT

Current.tv: The first 24-hour network based around viewer-created content.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
video, new media, IPTV, Channel, webcast, network, interactive media

Like YouTube, Current.tv features videos created by users and uploaded to their distribution platform on the Web. They call them “viewer-created content” but that difference is only semantic, especially considering that of the short programs called “pods” that make up the bulk of programming, an estimated 30% are created by viewers and users.

Unlike YouTube, Current.tv organizes the content into a single channel, with short to medium-length programming includes spots from of Google. Current.tv isn’t just on the Web, either; the channel went live in 2005 on most major domestic U.S. cable networks, including Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, DirectTV and Dish Network.

The cable television network is run by Current TV, an independent media company led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt. A second network was launched in the spring of 2007 in the United Kingdom and Ireland for Sky and Virgin Media subscribers. There’s an official Current blog that about noteworthy content that’s worth a look as well.