Somedays when he is not being a Cranky Geek, John Dvorak comes up with good stuff. Today he points to HolerSoft, a French company that has come-up with a Windows-only application that allows you to watch 1200 channels from around the world on your PC. “The cable companies should consider the Holersoft announcement as a shot over the bow and begin to rethink their business model, fast,” he quips. Of course, while the broadband players dither, there are other options. John points to Channel Chooser, which has a few hundred channels. Now we know, if Jeff Pulver reads this post, he is going to be late for the VoN show next week.
Why do you think cablecos and telcos with fiber are so reticent to offer higher speeds at reasonable prices? IP wwitching gear is dirt cheap. They want to make money off of broadcast-style TV and they know that offering decent speeds opens the door for 3rd party IPTV. One of the main reasons they want tiering is to be able to advertise 20+ Mbps service and still throttle competing services that could take advantage of this speed down to dial-up levels.
There’s another one out there that I found while trying to watch World Cup at work – the app is called TVU, available at viidoo.com. Its Peer-to-Peer television. I frequently use it to watch CNN and ESPN at work, and the quality is very decent.
I’m currently at the IBC conference in Amsterdam – and there is one specific group of people that’s walking the halls with a worried look on their face – The broadcasters. One main thing is evident – TV is never going to look the same, and it seems they are starting to move (albeit slowly). As opposed to previous years – IPTV has now passed the “announcement” stage, and starting to go into the deployment stage – but there will be many challanges along the way before we see it as reality. (BTW, It seems that Mobile broadcast (i.e. DVB-H, etc) will be here much sooner… ), and openess to the external Internet TV world is definately a threat.
If you look at what Free Internet TV actually offers some of those “channels” are actually programmes and some are no longer broadcast. So I’m puzzled at the reference to them and at the idea cable companies fear this – most cable companies I know don’t see the redistribution of terrestrial TV channels as their future business – they’re looking at a range of UCG “applications”, facilitating personal TV and taking the eyeball back from computers. There are also channel aggregators out there part of the same landgrab as Free internet TV.
Unfortunatly most of the 1200 “free” channels, available in broadband on those site, are mostly junk and/or almost always in foreign language. So, in my opinion, those are not a threat for the traditional cable companies. there are few other sites similar to channelchooser or narrowstep, the first that comes to my mind is ” streamick.com “,where there’s a selection of american broadband tv stations submitted and voted by users, in order to get at least the decent ones. but again, I don’t see free internet tv being a leader yet either, both for the quality of the signal and for the poor quality of contents (unless some big company or network join the game).