“We have every movie ever made, in every language, anytime, day or night”
- J. Walter Thompson
Walt Disney has introduced a pay tv system to deliver high-definition films to U.S. homes utilizing public television spectrum. Moviebeam uses ABC broadcast affiliates and the National Datacast Network, which was established in 1988 as a for-profit subsidiary of the Public Broadcasting Service.
MovieBeam says it plans to offer first-run films from six of the seven film studios in standard digital-video format and high-definition films from Disney and Warner Brothers.The video-on-demand service is aimed at heavy movie renters and initially will be offered in 29 U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, at prices competitive with renting the same movie at video retailer Blockbuster. Nevermind the string of datacasting failures.
MovieBeam was founded by Walt Disney four years ago, but appeared to have run out of steam when Disney took a $24 million write-down on the company last summer, reports Reuters. It was revived last month with a $48.5 million cash infusion from Intel, Disney, Cisco and three venture capital firms.
MovieBeam “datacasts,” up to 10 new movies a week to subscribers using an exclusive transmission deal to send data signals over the Public Broadcasting System network. It’s similar to the U.S. Digital Television (USDTV) system which also uses datacasting to deliver a “no frills” $19.95/month digital TV service to markets such as Norfolk/Hampton Roads, Va.; Dallas/Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque and Las Vegas. Datacasting can use 6 lines in the Vertical Blanking Interval, a full channel, or parts of it.
MovieBeam settop boxes will carry Cisco’s Linksys consumer electronics label and be sold through U.S. electronics retailers Best Buy, CompUSA and Sears. It will have a capacity for 100 movies, and will be priced at around $200, after a rebate, and a $29 activation fee.
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| “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box.”
- Edward R. Murrow, 1951
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First-run standard format videos will rent for $3.99 and high-definition videos rent for $4.99. Older movies in the catalog cost $1.99 for standard format and $2.99 for high- definition — roughly in line with rates at video stores.
“If you’re somebody who rents an awful lot of movies, this is potentially attractive,” Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff said. “But, for the great mass of the movie viewing public, getting a separate set-top box just to get movies is an awfully big stretch.”
Not mentioned by the press release is what will happen to PBS and ABC video programming when their spectrum is taken out for pay tv ventures. Also problematic might be the ATSC standard that US broadcasters use.
ATSC reception generally requires a rooftop antenna.
ATSC’s gang of four rejected European-developed DVB standard, because there were no points in it for their own royalty sharing arrangement. DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting), is an internationally accepted, open standard for digital television. DVB, using multi-path rejecting COFDM, can often use indoor rabbit ears.ATSC is more about royalty bucks than service. Want a Portable DVD Player with a built-in TV Tuner? ATSC won’t cut it. A digital set-top box with DVB-T tuner and MPEG-4/AVC decoder is used for HDTV reception of the Olympic Games in Italy.
You’d think James Barksdale, former Netscape president and Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman, could have come up with something better than this for the PBS Digital Futures Initiative.The PBS national network is unique in that it can deliver over 100 million households in the U.S.
Freeview (right), the wildly popular British free-to-air digital television service. uses the terrestrial DVB-T system. It delivers, absolutely free, more than 20 television channels to 7.2 million people using $99 set top boxes. With rabbit ears. Another five channels in HD are being considered.
You can fit around 6 digital tv channels into the space of one analog channel, so Freeview provides 30 standard definition video channels and 20 digital radio channels. It’s available thoughout the UK. How many channels can you pick up for free?
Freeview (right), the wildly popular British free-to-air digital television service. uses the terrestrial DVB-T system. It delivers, absolutely free, more than 20 television channels to 7.2 million people using $99 set top boxes. With rabbit ears. Another five channels in HD are being considered.
You can fit around 6 digital tv channels into the space of one analog channel, so Freeview provides 30 standard definition video channels and 20 digital radio channels. It’s available thoughout the UK. How many channels can you pick up for free?
What are those people at the Society of Broadcast Engineers doing for us? Not much, it would appear. UPDATE: Nevermind. I jumped the gun about Moviebeam.
PBS is apparently NOT using their HDTV spectrum for commercial purposes.
Moviebeam is using a different technology, Dotcast, to insert the digital Moviebeam signal into the ANALOG NTSC signal. Digital data is inserted across an entire analog TV channel, enabling data rates of up to 3.9 Mbps. Moviebeam is simply riding piggyback over current NTSC pictures. That should leave the PBS HDTV picture and data payload unused. Different people may have different reactions, but the PBS mission would seem to be largely unaffected by Dotcast technology while enabling an additional revenue stream. I have no problem with that.
Initially, up to 100 movies will be stored digitally on the hard drive. Each week as many as 10 new movie offerings will be transmitted from a local broadcast station via datacasting technology to the set-top unit.The new titles are transmitted to the box, using technology from datacasting specialist, Dotcast, and bandwidth from ABC TV stations and from PBS National Datacast’s network of TV stations.George Bush signed the act containing the analog cutoff on February 8th. NTSC will disappear forever on February 17, 2009. Section 3002 notes that only full-power stations need to drop analog on that date, and Section 3005 seems to indicate that if a set-top box has anything but an NTSC RF output it cannot be subsidized.
I believe COFDM would have been the solution to keep newspapers and local broadcasters in business. But the NAB, the FCC and ATSC could only focus on making a quick buck. Now they’ll pay. Low resolution mobile TV offerings by MediaFLO and Crown Castle’s DVB-H (on dedicated, narrow band frequencies) are no alternative to a rugged, full resolution system like DVB-T that can be received by rabbit ears.The rest of the world has moved on, leaving the Americas a desolate island of incompatibility. How many people can watch the HD Winter Olympics on rabbit ears? Damn few. You’ve got to have cable or satellite reception. What kind of business is that? Thanks, Bill.
Mark Shubin says “the current HD universe contains only 6 million viewers“. There were reportedly 3.8 million HD cable subscribers and 1.8 million HD satellite subscribers at the end of 2005.
A new study from Kagan Research indicates 284.1 million TV sets in U.S. households, of which 11.2% were replaced last year, 10.1 million of them with HD sets.The FCC says their 12th annual video-competition has the latest stats, but currently all they’ve got is a press release with a summary of statistics as of June 2005:
- 109.6 million U.S. TV households
- 94.2 million (86%) subscribing to a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD)
- cable down to 69% of MVPD subscribers
- DBS up to 28% of MVPD subscribers
- all other MVPDs down from 3.3% to 2.9%
- 15 million households relying exclusively on off-air reception
- 531 satellite-delivered national programming networks plus 96 regional
- 375 models of CableCARD TVs as of November 30; 90,000 cards deployed by top-ten MSOs
Echostar 10 (right), a DBS satellite launched this week will have 49 distinct spot beams, providing a 12-to-1 frequency re-use factor.
Echostar recently got FCC approval to use both Ku-band and Ka-band “fixed” satellites to distribute video. The result is much more capacity to support “local-into-local” TV distribution.
Echostar recently got FCC approval to use both Ku-band and Ka-band “fixed” satellites to distribute video. The result is much more capacity to support “local-into-local” TV distribution.Rupert Murdoch says DirecTV will soon enter the VOD/broadband business with a WiMAX approach. Meanwhile, MatrixStream says its technology will work over WiMAX wireless networks and cost less than $250,000 for a system capable of supporting 10,000 viewers. Dedicated video servers run their IMX middleware management system and, optionally, third-party digital rights management (DRM) software.
Wouldn’t it be great to see any channel, on any television network in the world, anytime you wanted?
Interactive Television Networks plans to launched PULSE, the first IPTV music video network this May. It will offer unlimited video-on-demand access to a commercial free library of more than 30,000 music videos from all the major recording labels for $4.95 per month.
WORLDVIEW, an internationally diverse 24/7 program stream, is available for public television stations. Globecast, a similar service, is available via IPTV. BellSouth gets its IPTV delivered over AMC-9. It’s distributed through BellSouth’s existing head end to IPTV settop boxes. They use MPEG-4.
The Tandberg/SkyStream merger, expected to close in April, provides a stronger headend MPEG-4 presence. Some industry observers believe IP-TV Settops will be dominated by two main companies; Scientific Atlanta (Cisco) and Motorola (which just bought Kreatel an open source IPTV solution).
UTOPIA is an 14-city consortium in Utah serving serving close to 200,000 citizens (above). UTOPIA delivers 100 Mbps to every connected home and 1 Gbps to every business. Currently available are 10Mbps for $39.95/month, 15Mbps for $44/month, or triple play (Internet, Phone, and Cable) for $90-120/month.
By the time telcos get around to providing fiber to your curb, wireless broadband might deliver the last mile via 802.11n. Why not wireless 10 Mbps service with dual 720p HDTV channels. For half the cost.
Why can’t we have it next year? Every movie ever made. The Free Triple Play. Now THAT’s competition!
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[...] Related Dailywireless articles include; PBS + MovieBeam, Mobile TV: Six Flavors, Open Source Radio Automation, HD Radios Get Cheaper, This is Only A Test, Cellular Movies and WiFi Rabbit. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » Datacast This on January 26th, 2007