I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Good to see business leaders like Simon Botherway getting into it …
Dismiss TVNZ’s Sky break-up call
We are definitely entering into looney times in regard to what the government intervenes in so as Sky investors you can see why he is motivated to squash this.
But it was also interesting that Simon mentioned this …
… there are numerous distribution pathways to the household. Not to mention the imminent prospect of broadband distribution.
The Internet is close to replacing traditional broadcast distribution as I mentioned here …
TVNZ through the Freeview consortium is in a ’walled-garden’ battle with Sky, resulting in the New Zealand tax payer and television viewer required to buy dual hardware unnecessarily to get the full suite of available content.
The NZ consumer is going to be mighty pissed soon when they realize they won’t be able to record HD content even after laying down their loot for two new decoders.
In parallel with this there is the Fibre to the Home aspiration. (I’m not a supporter of FTTH, and feel that the NZ broadband debate is drifting back to internally focussed FTTH and broadband for all rather than the much more important international links and getting businesses connected - but I digress).
The reality is there is only so much money available per household for content services. That means newspapers, telephony, magazines, pay tv, video rentals and mobiles. Maybe it’s $100- $300 per month.
The market for people that will pay for both a PayTV subscription and a super high speed broadband subscription is a lot smaller than the market that would pay for either of those.
FreeView feels less regulated than Sky. Already people are connecting to FreeView using commodity tv cards and PVR software like EyeTV. I believe they can record programs in HD. Adding a computer to the mix starts to blur broadcast TV and IP based TV.
So as the Government owns both TVNZ and needs to build a business case for FTTH perhaps a strategy that TVNZ can use is to lead the world in IP based television. Deliver TV content over an internet connection and suddenly the money a household spends on television can be diverted into contributing to a fibre connection.
IP TV is coming anyway. TVNZ could embrace it and while the government makes the case for FTTH much more compelling and reduces take up risk.
Now that would be a game changer.
blog
The problem with making content part of the included case for FTTH is that _NO_ current provider in the country is set up to provide: data, voice, TV at suitable capacities and latency nationwide
You need wide coverage because otherwise you can’t sell advertising.
You need large capacity because IPTV is not as efficient as a broadcast medium.
You need low latency (as a side-effect of proximity to the consumer) as a direct effect of needing large capacity.
So instead of one provider, you could stitch together several and have one agency supply services by procuring from each specialist (TV feed, VOIP, data upstream). Data is the easy part, VOIP second, broadcast TV is the harder one (witness the ongoing bunfight with the new Digital Broadcasting proposals). Add an online version of DVD Unlimited and you are set.
Freeview could be a useful lead into the market to provide TV services delivered over Ethernet. There’s a gap in the market right now for a decoder box that will take Freeview, Sky and and Ethernet feed and serve that up. Now, if you know that all of that can be done using Open Source right now (mythtv anyone?), all you would need would be someone with some investment cash ready to go.
Since you can soon (August 2009) get interchange with Telecom customers at local peering points, the architecture becomes feasible - media servers located at neutral exchange points and off you go.
Doable in the price range $100-$300 monthly? Absolutely. Figure on $100 or less for TV, $10 for VOIP, $40-$80 for data and purchase on demand for DVD movies. It’s not a technical issue, it can be done soon and it doesn’t need to wait for FTTH to get a customer base.
So Bothers thinks we are on the edge of imminent broadband distribution? Me doesn’t think so. Although I guess what his definition of broadband is. The Labour governments money for broadband over 5 years will not achieve it and it smacks of everything about this government, spread the jam thinly over everything. What this means is none of the infrastructure services work well.
I agree with your FTTH comment; I think this could a case of thinly spread jam.
Of course if JK gets in $1.5B would achieve a lot for business.
Hey Rod,
Found your blog through a daily Google search on FTTH!
I’m currently installing FTTH into two big master-planned housing estates here for Kensington Properties (Orewa and Taupo). I have run into all the problems in the world getting standards and interfacing resolved here. The major was getting SKY and Freeview L-Band signals over fibre to their own Set Top Boxes. That is now resolved and working impeccably: a great alternative for costly and fragile MATV in “no antenna” estates.
Now the major problem is “backhaul” or the “fat internet pipe”. There just ain’t any where you need it. Tons of fibre up and down the country as Telco feeds, but no second tier to connect projects such as ours. We will be using microwave RF links initially for data and VOIP.
IPTV: not to be confused with Internet TV.. IPTV is streaming TV, full screen and now HDTV… needs bags of bandwidth AND a QOS network. Impossible to send consumer quality TV over the public internet. One dropped bit somewhere and your packet of data has gone, never to be recovered!
We are a LONG WAY off being able to offer IPTV at any commercial level. Even new VDSL or ADSL2+ installations don’t hack it with IPTV, ie more than a couple of channels. We could offer IPTV over our FTTH network from our headend in each estate, but this will be limited initially to a local VOD (video on demand) server.
We are STUCK with RF TV for quite a few years until there is some thrust or regulation getting the ducks lined up.
Why are you anti-FTTH?
Love to discuss this with you,
John Nixon
Optical Network Engineering Ltd
Auckland
mob: 021 801110
john.nixon@onefibre.com
Hi John, great comment, thanks.
By anti FTTH I mean that I don’t want the NZ broadband debate to be about FTTH. Connecting NZ.Inc to world should be the immediate priority. FTTH will be great but as you have found you need the back haul in place.
My observation is that to justify FTTH investment, the service might have capture PayTV spend, so can the question becomes can you separate the worthy FTTH long term goal from TVNZ strategy. Decisions made now might have a major effect on the business case for FTTH.
I would love FTTH everywhere, but I don’t think it makes the boat go faster right now but it has to come and great that you are out there pioneering and learning what else is required to make these things work.
Happy to contribute to the debate Rob.
You say “Connecting NZ.inc to the world”. Do you mean in a data/internet sense or including video media? FTTH usually offers “triple play” or Voice, Data and Video over one fibre connection to a subscriber.
I think we all agree that from a business/economy/smart-nation point of view, the data/internet bit is the most important. Voice will fade into insignificance as VOIP takes over (as it is doing, even with the Telcos). Voice will be just data like any other IP packet and ultimately be free.
Connecting NZ.inc to the rest of the world means getting fast and cheap connectivity to Oz, Hawaii and beyond. For the moment there is almost no competition, with only one undersea cable. Satellite connections are costly and have high latency. The second cable to Oz will introduce competition and be a good thing for NZ.inc.
TV/Video: as pointed out previously, you will never get acceptable commercial quality TV over the public internet network. This is because of the “best effort” nature of IP, and the need to stream video with no packet resend in the case of a data error.
To improve overall broadband performance in this country, you need a combination of elements: improved and competitive IP connections to overseas; vastly improved backhaul and switching infrastructure within the country, improved “last mile” delivery which includes VDSL and C°, and FTTH. Also one huge step would be to coax, coerce or legislate to have all the Kiwi fibre owners to cooperate, open up, cross-lease, make one big cooperative fibre wholesale network in the country. This includes of course Telecom, TelstraClear, Kordia, FX Networks etc. Be as easy as making pigs fly!
These things are all important, and all depend on each other to up the ante.
Can amplify on any of this if there are interested readers.
John Nixon
john.nixon@onefibre.com
Recording HD off Freeview is trivial, it helps it’s not encrypted or encumbered too much. (The only big hassle is the choice to not broadcast DVB-standard EPG data on the -T service, it’s still there on the -S service.)
Also, ignore all the noise about HDCP and Freeview. I wrote something up about this when Computerworld ran a scary story about it, see http://pvr.geek.nz/w/index.php/DRM_and_Freeview
Related to this topic, check out my post on:
http://www.drury.net.nz/2008/02/18/meet-some-high-value-bits/