[steveh]

Originally Posted by Chris

Actually, if the national news and entertainment infrastructure is ever to transfer to exclusively IP-based delivery, then 100% penetration is exactly what it *will* need to achieve. Why would you think otherwise?

Was a bit too concise in what I wrote - what I meant was that terrestrial and satellite delivery of linear channels are likely to persist for a long time and I think will still be a significant part of viewing in ten years, say, especially amongst older viewers. However, ultimately everything is likely to move to IP or its successors.

Originally Posted by Chris

Virgin Media and others are very good at advertising blisteringly fast headline speeds, but they are selling you a contended service. You share the same chunk of bandwidth with at least half your street. If the entire UK TV audience tried to consume something in HD at the same time, using the Internet as opposed to a terrestrial aerial or a satellite dish, you would very quickly learn a frustrating lesson in just how much of that 200Mbps is actually "yours".

You're unlikely to get corporations investing so far ahead of demand, except for oddities like Google with their fibre service in the US. While there will obviously be technical hurdles to overcome I don't believe there are barriers that will prevent the bandwidth that is needed from being available at the time it is required.

Originally Posted by Horizon

But on the subject of bandwidth, I present to you one word "multicast", sounds sexy, doesn't it?

It's also something that has been regularly pointed to as being the solution for many years - BBC R&D were doing experiments in TV multicast delivery across ISPs back in 2000ish - but whose practical realities have made it very difficult to deploy. Increases in bandwidth are perhaps likely to make it irrelevant before the issues with multicast can be resolved.

Originally Posted by Horizon

The change will be that linear and non-linear watching of tv will become so seamless, you will not notice whether it's a "proper" channel or not.

I share your desire for an intelligent TV that can personalise a night's viewing for its watchers but it's going to be very difficult to achieve, primarily due to the cooperation required between the stakeholders. TV content owners are desperate not to see the same thing happen as in print where the majority of the money, control and data have ended up in the hands of Facebook and Google. Because of this they want to control streaming services as their own fully independent fiefdoms.

There's also the issue of who would invest in developing such a service - TV and STB manufacturers have tiny margins that can't be stretched, old-school media companies have typically been terrible at investing in technology and spend all their time in endless committees or fighting when they do try and work together (witness YouView), while telecoms companies don't really have the vision for it. When we do eventually get such a service it will probably be from the usual Internet giants with serious data mining abilities and in the aftermath of a massive battle with content owners.