The future of broadcasting: Part 1 – IPTV

Over the last few weeks I’ve been beta testing next generation services from both Rogers and Bell for TV broadcast delivery.

With enhanced services being offered by each, consumers will now have more than price to consider when looking to stay or switch to or from their current provider.

Although Bell is known for a better HD quality experience, the knock has always been against its satellite delivery system which can lose its signal in bad weather – or the times when you most want to be indoors watching TV!  They’ve been quietly rolling out a next generation service called Bell Entertainment Service (BES) which is based on IPTV.

IPTV is an acronym for Internet Protocol TV. It’s essentially a technology that delivers video or TV broadcasts over the Internet.

Instead of receiving television or video over the broadcast waves, cable lines or through a satellite TV service, your TV is hooked directly into a broadband Internet router and receives digitals signals directly over the Internet.

For Bell’s service, this means one router now controls all the media in your home through a 27 or 30 meg stream delivering Internet and all your broadcast channels (include HDTV) over IP encoded in mpeg-4 (vs the inferior mpeg-2 standard) – so you get amazing quality streaming without ever having to worry about the weather again.  Also new for Bell is video on demand (another Rogers advantage previously), an interactive programming guide that goes out up to 14 days and a 20 meg stream for Internet access also through the fibre optic line.

BES also allows you to remotely program your IPTV PVR box from your mobile device or any other Internet devices to record  – which is ideal when that one pint after work turns into three and you find yourself suddenly in danger of missing the next episode of Madmen!

You get all this with BES now; however,what comes next is potentially even better.  By running everything through IP, Bell can enable two-way communication for interactive TV. For example, you can actually participate in a televised game show when the host asks for audience participation by helping a contestant answer a question. Real-time participation through SMS has done wonders for American Idol – imagine what IPTV can do for the next generation show…. or whatever marketers and brands will come up with to leverage this new channel.

BES will also hopefully introduce another IPTV feature in 2010  – the ability to turn on multiple angles of an event and then watch it from multiple angels simultaneously using picture in picture viewing. This would be especially attractive for sports nuts.

In order for IPTV to work, you need to be living in an area with updated fibre in your local Bell CO.  For now that means you can only order this service if you live in Mississauga, Etobicoke, and a few parts of Toronto and Scarborough.

The downside of BES? For one thing, if your system hangs you have to do a manual reboot of your router – which takes about 10 minutes to reset and could prevent you from sending commands to your box remotely.

The other current downside of BES is that you cannot do any remote viewing of your programming on another IP enabled machine – like a laptop or smartphone. This is something Rogers is offering with their new Rogers on Demand Online service… which I’ll cover in part 2.