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June 2006: PAUL SMITH’S DEVIANT’S DIARY - IPTV: Global Digital Broadcast.
There's a place in Chicago that'll forever have a claim to fame. It's just a car park with a simple plaque now, but for a while it was literally white hot with technological advancement. Back then it was a Racquets court, and it was where the world's first working atomic pile -what we'd call a nuclear reactor- was built in the 40's. Perhaps one day a similar atmosphere of reverence will be applied to a business unit tucked behind houses on a Hove side-road. As it's here that Global Digital Broadcast, Jim Deans (Formerly known professionally as Phil McCavity) and a dedicated team of techies are developing IPTV.
Internet Protocol TeleVision has been mooted for some time. In a nutshell it's the best things about digital cable TV married to the best things about the Internet. I paid GDB's offices a visit to learn more about gdbTV, which was founded in 2004.
I was met at the door by James Deans Jr. sporting a sporting injury to his hand. He gave me a tour of the place as we tried to track down his dad. The deceptively small unit is actually quite large inside, with a kitchen, boardroom and a full-sized snooker table in the games room, linking rooms overflowing with servers, cables and various TV-top boxes being put through their paces to ensure they'll function perfectly with the service. Twelve people work for the firm, which is drawing more interest and demand for their IPTV service all the time.
Jim senior's been in the broadcast and adult industries for over 25 years, dealing with Playboy, TVX, Private etc. and pointed out some ancient large-format tape recordings to me as we passed a storage room on the way to the demonstration area; a cinema in miniature. It's here that the service can be seen as a home user with a big TV would see it. With the exception of a 'Buffering' message as the box connects via broadband, the experience is very like watching digital satellite telly, with big clear menus of channels and sub channels. Jim explained their system needs a 1Mb connection to work properly and having tried the service on my el-cheapo 'AOL Silver' 512Kbps link, I can confirm you need a bigger pipe to make best use of it. But as 80% of Brits already have access to fast broadband, this doesn't pose too much of a problem.
Some practical information: Each set top unit is essentially a browser in a box, capable of showing normal HTML (although you'd want to optimise a web page for IPTV use. The right sort of text to be readable on a telly isn't the same as the right font and point size for PC use) and WMV video files. Flash-animation-enabled boxes are on the way too. A retail cost of $100/£60 is realistic and you can expect to start to see them on the shelves in the next couple of months. Manufacturers I saw include Tcom, CMS and Sunniwell, and some boxes include Freeview support, giving owners the best of both worlds. Some also include a fly-lead so you can 'piggy-back' the box off an NTL one. So TeleWest and NTL (one and the same now) subscribers don't need to miss out on the excitement.
End users pay via an iPay 'eWallet' account which they can top-up via PayPal or a Debit/Credit Card. CCBill and iBill are behind this part of the operation. From the content-provider's point of view, the system's equally simple. Once you've encoded your content and supplied it to GDB (probably on hard drive, to save uploading perhaps tens to hundreds of Gigabytes of video data) then you can chose how viewers will access your material via a very clear interface. Using GDB's Middleware you can pick what's shown when, and if it's charged for. As an analogy, if you think of a camcorder as a portable TV studio, Middleware's a broadcasting corporation on your laptop. Scheduling is the key; mixing adverts with pre-recorded material and perhaps live links or content (which would need a Fibre or SDSL connection from your studio) - all with a possible interactive element, as the system delay is only a few seconds. And since it's still an Internet service (albeit one delivered to your telly looking like television) the BBFC is bypassed. The Middleware has full territorial controls and payment selection features, allowing you to tailor your service to any user, around the world. To make life even easier the 'timeline' GUI lets administrators just cut and paste material from one day to the next, creating weekly schedules with the minimum of editing the 'play list'. You can even pick what you want to be shown a year ahead. It was features like this that caused a stir at Venus, which Jim attended last month.
The appeal of the set-top box is partly because some people just don't trust computers. They have a point; PCs are evil things that'll eat a 10,000-word dissertation as soon as look at you. The television is our friend though. We share our living room with it. It entertains us as we eat our microwave dinner on the sofa. It's a social object that you can enjoy the experience of watching with the family, loved one, or mates. Few people gather around a PC in a cold back bedroom of an evening, which is why Microsoft made the successful Xbox games console. They know the place for entertainment at home is the lounge, not the study.
Unlike traditional broadcasting, the box can display a video stream from any Internet address, which effectively means there's no limit to the number of channels it can show. Satellite and terrestrial systems rely on radio waves that get banded into frequencies. That's why you tune a TV or radio in to receive them. Even digital broadcasting, which uses less of the 'radio spectrum' per channel, is limited. The practical upshot of this is you'll never find 'TV-Brighton' on a mainstream broadcaster, as its appeal is just too limited to warrant a frequency that could be more lucratively used for something else. Perhaps an interactive game show channel like ITV-Play. However, you will find TVBrighton(.com) on gdbTV, complete with geo-targeted advertising and locally made programmes. Lots of creative folk in Brighton.
Another good thing about IPTV is the stream is encoded for PSP, VideoiPod and mobile phones too, meaning every 'screen' is catered for. Each channel can carry either a whole days streaming content, or be a selection of PPV clips that can just be dipped into as a 'video jukebox'. "A pound a pull" Jim called it, describing a billing structure that lets an adult viewer access a 20 minute porn scene for, typically, a pound. Full stats are available to content-providers, showing which streams have proven the most popular and the revenue they've generated, and an email service is to be built into the system in future, letting users direct each other to interesting stuff. To help track down content there's a keyword search feature too. All the angles seem to have been covered.
As I sat, watching broadcast -quality TV arrive on the big telly in front of me, I think I got a flavour of the meeting at Apple when someone slid a sexy white 'pod' across the table and said, "Gentlemen, meet the end of the CD." For a while it looked like MP3 files might spell disaster for the music industry, until it was noticed album sales were going up. Could it be free-downloaders were getting a taste for bands and buying their music too? iTunes showed the music business that you could successfully sell music online, and perhaps make even more money as there's none of that annoying burning thousands of CDs and printing self-congratulatory sleeve artwork. Earlier this year the first single to make it to number one via downloads alone sat at the top of the charts for several weeks. If this is a model that'll work for music, it'll work for video, and I think IPTV has the potential to l do very well. So do established broadcasters - I keep hearing adverts for Lost and Desperate Housewives on the radio. Just go to Channel4.com to see the first two episodes for free and then pay to stream the rest of the series. King Kong was made available as a pay-to-download at the same time it came out on DVD. The problem here, for now, is these services still deliver their content to your Mac or PC, not your TV.
To Jim's surprise, at the moment only about 5% of the interest in gdbTV's IPTV solution is coming from the adult sector. Ben Dover, Relish and Rude Britannia were all names I picked up on, but it's clear that IPTV is something everyone in the industry should be talking about. Channel 900 is the entry point into the adult zone, with a simple sign-in screen giving password protection. Another feature of the adult content channels is if there are no buttons pressed on the handset (or optional infrared keyboard and thumb-ball) then you're automatically logged out after two hours of inactivity, helping keep the service secure. Channel 904 is Xstreamheat(.com), generously fronted by Jim's other half, (ex?) porn star Bev Cocks. Jim introduced us as he explained how he hopes more adult firms will get involved with IPTV - perhaps a free adult shopping channel, where you can see the toy in action or film clips for a small fee before purchasing the toy (sent in strong, anonymous packaging via the post) or movie (accessed via the IPTV service itself) and getting that small fee refunded in the transaction.
On the other side of the porn divide are such diverse elements as the Mormons, extreme rollerblading (Jim Junior's thing, hence his bandaged wrist) videos, the Ryman League and Chinese language travel shows to encourage the world's largest population to visit our little island. GDB even recently signed up a channel of soothing sounds and images for Tinnitus sufferers. Niche works just as well as mainstream (eBay TV was suggested, and QVC's name was mentioned too) on GDB's IPTV service, obviously. I also suspect there will be a lot of interest from the public who want to see their own videos shown too, as seen by the success of web sites like Google Video and YouTube.
Sample prices (ex. VAT) for the gdbTV service:
Initial gdbTV Channel set up - £4,175. This includes 500Gb (approx 500 hours of high quality video, 750 hours of 1.5Mb/s broadcast quality video or 1500 hours of 1Mb/s DVD quality video) available online to 250 simultaneous users. An extra 500Gb would be £545 and more bandwidth can be bought, if required, at £3,175 per 250-user 'chunk'.
Portal development is typically £360-£720, depending on the complexity of your needs.
Monthly fees:
Client system server rental, including 500Gb storage (per server) is £295, and a middleware licence (per channel) costs £495.
Bandwidth/Transfer rates:
Up to 3072Gb (3Tb) per month - 48p per Gb. From 3Tb to 40Tb per month - 25p per Gb. and above 40Tb per month, each Gb. (approx 2-3 hour of video, per user) accessed costs just 18p. Caddy transfers to the Client Content Server cost £385 per transfer.
Rack-mount (2U) hardware encoders cost between £6,250 and £10,650 depending on your requirements, and are supplied with a 1U breakout panel if required. Price includes delivery, software installation and setup, plus training.
GDB low-volume content encoding costs £100 per hour of video, payment gateway fees are 10%, Server/Encoder ad-hoc support is £90 per hour and data backup (up to 1Tb) is £145 per month, and is done monthly.
Given your programming can reach anyone on Earth who has a broadband connection (portals are usually designed for set-top boxes, but will also work with Internet browsers on computers) the costs don't seem unreasonable to me. I don't know what Sky charge for a channel, but I suspect there are several more noughts in their prices than in any figure above.
Like Sky or any premium TV service, one concern I had was that anyone could hook an IPTV box to a DVD recorder and make copies of anything downloaded. Jim's response really put IPTV into context, "If you can access the latest, best, most interesting content to you for a couple of quid, are you really going to buy an unmarked DVD off a bloke at a car boot for more money?" - Fair point. While some of the technological talk went over my head, Jim's enthusiasm and commitment to the IPTV concept was infectious and I hope his faith in the technology is rewarded. Certainly the concept is hugely strong and offers enormous scope for firms and organisations, large and small alike, to develop something unthinkable five years ago - their own TV channel. I can't promise you'll be seeing ETO-TV this year, but I'm liking the sound of The Paul Smith Broadcasting Corporation…
Global Digital Broadcast
Unit 5
196 Old Shoreham Road
Hove
East Sussex
BN3 7EX
Phone 01273 774800
Fax 01273 748514
www.gbdtv.com
www.xstreamheat.com
Around 2200 words on the exciting world of IPTV Dale. I hope you liked/understood them :-P
Paul.
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.