This is not a versus thread. Internet TV is nothing new as a technology and doesn't warrant debate. People wanting to compare the business models of Sony and MS should do so in the business comparison thread.
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A fundamental issue with the current model is you have to subscribe to a service's cable operation to get its programmes. eg. If I want to watch Sky TV on the internet, I have to have a Sky membership, and you can't get that without the high cost of monthly subscriptions. I believe Sky have short-term subscriptions, £10 for a day to watch Sky Sport on the internet. There's definitely room to expand one's market by selling internet service contracts instead of requiring a dedicated box and connection first (not even available in my part of the world). The monthly sub model can be maintained as a value-added package, with the internet service an additional revenue stream.
I guess if someone was to put together a tech to provide that universally, they'd provide quite a compelling offering. This is what the battle for the living room was all about, after all! It's encouraging for Sony that they are making this move (about 5 years late...), instead of waiting for Apple or MS or Google to lead the way, but I imagine they'll all do it at some point. The question is what the underlying tech is and how much control anyone can exert? Will there be just one system for streaming content and lots of branded portals to access it, or a dozen fragmented services?
This topic may warrant its own thread.
I guess if someone was to put together a tech to provide that universally, they'd provide quite a compelling offering. This is what the battle for the living room was all about, after all! It's encouraging for Sony that they are making this move (about 5 years late...), instead of waiting for Apple or MS or Google to lead the way, but I imagine they'll all do it at some point. The question is what the underlying tech is and how much control anyone can exert? Will there be just one system for streaming content and lots of branded portals to access it, or a dozen fragmented services?
This topic may warrant its own thread.
Good god what in heck does MS's vision have anything to do with what I posted? The Playstation audience made it clear they don't like features that require an always on connection, but here they introduce a feature that requires always on connection. I was asking how they expect that to be adopted when it's something their users don't want or even reliably have. It's a very basic question and nothing to do with what you are talking about, nor is it a versus question, it's a business question where I'm wondering why they are targeting something their users don't typically have available. When you limit your audience then how do you expect widespread adoption? If your audience has bandwidth caps and limited connectivity why bring out something they can't use? Christ are you not allowed to say even anything remotely negative anymore? Ok sure it's all great, whatever, just delete my posts clearly they are too controversial.
It's not just PS audience, it's MS fans too. They were talking about always-on gaming specifically. Around the same time, SimCity and other games were having server issues due to their always connected requirement. Some regions simply have unreliable networks.
For TV service, today it's not uncommon to allow both streaming and downloaded shows. Sometimes it's live broadcast, sometimes you wait for 24 hours for the digital version. The consumers may decide not to subscribe to such TV service, or choose a distribution model suitable for their network.
Probably not enough info yet.
At this point, I'm just curious what Sony plan to do with their 3DTV network partnerships. May be they will roll the initiatives into the IPTV effort.
You know it's available! Unless you really place your understanding of the world on internet forum noise instead of proper research papers, then there's no confusion whatesoever that you can have about the viability of IPTV services to an internet enabled device.
When you said -
We've had IPTV for years. It is not plagued by issues like - "they have unreliable internet, or their internet is slow, or they have internet bandwidth caps, or that they don't like anything that requires a constant internet connection," and you know that from your knowledge of the state of the internet and the fact that the most popular services on the consoles are the IPTV ones! The only issue that affects these services are bandwidth caps. Even slow internet (and the real state of the internet is enough to stream reasonable programming) can be solved by downloaded in advance.
If you were a clueless noob, I could believe you honestly thought the internet was too ropey to supply TV services, but you're not (your business revolves around it, does it not?) and none of what you posted reads as a legitimate question given the context of the poster's knowledge and experience.
What's the state of Video Unlimited? That seems the natural launching point for a widespread service.
Dude people interested on Playstation want a Playstation mainly for its games and that doesnt require an always online connection. The IPTVn feature is a secondary feature. It is not the same as XB1 requiring online connection for games. Do you even read the replies others made or do you just skip them and continue with your rant?
Secondly expanding the audience means absorbing people that are not part of the existing audience and hence obviously they arent the Playstation fans you are complaining about.
Third you talk about "users" that "dont want the service" very vaguely and you generalize without having any statistics or numbers that show that the number of people that can adopt this secondary feature is insignificant. Lastly playing games and watching TV are two different experiences and people have different demands for each other which makes someone wonder why you even bother using one example to make point for the other
Rumored. There is nothing definitive at all... yet.
The demands for gaming and tv are identical, notably that they work. Mentioned many a time on the gaming side is people didn't want to be in a situation where they couldn't play a game because their internet connection was flakey or they were at their internet bandwidth cap. Many people here brought that up. I get that, so how could live tv ever work for this same type of user? Secondary service or not, if you want to watch live tv, how can iptv ever work for these people when it didn't work for gaming? If anything it's far worse because a flakey connection can still work for gaming or buffered non-live stuff like Netflix, but it would never work for live tv via iptv. The situation is even worse for those with bandwidth caps as live tv will eat up their cap in no time. You buy a box with the expectation that it works offline, but it really doesn't so it's a solution that excludes a large portion of their audience, should those people be happy or should they just be happy to be excluded when a solution that worked with their existing tv boxes would have gotten around all that and worked for everybody?
Live Internet TV doesn't really streams live. It buffer for a few seconds to a few minutes. Flakey Internet won't be a problem as long as it still have enough normal bandwidth.
They weren't complaining about not being able to game online. They were talking about not being able to game locally when the internet is down (same with games like Diablo 3 and people who couldn't play it single player due to internet connection issues). No-one with experience of the internet expects it to be up and problem free 100% of the time. What they do expect that is their media services still run locally when the technology is there to support that. If Netflix doesn't work because your internet is down, that's to be expect. But if your DVD player can't play DVDs because the internet is down, that's just a stupid, unnecessary aggravation. Likewise if your console cannot play games from the disc in the drive or installed on the HDD because the internet is down. If IPTV doesn't work 0.5% of the time because the internet is flakey (a premise based on unsubstantiated internet gossip so I don't understand why you still consider it a relevant argument; we have real-world reports on the state of the internet), that's 0.5% of the time people will have to find something else to do. No problem; it's no different to what we already have (want to watch iPlayer, internet is slow, give up and go do something else or download the video instead). It's not making things worse, unlike the complaints of local gaming being tied to an internet connection.
The argument about always online is immaterial to the discussion of internet TV. The requirements of internet TV can be considered independently and without reference to internet forum heresay on a matter where such discussion was largely unscientific and unqualified. We have real world usage statistics on BW, uptime, and existing internet TV services including use and growth. Ignoring the unrelated discussions of XB1's always online policy, what is there about the state of the internet as it really is that suggest to you everyone happy using net viewing as it is will encounter problems going forwards? There's an issue with data caps, and maybe if all the TV viewing currently run over cable or airwaves moves to the internet, the capacity isn't there. I dunno. Whatever, those are legitimate discussion points, unlike taking the viewpoint that the internet is broken and incapable of providing these services because 'people on the internet said so when talking about XB1.'
But would anybody sign up to iptv if they know they have a flaky internet connection? Good internet is a requirement for iptv and was also for the always on solution that MS first proposed.
But the difference in my mind is that iptv is an optional service you buy. While always on for gaming means that you needed to have internet and a none flaky one to use the X1 at all, with the previous solution from MS.
But the difference in my mind is that iptv is an optional service you buy. While always on for gaming means that you needed to have internet and a none flaky one to use the X1 at all, with the previous solution from MS.
As a first step I would be very happy if I could ditch my secondary cable box and replace it with either PS4 or X1. It would basically save me the cost of Live/PSN yearly.
I wonder what the odds are of Sony making the PS4 a RVU client: http://www.rvualliance.org/ Sony's 2013 TV's R5xx series already have this functionality. I contemplated buying one them just for this reason. But, there's no reason the PS4 couldn't be capable of running the RVU protocol and acting like a client. It's not a la carte IPTV yet, but it does eliminate the need for an additional box under the TV. In theory, you could hide your primary DVR/Receiver in a closet and just use clients on all TVs.
Never heard of it, but seeing as PS3 is listed as a news item on the front page, I think probability of PS4 being an RVU device is high. A cursory glance at that website implies it's a home-server based system and not an internet service, although I suppose there's nothing stopping internet content being RVU compliant if RVU is suitably robust (there are different requirements to supplying media over the internet versus a home network).
The argument as presented is just noise - to compare what MS was initially doing with XB1 and an optional IPTV service is like the following:
"I don't understand why people who complain about the high cost of insurance and poor MPG of sports cars praise the Prius. I thought they didn't like cars... "
Its being deliberately thicke to advance the argument that the world is against my platform of choice and ignoring context.
As several of us already said the details need to be seen to see if this would infact be a progress but the best scenario is that we see IPTV ala carte services for both XB1 and PS4. Competition for cable and satellite companies would be good for driving cost down and increasing the quality of services for consumers.
Yep, the people you mention most likely wont be enjoying IPTV, and they wont be arguing with you here since they aren't connected here either.
But they will be playing games on their new XBOX1 and PS4
What is your point?
What is your point?
Going with a solution that includes everyone especially when you know it's a non connected device for many. But internet connectivity apparently is no longer an issue for this platform so nevermind.
But it's a totally different situation to an always on-line requirement which is the issue the vox populi was raised against. You are arguing apples to oranges for the sake of it.
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