Do adjust your mindset ( The Age / Alan Kohler )
In this article Alan Kohler takes a look at some of the challenges facing the free to air TV stations in Australia. Audiences are in decline, costs are on the rise, and there are increasing challenges from other forms of entertainment. What does this mean for the industry, and what impact will technology like IPTV have?
This needs no further comment:
IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )
From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind - something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”
With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ - IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.
There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.