(This is off the subject a bit, but does anyone besides me remember the poor man’s color TV? This was very popular in NYC. It was a multi-color laminate overlay that was taped onto the TV’s picture tube to give the impression of a color picture. I don’t remember the exact order of the colors, but I think that the bottom was brown (for ground), next up was green for grass, red for faces, and the top was blue for skies.)
Then came Cable TV, and what a delight that was; many channels, all clear, and you didn’t have to futz around with the set top antenna. The downside was that you had to pay for the service. Later came Satellite TV, but for the most part, it was the same as Cable TV, except that it required the installation of a satellite dish. For people that did not have access to Cable TV, this was a godsend.
Today, although you can still get your television programming off the air (even in HD), and from Satellite and Cable service providers, there are new players like AT&T and Verizon offering television programming through your telephone wires or new fiber optic cabling. And then there is the brand new frontier of IPTV, which is television-like programming, distributed through the Internet.
The quality of the programming and movies that we watch has and continues to change, and improves every few years. New televisions and players now offer high definition, and the industry has gone mostly digital. In fact, by February of next year, all analog broadcasting will cease and televisions will have to be digital in order to view any programming.
Movie distribution to the consumer will change very fast over the next few years too. Movie-on-demand boxes are now available from other companies beyond our Satellite of Cable companies, and there are some unique advantages with going to these new movie providers. The most important point is that you can select a movie-on-demand from thousands of movies instead of a dozen. You can also buy or rent the movies and even store them on your movie box. Trailers for each movie are also available. Most of these boxes will get their content and meta-data via the Internet. Soon, these same companies will offer network television on demand. So if you missed an episode of Lost, you won’t have to sit in front of your PC to watch it.
But In order to truly experience the benefits of digital programming, online movies, IPTV, and the myriad of new sources that are becoming available, your home’s video distribution infrastructure must also go digital. So far, this has not been the case. Our industry is still pushing analog technology. Can you imagine using the large brick Motorola cell phones, today? Well, most homes today still use 40+ year old technology to distribute video around the home.
Although I love the concept of ‘structured wiring panels’ when it comes to video distribution, they are just about obsolete, because they still use splitters and RF amplifiers to distribute Cable or Satellite Television around your home. Coax will be around for a while longer if you are getting your content from the Cable, Satellite or Telephone service providers, but this does not mean that you have to distribute the content they provide, around your house using coax once it comes out of the set top box. It also doesn’t make sense, today, that you have a set top box in each room. They don’t look good, you pay a monthly charge for each box, and with wall mounted flat screens, why would you want to clutter your room with bulky furniture filled with black boxes? Why not locate all of your sources in a dedicated closet, but controllable from anywhere in your home? With the right system, this is now very simple to do.
Let’s take a look at the video sources available today:
- Television Programming: Available from Satellite, Cable, and telephone companies. My favorite is DirecTV because they have more HD channels than any other Satellite or Cable service provider: 100+ and growing.
- High Definition DVD players: High definition DVD players are here now and some selling for under $200. In my opinion, Blu-ray is the clear winner. I have several of these players, but my favorite Blu-ray player today is Sony’s S301 Blu-ray DVD, because it is inexpensive and outputs HDMI and Component video simultaneously (not all do). This is important if you want to distribute a movie to multiple displays at one time. I have been asked by many people if a Blu-ray player can play standard DVDs and CDs, and the answer is yes. In fact, most players will up-convert a Standard Definition (SD) DVD, which means that the movie should look much better.
- Movie boxes: These are the most exciting sources to appear in a long time. For as little at $229-$1,000 you gain access to thousands of movies-on-demand (some in high definition) and you pay no monthly services. No more trips to the video store or waiting for movies via mail. You can either buy the movie or rent it for as little as $2.99 each. The top two online service providers are Apple TV and Vudu, but In my opinion, VUDU is a company to watch. They are the TIVO of the movie world, and they got it right. Not only are there no monthly service fees with their box, but they make the movie buying or renting experience fun, and with a rich user interface, and you don’t need a PC or MAC. Their solution, married with some of the NetStreams products that I will describe in an upcoming post, rivals some of the high-end video server solutions found in the market today.
- Video Servers: These are dedicated servers that are designed to take user own movies and store them for playback. Most of these solutions run on Windows or Linux platforms. Many of these manufacturers are now combining music storage with movie storage on the same box.
- Media Center: This is a PC based entertainment solution that continues to get better with each passing year. Using Microsoft’s simple to use Media Center interface, you can access your libraries of pictures, music, movies and games.
- IPTV from the Internet: IPTV is content that is available (some free and some by paid subscription) via broadcast or on-demand streams from service providers that distribute over the Internet. Although most IPTV watchers today are doing so on a PC, tomorrow’s watcher will be watching this programming on any display device in their home. IPTV will experience huge growth over the next decade, and many predict that it will overtake content distribution over Cable and Satellite, for many reasons.
- Distributed Picture: Many companies are popping up everywhere with digital picture frames. The second generation of these allow you to pull pictures from your home server. So we need to consider this application as a source, because you may want to display pictures on your televisions too.
- Gaming Sources: Let’s not forget gaming as a source. Although gaming has been primarily a one room experience, methods of distributing the video output of gaming boxes, along with their control signals are being developed and some released now. If you are able to store your games in your box, and access them and control them in any room, this will make gaming a more widely used source.
So... with all of these sources in play, how do you distribute the video from these around your home while maintaining the same quality that is outputted from the source? How do you control the sources from any room? For these answers and more, you will need to read my next post – Multi-Room Video Today.
Herman Cardenas
If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com
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