It’s weird, but I had a Channel 9 tour planned of our IPTV plant today. Why is that weird? Cause Cisco bought Scientific Atlanta today for about $7 billion.
Why is this a big deal? HDTV. See, telephone and cable company operators are bashing themselves into a pulp to figure out how to bring new TV experiences to you to get you to switch to their services.
There is a lot of new opportunity because of the new HDTV screens. Why? Well, when you get a $3,000 TV home, what do you want to do? Watch more stuff!
Here’s how IPTV works. The telephone company drops in a new VDSL line. That brings 30megabitspersecond right into your house. That’s enough for — today — four HDTV channels, all at one time. Soon six. Don’t miss the significance of that.
The new box I saw today lets you watch multiple channels on screen. All live. All at the same time. Imaging watching a NASCAR race. You could watch three different cars (they are in Windows along the left side) and also the overall race on the main screen. I’ve seen it work and it’ll change how you watch TV as much as Tivo did when they let you time shift and fast-forward through commercials.
This stuff is not cheap. I saw a single HDTV, built by Sony, that costs $40,000 and an HDTV deck costs $70,000. Whew. They use both of those, by the way, for testing and demonstrating that their system is really as good as they say it is.
Anyway, I’ll leave more of the details for when we run the Channel 9 video. I gotta get some sleep. Let’s just say that I know where I’m watching the Superbowl now. These guys have huge satellite dishes and ways to watch tons of channels.
