AT&T To Offer TV Over Phone Lines

ppadala writes "AT&T is upgrading their phone lines to offer video programmes over phone line. The service, called U-verse TV will be available in parts of Southern California communities initially. Channel lineups will be similar to traditional cable and dish offerings. AT&T is insisting that, 'This offering is on par with those of its cable rivals. But AT&T claims that it offers customers more for their money, including fast channel changing, video-on-demand, three set-top boxes, a digital video recorder, a picture-in-picture feature that allows viewers to surf channels without switching channels and an interactive program guide.'"

a momentary blip of anticipation

Wow, video (on demand and more) via the phone lines. I actually had a "moment" of anticipation, thinking I could maybe finally dump the miserable (Comcast) quality and service of our cable company. Then, the quote: "'This offering is on par with those of its cable rivals. "...

Sigh.

Re:a momentary blip of anticipation

That's why I went with satellite. Contrary to what Comcast says, the service has been significantly better and contrary to popular belief it takes far more than the torrential rain we have been getting here in Seattle to make it go out. The fact that even with a few perks it is still cheaper than cable makes it pretty much a done deal that I won't be going back.

I personally hated that I was only getting 70 or so channels with 4 or so ones worth watching and several channels that we were supposed to get were unviewable. The worst part was that one of the local channels comes in better without an antenna in the basement than it did through the cable. Pretty much the contempt that they showed me for complaining when I had a cable modem about it being advertised as always on and having it be out for three or four hours a day for several weeks in a row was enough to switch to DSL even if it is on paper a bit more sluggish.

So in general Comcast sucks and doesn't actually care about providing the service they promise. I had no problem with Earthlink and non yet with qwest.

So the service wouldn't have to be that great to beat the low quality cable service around here. It would be really cool, that way they could probably provide a way of just watching it on a computer at home, in addition to a set top box.

Catching up with the rest of the world

Gee, that sounds like what Europe and Japan seem to offer people at a fraction of the cost, except crappier and more expensive. Way to go AT&T! I love when telecoms are looking out for the consumer's best interest.
 
/sarcasm off

Re:Catching up with the rest of the world

Helloooooo America! Welcome to 2004.

What an Innovation!

ADSL modem + private network + set-top box.

Must have taken them months to independantly discover this combination.

And note the "location" issues

The service, called U-verse TV will be available in parts of Southern California communities initially.

You bet. Qwest has had "Qwest Choice TV," for all appearances the same thing, available in "parts of Phoenix, Arizona communities initially" for several years now. Why only parts? Well, probably because they had to lay fiber to make it happen. In my parents' neighborhood in north Phoenix, they lay fiber to the neighborhood box and then copper takes things the rest of the way. Everywhere else Qwest partners with DirecTV or some such.

Of course it will only be select communities, i.e. those where any lesser offering would be laughed at. And you can bet that, like Qwest, AT&T will not let you take advantage of the full bandwidth of your connection for anything other than TV purposes. The Qwest connection is 11 MBits, but the most they would let us use for internet was 1.5/768 (so as not to make their regular DSL customers pissed, I'd bet). I think they've raised those caps but I don't know, I now live in a rural Utah community where the Qwest Choice TV/internet is not available.

This isn't news. This is AT&T trying to make a big deal about actually using some of the technology they've had for years. Only now are they being forced by the competition to implement some of that technology. Remember, kids, when corporations say they want a deregulated "free market" they really mean "free from competitors."

Re:What an Innovation!

ADSL modem + private network + set-top box.
Must have taken them months to independantly discover this combination.

No, they discovered this back in 95, [findarticles.com] but instead of moving forward with it, they killed it after the trial run. I was part of that trial run and I have to say, it was pretty nice.

Nothing New Here

At least not in Hong Kong, where the local phone company has been offering this service for years:

http://www.nowbroadbandtv.com/eng/ [nowbroadbandtv.com]

This is news?

This definitely isn't the first ILEC to offer TV over IP: I know Telus up in Canada is offering it already.

Having used it quite a bit myself, it's very similar to digital cable (isn't that what it is?). There's also the added bonus of choosing very customizable channel packages and individual channels to subscribe to, which I think is a good change from the limited Tiers from cable companies.

an upgrade?

How is TV an upgrade over anything?
American Icon, Survivor, etc!

Interesting

The ATT site is somewhat short on details, but it does mention that it delivers TV programming "using Internet Protocol via a broadband connection".

This raises some questions:

1) Is the bandwidth dedicated to television progamming separate from your other broadband use? Or does watching TV take up most of your bandwidth? Given that they offer a DVR, which means that TV programming will be continuously streamed to the device (think 1/2 hour buffers or whatever), I would expect the only reasonable way for this to work is for AT&T to dedicate bandwidth above and beyond your normal broadband connection to TV programming. But that's just a guess ...

2) Is the 4 "tuner" DVR capable of recording 4 programs at once *in real time* over a single "U-verse" connection? Or does each show stream in at 1/4 real time and you just have to wait 4x longer for all shows to complete?

3) Are they using multicast IP or peer-to-peer streaming? I would expect the latter since multicasting 190+ channels would seem infeasable.

4) Given that it's likely peer-to-peer, does AT&T really think they have the server capacity to support tens of thousands of customers all streaming different programming at different times?

5) Are there QOS guarantees in place that would prevent my TV programming from ever "hiccuping" due to traffic congestion?

It looks like a very interesting offering *if* the aspects of the service that AT&T "conveniently" left out in their documentation live up to the hype - i.e., if you really can record 4 channels (or even 2) at once in real time without disturbing your other broadband use.

Re:Interesting

I happen to work on the IPTV project at Microsoft, which provides the software for AT&T u-verse

1) The TV shares the VDSL bandwidth. This can potentially cause an impact on browsing speeds if you're streaming all 4 channels at once. I don't have the numbers with me currently, but SD channels stream at approx 1Mbit, while HD stream at around 5Mbit. VDSL connection is anywhere up to 24Mbit, although as this is based on line length, most customers could only expect 15 or so.

2)Yes, real time for all 4 channels.

3) Multicast for all live TV streams. Unicast for video on demand. Essentially the same way cable does distribution, except over IP. This is exactly the kind of thing that multicast was designed for. The actual number of multicast streams AT&T are streaming now is over 600 (each channel is actually 2 streams - 1 for the content, and 1 for the little picture-in-picture stream for the channel guide).

4) As live TV is multicast, this question is redundant. However, for video on demand, the content will come from servers physically close to the customer's location. Multicast sources are mostly centralized.

5) Yes.

Re:Interesting

Microsoft, which provides the software for AT&T u-verse

Oh man, thanks for the tip. Some guy was going door-to-door in my neighborhood to sell this, and it sounded good at first. Now that I know it's from you guys, I'll pass.

-jcr

Re:Interesting

(I have this service)

1) TV uses up part of your total bandwidth. We have a 6Mb connection, and an HD stream probably uses about half of it. SD probably uses a quarter of that (or @ 1/6 the original).

2) The DVR records 4 shows in real time. Everything has a sense of real time, but the box constantly buffers up 90 minutes or so of whatever channel you're on. You can only record one HD stream at a time, although you can watch another.

3) If multicast means the data for all the channels is transmit at once, this is clearly impossible. We've got about 25 HD channels, and 300+ other channels. I'm assuming there's some packet sharing peer-to-peer scheme for distributing content, but I'm not sure how it would work without losing the concept of scheduling.

4) They're laying fiber for the bandwidth. Does that help? I mean, I don't know. If they alot a certain amount of bandwidth per customer, it seems feasable.

5) Nope. First, the question itself is silly to begin with, given the nature of networking (since its a consumer product). HD definitely has a frame drop every now and then, but its generally very good. HDFoodTV seems to be worse about it. What's much more noticeable is the compression during fast action sequences, if you're familiar with HD and H.264. SD is really good, much better than actual NTSC SD.

Okay, but...

...I recall when DSL had been out for a few years, and I had inquired about getting a hookup to it. I remember being told by Qwest (after a LOT of pressing for details) that while I was close enough to a CO, the neighborhood trunk operated on what was called "integrated pair gain", which they (at the time) did not have the ability to do DSL over. I asked them for some sort of ETA on upgrading it, but was told that it wasn't profitable enough, and that "maybe in a few years...". I eventually went with Sprint Broadband Wireless, which was available (it required an antenna). After three months and roughly half the neighborhood doing the same (cable Internet wasn't available back then in that area either), Qwest suddenly announced that "hey! we can give you 128k DSL now!" - to which most of the neighborhood went "pfffth!" because we were all enjoying an average of 1.5Mb/sec up and down (with a bit of lag, but for most no big deal). It's interesting to note that most other areas in that part of Utah enjoyed 7Mb/sec or so d/l speeds.

So... question is, is this just some stopgap crapola that they can announce, but in reality will only be available to a few selected areas and that's it?

/P

I have this already

The phone company where I work is a small outfit that only has about 6-8k customers, but we've had this for the last few years, to answer a few questions that have come up, 1.The tv bandwidth is seperate from the internet. 2.It's done through peer to peer streaming, I can run 3 tvs simultaneously over one phone line, but that's it unless you have a second line. 3. The quality of service is amazing, it never hiccups and they're going to start offering HD signal soon.

Let's break this down...

fast channel changing - What's slow about pushing the button and the next channel is there? I can't even blink that fast.
video-on-demand - Cable's got it and charges out the ass. Unless it's free and actually has content (the free stuff on cable is crap), no thanks.
three set-top boxes - Right, cuz 1 just wasn't enough.
a digital video recorder - Is that ANOTHER box? Anyhow, cable without DVR isn't worth it.
a picture-in-picture feature that allows viewers to surf channels without switching channels - TV, cable, satellite have all have this for years,
an interactive program guide - Again, they've all had it for years.

If they aren't going to offer anything special, and they aren't going to have significantly lower prices, they can go ahead and call this a failure.

The only thing I see that's even halfway special is that the entire thing is going to be 'on-demand'. That's why the need to state fast channel switching, etc. They aren't going to play all channels all the time... They are only going to play the 2 channels (pic in pic) that you are currently watching, streamed from their CO. (Central Office, the local telephone switch in each city.) If they also made it so that the 'DVR' wasn't at my house, but was instead stored at the CO (it's not really a DVR, just a way to play back whenever I want) then I could see an advantage.

DVR Advantage: I missed Survivor this week because A) I forgot or B) The president had a fit and decided to tell the world, making every show in existance run later than normal. With CO-based DVR, I could just say 'I want to watch ep 785 of Survivor' and it plays it. No worries about storage space or recording mishaps. I'd even pay -extra- for this service. Take it a step further and let me watch Thursday's shows -any time- on Thursday, even before they 'air', and I'd be even happier.

But no, they'll totally miss the coolest aspects of this and instead try to merely match what everyone else already has.

I've already got this

Our house signed up for U-Verse a few weeks ago. We've got about 350 channels. It's actually delivered by fiber to a node down the block, then a specialized DSL connection that's 6 Mb/s connection. The service is extremely location specific. Our next door neighbors can't get it, so we're right on the edge.

The TV is H.264 encoded and streamed over IP to the DVR box. You can record up to 4 standard definition channels, or a single HD channel, while watching another. The standard def television looks better than regular standard def. More like 480p. The 'Hi def' channels look similar to 720p but with noticeable compression, and the occasional dropped frame. If someone were really looking for full 1080i HD, highest possible quality, I'd have some reservations recommending it. But the SD looks good enough that we're pretty happy with it. A lot of what we watch is still only on the SD channels.

Since everything is streaming, it always buffers about 90 minutes worth of footage of whatever you're watching (a la tivo). It also has some neat features like being able to show thumbnail previews of channels while you're surfing around, along with a representation of how far into the show it is.

Overall, the DVR functions are quite primitive. Its can be difficult to make the recordings you want. There doesn't seem to be any way to make only recordings of new episodes of Stargate SG1 (This is slighly less of a problem since there's only like 4 episodes left in the series. This was the only show we record that had problems.

For TV + broadband for under $100, its well worth it for us.

Not just California . . .

It's also being offered in some Texas communities, including [chron.com] Houston [chron.com].

This is old news of a much-delayed release

AT&T is using Microsoft's trouble-laden [seekingalpha.com] IPTV software.

Other areas too...

will be available in parts of Southern California communities initially.

It is also available in San Antonio, TX, Dallas, TX, Austin, TX, Milwaukee, WI, and Indianapolis, IN. Source [att.com]

That service has been here for ages

Hmm... video on demand, over a phone line, using "internet technology"... you're talking about bittorrent.