Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 2 June 2006, 6:00 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Wednesday 31/05/2006
And this is why broadband matters: I get back to my desk to find a Hauppauge Personal Video Recorder package waiting to be plugged in. By itself, it's nothing that new — a digital TV tuner with a USB connector and software to save programmes on your PC — but it comes bundled with Orb access. Orb streams live and recorded video from your PC over broadband to whatever device you have plugged into the Internet elsewhere. That includes mobile devices hanging off wireless. So if you're already paying through the nose for a particular subscription TV channel and don't fancy paying yet more to see it again on the hoof, this might be for you.
The same day, Rory from our sister consumer site cnet.co.uk comes back from the launch of the Slingbox, an eccentrically shaped gizmo that hooks into your existing video installation and supplies the same sort of features. He's raving about it: people exposed to Slingbox tend to behave like that. Last year, an American marketing bod came into the offices ostensibly to talk about wireless networking, but halfway through his laptop-based PowerPoint pitch he said "Oh, you've got to see this" and pulled up some baseball game from his home setup in Atlanta. I guess the poor man hadn't had time to finish watching it in his hotel room before breakfast.
You don't need to be a telly addict to see what's happening — broadband is spawning entirely new services, just like we said it would back in the last century when we were bashing down BT's door asking very nicely for them to get their digits out. There is a degree of pain involved for the established media and communications companies, because none of the new services are a very good fit for the way they've always done things, but we can live with that — provided always that the establishment doesn't try and change the rules to nobble the competition. As if they would.
But the rules are changing anyway. Is it legal to stream TV over the Net? You won't get a straight answer from anyone, because nobody's quite sure — even when they apply the usual rule that "if we want it to happen, it's legal, if we don't want you to do it, it's not", because nobody is quite sure what they want. It might seem cut-and-dried that if Sky wants to open up a new revenue stream by selling a channel over the Net, it's not going to want to let you provide that same channel to yourself from your existing subscription. Yet if you're paying the bandwidth costs and consuming more TV than otherwise, then Sky will get more revenue by letting you than by stopping you — even if they could. If you then multicast the channel to your friends who don't have a subscription — what then? What do Sky's advertisers think? Its content providers? There is no consensus, and no sign of one, except among the consumers.
The same uneasy truce among the undecided exists elsewhere. You won't find a mainstream Linux distribution with a full range of codecs to play all the online content that's out there, because so much of that technology is larded about with patent and licence restrictions. Yet it takes a moment to find the places that provide all that stuff packaged and ready for instant installation: the distro bods are happy to point you there with a "We can't officially support this, but here it is" figleaf. The IP owners look the other way. Again, broadband has rewritten the rules faster than anyone can work out what's going on and whether they like it.
You think about this sort of thing when your only connection with the outside world is a long wire connected to a shortwave radio and your iPod is under attack by a homicidal creationist wagtail.
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