Moves in the news ...

This last week has seen lots of interesting articles around convergence ... I have just been able to quickly scan through them, so if you have a comment or an errata, just let me know and I change this. Let's start:

The Top 10 Things You Need to Know to Successfully Deploy IPTV: Myrio is one interesting piece in the IPTv puzzle, so these guys must know what they are talking about - almost, I only disagree on point 5 - there is no multicast vs unicast debate - broadcasting over a network (multicast) is expensive for a telecommunications company - 1 exchange with 3000 subscribers, 100 channels at 3.7 Mbps = 370 Mbps that you need to pre-allocate (lets not even go to HDTv); if you reduce the number of subscribers, if you have not many subs in an exchange, then the economics are not viable - as a consequence only Tier1 suppliers can (in theory) have the luxury of putting moer and more bandwidth to supply for more and more channels around the long tail. In the long run, broadcast should remain through the air (a-la BT Vision or Aggregator) timeshift/timeslip & vod, all come as unicast. A sentence that called my attention - due to a comment from an ex colleague around the subject - is: "You might encounter scalability limitations when your IPTV subscriber base numbers in the tens of thousands, and then again at hundreds of thousands". So remember - problems in the 10's of thousands appear to have been solved - don't bet your solution on horizontal scalability, if the architecture is inherently not scalable, adding more hardware won't make the problems go away !

Azureus' HD Vids Trump YouTube: same move as the guys from Skype & BitTorrent, I suppose that the more the merrier - but Peer2Peer has a lot (A LOT!!) of potential to sort out the problems of scalability around deployments.

Finally, it is official ! BTVision is online (1 & 2), so now that the biggest telecommunications company in the UK (8th biggest in the country) has launched their Freeview + broadband + telephony service (although a bit cheeky in their marketing ... a colleague now was thinking of buying the service as he cannot get freeview thinking the broadcast was over the broadband line !).

PS: Isn't Google video looking more and more like a proper TV service ?