HD For Indies

Internet speed battle escalates | Chicago Tribune

New Comcast links promise to fly along 25 times faster, and threaten to transform the television industry
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Comcast Corp.'s chief executive, Brian Roberts, unveiled a computer connection that delivers data 25 times faster than today's cable modem services.
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Called Wideband, the service could be available commercially in a couple of years, Roberts said, but declined to say at what price.
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policymakers in Washington wring their hands over America's declining position regarding broadband connectivity. An international study last month found that more than a dozen countries now have greater coverage and faster speeds for Internet connections than the United States.
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introduced a resolution to make it national policy to supply universally available Internet connection speeds of 100 megabits per second by 2015.

(Current broadband varies from 1 to 10 megabits/sec)

Consider that current HDTV is 19.2 megabits/sec, and you start to get the idea of what that could do for you.

Interest quote from an Internet based video service:

"In three to five years, there will be devices, not computers, that you can connect to your flat-screen TV that will bring anything you want to see from the Web," said Pulver. "You can bypass the middle people, including the cable TV systems, and just download programs offered by content producers.

"I believe the cable companies will try to put up roadblocks to keep that from happening. They will have the fight of their lives."


Obviously, this starts to open doors for indie content - what if you could host/distribute HD movies from a website or service directly to a TV without a middleman on a pay-per-view basis? That's a big leap from what the guy above is suggesting, but that'd be the ultimate - if you could subscribe to a show the same way you subscribe to an RSS feed (speaking of which, you ARE running NetNewsWire, right?).

-mike

PS - thanks to longtime reader/contributor Cord Frederic Romberg for sending this one in. See something you think should be up on HD4NDs? Send it in! Email at top of page.

Labels: distribution, future, hardware, Internet, online distribution, online video