Thursday, November 18, 2004
SBC & Microsoft To Provide TV On High-Speed Lines
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 08:00 AM
"SBC Communications, as part of its effort to compete head-on with the cable industry for television subscribers, plans to announce today that it will pay $400 million to Microsoft for software used to deliver TV programming over high-speed data lines ... SBC plans to deploy Microsoft's software to encode television programming before it is sent to subscribers and then decode the same programs on TV set-top boxes in customers' homes. Most important, the software compresses digital signals so that video programs can be sent over high-speed data lines."
I know that Microsoft has been testing IP-TV for some time now outside of the US, we posted on this some time ago. SBC plans to start selling programming through its fiber and copper network from the satellite provider, EchoStar, by the fourth quarter of 2005. If the reliability is anywhere close to VOIP (which I like very much) and there isn't any loss in the quality of programming, I wouldn't mind trying this out at all.
I know that Microsoft has been testing IP-TV for some time now outside of the US, we posted on this some time ago. SBC plans to start selling programming through its fiber and copper network from the satellite provider, EchoStar, by the fourth quarter of 2005. If the reliability is anywhere close to VOIP (which I like very much) and there isn't any loss in the quality of programming, I wouldn't mind trying this out at all.
