egafd.com

wey..... took ?41 tonight thankyou guys, although 287 of you viewed all the freebies, when we do the first live show it will be free also. Just need to get a couple of stars down for the night, how about my pall Stacy.

Phil McC

well pete you can buy the box in britains biggest electrical store, in 6 weeks time. and it is the hi-def box price around 170 quid. with DVB on it

Phil McC

Thanks for the offer dude!

Cheers I'd love to!

I'm really interested to see how much stuff is on there!

Keni

Around 900 channels at the start, but remember it has a web browser so as long as the web-site has confiquered for a box it will view on it. If not we can pull the feed into our servers and then re-stream it on our bandwith so stable. We even pull in live streems via satallite and the out over our SDSL's. I am planning to move real soon with a view to a building I can put 10 dishes up on with quad LNB's so as to allow me 40 extra channels on the box.
The day has arrived where you can go into a high street store and buy a box that plugs into your broadband and into your TV and Bingo Hard-core, 24 x 7......

Phil McC

Hey Phil it seems like a good idea, but is the consumer experience really going to be as good as you make out. My immediate thoughts are

1. How much bandwidth is the box going to use? There isnt 1 ISP who will give you unlimited bandwidth (some may advertise it, but everybody knows the story). Most ISP have caps on bandwidth and charge for overusage, others rate limit you after so much usage and some just turn you flat off. Anything over 10GB+ day is going to start flagging things up on many ISP's. If i can only view for an hour a day, it makes it a worthless gimmick in the end.

2. What quality are the streams? You mention one channel at least on 720i, which i wouldnt really call better than DVD (in some cases it will be worse), 720p/1080p is of course where HiDef really is, but the internet just isnt ready for the kinda of bandwidth they require, neither are consumer lines. Even for 720p the lowest i would drop to would be around 4Megabits per second using H264 codec (more if i had to use MPEG2/VC1/Divx/WMV9 etc)and trying to keep a steady uninterrupted stream of that through an ISP, just isnt going to happen (regardless of the equipment you have your end)

Sorry if i come over as really negative, im just curious as to the 2 questions above, if you could answer them that would be great. Thanx

The box uses about 400-600 for good qualility, all our live feeds will be at 600 at the start. The box is 720p.1080p Already. Using VC1 we can get Hi-def down to about 3600, you can use H264 its to hungry. VC1 gets through just about everywhere and 1 codec works on everything so cheap to run. The initial idea with Hi def will be to choose stream or down-load, so you could download to hard-drive then view.
The bandwith issue is changing by the day, BT are trying to keep caps on it but it is changing by he second. You could view around 4 hours a day right now without any issues and IPTV is not to replace SKY it is niche content viewing. We have boxes in 2 major hi-street stores in around 6 weeks, this may well sound to good to be true but it is. Our network handles over 1% of all UK traffic we can cope with up to 15% of it. We can multicast over 30% of the network I can assure you no one else can. The box will be advertised on the 30th busy English spoken web-site in the world and the box will have channels from nearly 90 countries on it.

I last thing I have seen exchange boards than can put 100mb to your house so getting 4mb stable in less than a year will be a piece of piss for around 80% of the UK population. Much has happend in a year.

Phil McC

You think I could still get into the Open University?

Yes Marcus. but what's the point I don't think there is anything worth nicking, ha ha.

Jim

Yea, you're right Jim, maybe Oxford would be a better bet.
Could corrupt a few co-eds whilst I'm at it.............

I they could teach you a thing or 2, spent all day configuring servers ready for the big server going in on Monday, just got in from work. This tech stuff is hard work porn was a doddle compaired to this,

Phil McC