Time Warner Cable Ends San Diego Broadband TV Experiment; Cites Lack Of Uptake And Non-Scalabilty
Time Warner Cable started an experiment in San Diego in summer of 2005: letting its customers in the area watch TV over their broadband connections…the PC service offered the same 75 channels that were available with its standard service. Now, after fewer than 1% of the 9,000 customers actually watched any TV that way, it has closed the service after 566 days of operation, reports Multichannel News.
Peter Stern, EVP of product management for TWC told Multichannel that the PC did not become a replacement for the TV in participating homes. Instead, the channels that came into their PCs were used almost as a second thought. Viewers who used the service might be working on their computer in their office and trying to keep on top of a live sports event, like a baseball game, or the news, through a cable news channel.
Also, more importantly, the company realized technical approach could not be used on a mass scale. And it assigned video engineers in Westminster, Colo., and data engineers in Herndon, Va., to come up with a better approach.
Related:
—Time Warner Cable Starts Testing Broadband TV, in San Diego
—Time Warner’s San Diego IPTV Experiment
Posted In: Media & Publishing, TV, Cable & Telecom, Technologies / Formats, Broadband, Companies, Time Warner
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Comments (1)
Feb 5, 2007 2:08 PM
Well I have maintained all along that this concept that somehow people would like to view video on their computers will at the most be a niche market. If the idea is that somehow the people will watch TV programming and movies on a Computer or use the computer as a means to download and transport to their TV’s is hype and shall remain so.
The long term viability of media content being all digital and being delivered to the house through High speed broadband connections is about 10 plus years away. For Cable companies the investment cost that has to be undertaken in terms of newer pipes to the house, the change to the Set top boxes to allow for new compression logic to be deployed ( MPEG4 part10/h.264 etc) and provide On Demand video content in HD is not the best use of their capital resources for the next 5 -7 years. The Cable conglomerates are similar in approach as Hollywood in taking risks and rightly so, this investment strategy is a gamble and they are likely going to push the decisions to be made as far as possible.
On the other hand Telco’s realize that Cable operators can offer the voice services today without having to make major investments in infrastructure. For the Telco’s it is important to deploy High capacity broadband connections to maintain status quo i.e. hold onto their share of subscribers for voice services.
When you look at the stock prices for the two industries as a whole they are just steady and holding, the market expects that the investments the Telco’s make in infrastructure is necessary for them to survive literally. The continue to face roadblocks in getting license to provide services related to TV programming.
Time Warner’s decision to close this chapter of experiment is not related to technology as much as the user experience of watching TV programming on a PC. This is always going to be a niche market. Even amongst the younger audience, watching on computers or on Mobile hand held devices are just small niches.
All the companies currently involved in such activities are only involved in terms of putting a placeholder so as to feel they are doing something.
It is going tobe interesting to see how the Video on Demand Services over IPTV fair given that HD content and legacy MPEG2 content needs a larger amount of bandwidth than that is available for most customers in the US.