[LINK] Weekend Magazine - The Future of Australian Television - Taxation, Licensing, Advertising or Criminalization?

Tom Koltai tomk at unwired.com.au
Mon Nov 16 09:47:44 AEDT 2009



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Boxall 
> Sent: Sunday, 15 November 2009 9:31 AM
> To: Tom Koltai
> Cc: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Weekend Magazine - The Future of 
> Australian Television - Taxation, Licensing, Advertising or 
> Criminalization?
> 
> 
> On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 at 14:18:59 +1100 Tom Koltai wrote:
> > ...
> > Standard Definition TV picture @ 400 MB per hour.
> In my experience, H.264 video encoded at much less than 1800 
> kilobytes/sec (with AAC audio at 160 kilobytes/sec: a little 
> less than 1 
> gigabyte/hour) yields poor quality. Perceptions differ, of 
> course, but 
> adopting too low a standard risks alienating the market.

Actually David, the market (most file sharing users) still prefer the
lower SD resolution versions.

The Most popular TV Show globally this week is House, MD

If we compare the two resolutions, there is a almost a 7 to 1 preference
for the lower 980/1020 Kbps encoded formats.

House - 6x01-02 - Broken.avi HDTV 
Size: 700 MB 
Clicks: 6919 
<http://www.tvu.org.ru/index.php?show=episodes&sid=27869>

Versus 720 P

House - 6x01-02 - Broken.mkv  720p. HDTV  
Size: 2.19 GB 
Clicks: 1063 
<http://www.tvu.org.ru/index.php?show=episodes&sid=27870>

Therefore for the moment at least, Bandwidth is still a concern and
Standard Definition is the predominant meme.

> 
> > 11.2 GB per week per person (based on 4 hours and 11 minutes of TV 
> > viewing time)
> Your children must differ markedly from those I know. Four 
> hours per day 
> would be closer to the mark.

I find 2 hours per day seems to satisfy my two, however, the American
Bureau of Economic Analysis stil claims 4 hours eleven for discretionary
watching of a mixed bag including FTA, Cable and Video on Demand.
 
> > 1 cent per gigabyte.
> How much does a gigabyte actually cost? My ISP wants to charge $30:
> >
> > You can return your service immediately to faster speeds, by
> > purchasing one of the following additional bandwidth data blocks.
> >
> > 250MB - $15.00
> > 500MB - $18.00
> > 1GB - $30.00
> >
> (An offer from said ISP, following my consumption of my monthly data 
> allocation and consequent shaping of my service to a nominal 64 kb/s).

My calculation of the cost of one Gigabyte of American based content
delivered to a user in Darwin (being the most expensive terrestrial
connection we have in Australia) for example equals approximately
$0.637294 cents.

(Before you all scream, "Wow how did you get that number?" I should
explain that is calculated on the basis of the Gigabyte taking 30.452
days to get from "a" to "b". As in one months billing cycle.)
N.B. it includes ISP on costs for example a monthly autobill percentage
of the EFTPOS fee that an ISP incurs on auto-rebill of a debit card.

Conversely, the same Gigabyte delivered via P2P from mainly Australian
peers equals only $0.15294 cents per GB.  

(Is it any wonder I am proponent of local caching, ubiquitous peering
and P2P technologies?)

> >
> > Develop an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) that scrapes all content 
> > from all sources.
> A while back, I played around with MythTV. It did a surprisingly good 
> job of monitoring broadcast EPGs and recording programs I hadn't 
> realised were on. That's only part of the job but, clearly, 
> much of the 
> coding has been done.
> > ...

MYTH TV is nice but doesn't even come close to the scraper that I
envisaged.
There is an apple based program that I found some time back that gets
close. 
(Actually the first time ever I considered purchasing an Apple) and I
apologise but forgot the name of the program.

The problem is not actually the FTA offerings. The problem is being able
to program the viewing preferences of each family member according to
their desires and interests, and not what is available via the rather
limited appointment TV or Video on Demand offerings.

My argument that an economical user pays licence fee eliminates the
file-sharing controversy and allows everyone to have the best of all
worlds.
Those that use the net to download "free" content pay more for usage
than those that don't.

Excluding VOIP utilisation, my entire Net activity per month fits into
less than 1 GB of bandwidth. (And that includes a pile of Youtube.)

> 
> On a side note: could we embark on a "z" minimisation program? 
> "Criminalization" - that's just *so* Yankee!

Yeah well, for work related reasons, my MS Word is set to American
spelling.

MS Word doesn't yet allow you to use style sheets for Document Template
specific spelling options. Or if it does, my version doesn't. (Office
2003).



>  
> -- 
> David Boxall                    |  Any given program,


Tom


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