SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The British-based broadcaster Sky (with operations in the EU and elsewhere) has decided it doesn't need to keep attaching satellite dishes to the walls of its customers' homes.
The BBC reports:
The pay TV company already offers some programming online on its Sky Go and Now TV* services and through Sky boxes.
Sky said offering the option was a "major development" that would let it enter new markets.
It hopes that making its hundreds of channels more widely available will increase both revenue and profits.
Italy will be its first market to get all Sky channels online, followed by Austria, with the UK expected to follow later this year or in 2019.
Sky is not proposing to stop broadcasting by satellite. The move will allow customers who cannot have a dish or do not want one to get Sky, a spokesperson said. A Sky box will still be required.
The company's move is a response to greater competition from the likes of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.
*Now TV is an internet-based, subscriptionless pay-TV service. Established 5 years ago, it's wholly owned by Sky.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Friday January 26 2018, @01:56PM (1 child)
Depends.
If you are already having to run individual cables to every household anyway, then utilising those cables rather than having to use "more" cables or satellite dishes or having broadcast infrastructure doesn't make much sense. Effectively you're spending twice to do one job.
And given that almost everyone has broadband, and on that broadband you can in theory happily deliver video-on-demand, broadcast-TV, telephone service, internet service, etc. then it makes more sense to start dialling down the broadcast stuff and investing more in getting those lines up to scratch (which has multiple benefits).
When you consider that people don't just want TV at home any more, it also makes much more sense to focus on Internet which applies everywhere rather than things stuck to the side of a house that is empty for a vast portion of the day.
In the same way, in business, everything is now going IP - VoIP telephones internally and SIP trunks externally, CCTVoIP, access control over IP, etc.
I work in a school... the maintenance guys no longer bother with a "radio". They all have smartphones with 4G and they stream their favourite music station if they are doing a job. It would cost pence to get a radio and keep it running, but their smartphone is also a torch, a reference tool, an ordering mechanism, a job organiser, a site-contact-radio, etc. etc. etc.
Rather than launch things 10 km up (or whatever it is) that can only send the same signal to all of Europe, and which need fixed infrastructure at every client end that you have to install, Sky are also an ISP... so just get those same engineers on the ground to install an Internet line and save those satellite operation costs while also providing many more services, and much more targeted service. It just makes sense.
To be honest, I don't understand why it's not the law to do certain things when building new houses or digging up existing streets. Put in a utility tubing with multiple levels. Sewage. Water. Gas. Electricity. Broadband (preferably fibre). Couple of spares for "future expansion". You can use it to do everything from controlling traffic lights, to providing residential broadband, TV and telephony and back it all over IP. Hell, we're already talking about smart meters for water, gas and electricity that need to use broadband too. If you treat it as a utility, stick it in every street, you could cable up anything from a streetlight to a mobile phone mast to a new office block all off the same wires. And it would give you an ideal amount of routing... literally the more redundant and connected your streets were, the more routes both the power and the data could take if there's a cabling fault and still provide service unnoticed.
If we were to ever "start again", I can only imagine that we would just cable everything with fibre and back EVERYTHING we could over it via IP.
And bulk-delivery / broadcast is dying. Barely a small percentage of TV is watched "live" now. It's all time-shifted, catch-up, on-demand, paused-and-resumed. Broadcast isn't suitable for that. Even if you want broadcast, things like DOCSIS, TCP/IP etc. provide for broadcast and multicast streams quite easily without unnecessarily loading the intermediate routes.
There aren't many technologies where you can say it can run almost everything, from broadcast mass traffic, to tiny real-time traffic, and everything in between and replace dozens or hundreds of previous uses. Everything from burglar alarm communication, telephones, panic buttons, CCTV, etc. etc. etc. all using the same wires/fibres and protocols.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday January 26 2018, @08:26PM
Around here it is.
Specifically for new housing subdivisions. There are existing service tubes, and totally spare tubes, and they all get dedicated (ownership transferred) to the city upon subdivision completion.
Digging up existing streets, to fix problems is different. Who would fix a water leak or broken cable if doing so required rebuilding ALL the infrastructure in the neighborhood. They'd just walk away.
Complete street rebuilds do require this, but those are rare. Most streets get simple repaving, done by people you don't want anywhere near your circuits.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.