New players are battling to capture viewers by providing more versatile user interfaces than the familiar set top box. New tuning devices can be managed from a variety of controllers, from smart phones to pointers to tablets. Unfortunately, many of these devices have yet to address the issue of viewer cost and versatility across media sources.

One solution would be to use one STB that accepts a variety of input signals. Let’s look at how this works. The receiver could support satellite, cable and terrestrial tuners as well as internet connections and local storage. One example from Gigablue is shown below.

The receiver would be connected to a monitor, like that shown below, providing whatever signal the monitor needs. One advantage of such a configuration is that the monitors need not incorporate tuners, which add cost. An aside note is that such monitors by law cannot be called “TV sets” in the U.S.

Additional TV sets, video monitors, laptops and desktop computers can be fed wirelessly with something like a Chromecast or Teewe stick, shown below. These devices receive via Wi-Fi a streamed content and output it to an HDMI connector to drive a display. Software for controlling the device runs on any mobile phone.

You are being watched

An increasingly common feature of the new range of STBs and dongles is that they may keep track of your viewing habits. In the background sophisticated software monitors viewed content, time and other viewer behavior. A few devices can even determine the number of people in the room or if a room is empty.

One example. I like to watch a specific worldwide news summary in the morning for about 20 minutes. Based on my repeated behavior, my system has learned this and now priorities my menu choices based on that history.

Just like Google displays ads based upon your browsing history, my home system also knows my preferences for evening entertainment and loads my home server with content it thinks I might like. In addition, the software provides a list of current and upcoming live events in which I might be interested.

Incompatible control solutions

In March, AT&T announced plans for several DirecTV-branded over-the-top services, including DirecTV Now—a contract-free OTT internet television service similar to Dish Network's Sling TV.

Other new services include; DirecTV Mobile—a service that will offer premium video and special digital content for phones. The last new ATT venture is DirecTV Preview, an ad-supported channel featuring content from the Audience Network, Otter Media, which claims to emphasize “millennial-focused" video and other partners.

Note in the photo this DirecTV Genie receiver has no terrestrial or cable tuner inputs. This means that there can be no software providing a unified user interface to support a range of media sources. The only way to get access to your private media is to patch the software using something like MythTV. That product is described as “The Ultimate Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub…a free and open source alternative to Windows Media Center or TiVo.”

DishTV is also a closed ecosystem. There is no browser available so viewers are limited to only the sites provided by the company’s ap function. The ability to “sling” your DishTV connection to any internet enabled device does get around some of these limitations.

Unfortunately, even if you copied your entire DVD collection to your home server, with DishTV, you cannot view the movies because this feature has been deleted from Sling’s implementation. The other drawback of the SlingTV implementation is that it is dependent upon the subscriber’s internet uplink speed which is typically much lower than the downlink.

Satellite television systems have traditionally offered limited video on demand capability by either downloading the media to the PVR or utilizing multiple channels to stagger starting times. Adding an internet connection with IPTV capabilities will allow for real VOD without the bandwidth requirement when live viewing.

What about UHD 4K?

UHD 4K imagery represents an opportunity to the satellite industry. Because the number of land-based broadband connections with speeds in excess of 20Mbit/s is limited, satellite is currently just about the only way for viewers to access this high quality imagery.

The recent UEFA championships provided a perfect example of this limitation as the matches were broadcast worldwide via satellite in UHD. Unless you had an FTTH internet connection like Orange in France or SkyLife in Korea, bet you didn’t see the matches on your OTT or OTA system.

What about cable?

It would seem like a no-brainer for cable TV providers to use IPTV for VOD and leave linear TV on the legacy cable system. Comcast thinks so to.

Says the company about Xfinity, “You’ll never need to scroll through a guide again. Let X1 search across live TV, On Demand, and your DVR library to find exactly what you want to watch, fast. X1 will even make recommendations just for you and give you shortcuts to what you watch most. Because TV shouldn’t be work – it should be fun. This solution goes even one step further than SlingTV by offering live streaming from your smartphone camera.

Cable is intrinsically shared bandwidth. DOCSIS, the system used to get internet onto your cable TV connection, normally uses a shared bandwidth ring network. This means that a fixed amount of bandwidth is shared among all users connected to the ring.

The downside of cable internet

Cable subscribers share a common network, and in the early days might oversell by a factor of 60 or more the available bandwidth. As the number of users online increased, internet speeds for everybody slowed--a fixed resource divided by an increasing number of users.

Early DSL provider commercials showed a family having to access their cable internet at odd times of the night, when their neighbors might not be on line. Dad might use his laptop from mid-night to 2am, mom from 2am-4am and the kids from 6am to 8am. The issue, cable providers divide the bandwidth between all their customers operating from a single zone or drop point.

Consider this: 4096 QAM 12 bits/second/Hz means that for the 900Mhz cable downstream signal, half of that is typically reserved for standard digital and analog TV. That leaves 5.4 Gbps or enough bandwidth to feed 216 homes with 25Mb/s download and 3Mb/s upload broadband.

The currently used cable amplifiers provide 40 MHz. upstream, take away half and you have enough bandwidth for 80 homes. The typical cable infrastructure ring architecture uses a node feeding between 200 and 2000 homes. With such a design, it is easy to see why it is insufficient to support high-speed internet.

What customers really need is one solution for all of these distribution paths. Why doesn’t someone build a single STB that does everything? The FCC has proposed a solution of using aps to replace STBs (and their monthly cost). Based on what I’m hearing, the cable and satellite giants are working overtime to kill that proposal just like cable did to the CableCard.

Until the FCC and other government regulators collectively address the issue of access, viewers will continue to face a maze of remote controls and STBs just to watch the media for which they pay.