DStv ON DEMAND via MWEB ADSL

Not according to the DSTV sign up process - try it yourself. Of course it may work, but they say only MWEB is supported.
Either way since MWEB=DSTV, it has everything to do with them. I can stream BBC way faster.
 
diabolus said:
Well to just to mention, the popular USA service, Hulu.com works similarly, they keep the last 5 episodes of a series and you better watch them within a given time or it's gone (bascially encouraging you to return on a regular basis vs. watching everything on one day) . The catch however is : It's FREE .
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That's probably true... better then to just hire the DVD. That's as on-demand as you get.
 
diabolus said:
But iplayer and hulu is FREE . It's also not tied to an ISP for "Exclusive access" [whatever that might be]. This DSTV equivalent has less content and costs R600 p/m EXCLUDING your internet costs. Technically they are BLOCKING access to things that should be cheap and easily available....that's the trend.. I can guarentee you Hulu/iPlayer would never have taken off if it costs R600 p/m just to access it.

So the only people who's going to use this are people who -already- have DSTV -and- uncapped. Even then these same people will only use it as a supplement for the odd episode they missed , not as a regular source of content. It will be IRREGULAR USE at best since their DSTV PVR will still be much more convenient.

Plus the whole "mobility" and "iphone" stuff becomes totally MOOT since we don't have mobile-uncapped and it costs a fortune on 3G. No one in their right minds will use this service on their phone/ipad/mobile device unless they link up to a WIFI hotspot on an uncapped account [of which i'm not even sure exists in public places]. (unless Vodacom/MTN allows FREE TRAFFIC to Mweb/DSTV)
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Ok, maybe I shouldn't have used iPlayer as the example. I just used it as it is the most famous (And most advanced technologically) A better example would be Sky Player (http://skyplayer.sky.com/vod/page/default/home.do) which is the main pay-tv service in the UK, exactly like DSTV. And that is only available to their subscribers.
Hell, HBO in the USA (The main pay channel there) doesn't even offer something like this. So it is pretty cool that we have it.

As for the iPhone stuff with this, I was refering to WiFi. iPhone with WiFi make up a huge amount of iPlayer traffic. You can stream it over 3G in england, but you get capped very quickly (Yeah, they capped me on my "unlimited data" contract when I reached 500mb iirc )
If ETV or SANC ever offers On Demand, I would expect that to be free :-)
 
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It is limited to MWeb initially, but they will approve other ISP's. I imagine MWeb will require that they will need to set up their own CDN
 
It's not limited to Mweb - I used it earlier without any problems, and I'm on Afrihost. I think they just punt the Mweb portion because of the fact that it's uncapped (so clueless users don't nail their cap on the videos), and obviously because Mweb is part of Naspers too.
 
Buffering on Demand, or Jerkoffvision, or Low-Content TV. They need to upgrade the entire network to get anywhere close to instantaneous and true Video on Demand. Will be nice when we get fibre to the door and hopefully this will push Telkom to upgrade the backbone. We should all have entry level 1024kb at least.
 
I was searching the forum for the announcement cos I missed it this morning. Did not realise it was this :\
 
ADSL related? like? Isn't this ADSL related... I mean it was pretty obvious right from the start that this would happen. Why else would they launch uncapped? Everyone who knows, knows that there is no money in uncapped. If you disagree with me, that's fine.. but R500 for uncapped 4Meg. Work out the costs, even downloading 100GB blows the business model to hell. Now if you have someone downloading content for which they are paying (cross subsidisation) then it makes perfect sense.

I'm still curious as to what you were expecting.. good market research for the next ISP to swoop in and give you what you want
 
gripen said:
ADSL related? like? Isn't this ADSL related... I mean it was pretty obvious right from the start that this would happen. Why else would they launch uncapped? Everyone who knows, knows that there is no money in uncapped. If you disagree with me, that's fine.. but R500 for uncapped 4Meg. Work out the costs, even downloading 100GB blows the business model to hell. Now if you have someone downloading content for which they are paying (cross subsidisation) then it makes perfect sense.

I'm still curious as to what you were expecting.. good market research for the next ISP to swoop in and give you what you want
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I hear what you are saying.

I don't really know what I was expecting. Cheaper uncapped perhaps? A DSTV Premium + uncapped 4Mb ADSL for like R700 or something...Just not this crap, useless 'on demand' stuff.
 
Cheaper uncapped? Crazy. Better uncapped rather. Perhaps a "leecher" friendly uncapped (something like Express+ but in the Mweb price area i.e. off peak line rate)

This whole thing is ok but nothing new. Whatever happened to making use of the Ethernet port on the HD PVR for ADSL? Then you don't need a PC at all. No nonsense. Browse with the remote and download. That was the plan was it not? It's a fail until they get that right.

You will get your R700 combo about the same time we get channel selection on so-called Multi (I mean NoChoice). Love my HD so I won't complain too much.

Why are people complaining? It's free ( for a lot of us ). Would it be better if you had to pay or what? Pretty obvious that something like that is coming. See my post above. Pretty sure we will be discussing this in our podcast this week :)
 
gripen said:
Cheaper uncapped? Crazy. Better uncapped rather. Perhaps a "leecher" friendly uncapped (something like Express+ but in the Mweb price area i.e. off peak line rate)

This whole thing is ok but nothing new. Whatever happened to making use of the Ethernet port on the HD PVR for ADSL? Then you don't need a PC at all. No nonsense. Browse with the remote and download. That was the plan was it not? It's a fail until they get that right.

You will get your R700 combo about the same time we get channel selection on so-called Multi (I mean NoChoice). Love my HD so I won't complain too much.

Why are people complaining? It's free ( for a lot of us ). Would it be better if you had to pay or what? Pretty obvious that something like that is coming. See my post above. Pretty sure we will be discussing this in our podcast this week :)
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What is free?
 
The DSTV VOD content. That is, if you already have a DSTV Subscription of course. If not, what you want to pay to have access to it? I don't think it's worth much to be honest. It's still going to be easier to download pirated stuff than use their site. That's why it's such a fail. It needs to be easy and just work.
 
gripen said:
The DSTV VOD content. That is, if you already have a DSTV Subscription of course. If not, what you want to pay to have access to it? I don't think it's worth much to be honest. It's still going to be easier to download pirated stuff than use their site. That's why it's such a fail. It needs to be easy and just work.
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Erm, no, no one wants to pay to access it.

Exactly, this might be one of the worst offers ever. Specially after it was hyped up so much beforehand.
 
Having survived the 11 pages of *cough* 'interesting' comments I thought I'd give some of my views.

I agree that this has been available for a while and probably got somewhat more publicity than it needed - but then MWEB are trying to push a few of the larger ISP's to peer - so I'm totally for the press release. Every attempt at convincing 'certain' ISPs to get into the open peering is a good thing for all...

As for my experience:

As my ISP peers with M-WEB at JINX I got pretty much what I expected - a VERY fast download of the latest episode of Dexter - after it had pulled a portion of the file to disk I was able to commence playback (the file continued to stream down as fast as my connection allowed). I was reasonably surprised by the statistics offered by the player - it indicated bit rates around the 8Mbps mark... I'd have expected a variable bit rate encoding in the 2-4Mbps range as having been good enough - and also a saver on bandwidth... Especially if one considers most of DSTV’s SD broadcasts are in that range.

If the primary purpose of this platform is on-demand services for premium DSTV customers I’d have to agree that it’s a bit of a waste – if however DSTV is just the first of many services I foresee some REAL advantages here. When MWEB announced their extensive uncapped offering I was immediately expecting a Netflix style service – this isn’t quite there but one can certainly see were this is going.

So, overall, while I agree that it may have been a somewhat underwhelming press release – the service and its offering to peered ISPs make sense in the long run.

Now if only MWEB limited the availability of the content to PEERED clients only ....
 
I think before jumping to TV 'on demand' they need to make sure that people are actually able to with their lines watch it 'on demand' without having to wait a day to watch it!
 
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