HD digital TV
THERE are many undersea optic fibre cables of major capacity linking the US, UK and Europe to each other and to the rest of the world, but Africa only has the SAT/3 SAFE cable.
A lot of work is being done to land more undersea cables in SA, including the Seacom, EASSy and Infraco initiatives, and there has been talk of another between the Cape and Brazil.
Local operators are also building high-capacity fibre networks inside the country in metropolitan areas.
Both these infrastructure operations are needed to support increasingly bandwidth-hungry internet applications and multimedia content, much of which is stored offshore.
“Today, 60% of internet activity involves sharing files and media, including illegal swapping of movies and music,” says Andy Brauer, Business Connection’s chief technology officer.
Sharing personal video clips is also becoming popular, such as footage of overseas holidays, and this paves the way to person-to-person TV.
For example, when people move to another town or country they can allow their friends and family they left behind to view their activities in their new environment, and vice versa.
Most laptop computers today have S-video capability, which allows them to be plugged into a TV or DVD player that has this type of connection.
“All the latest DVD players have them,” says Brauer.
He says the next big trend will be widespread use of high-definition digital TV (HDTV) sets that have a standard connection that allows internet based TV programmes and other content to be downloaded and watched.
“It will be possible to do everything on HDTV that you can now do on a PC.”
This will include downloading movies from Amazon.com and watching internet-based TV channels.
With traditional satellite TV, viewers have to watch programmes according to a schedule or after they have been aired, but with IPTV viewers can download a whole series and watch it when they want to.
“First we had convergence of data and voice, and now broadcast is joining this world with TV, radio and video.”
He says it is possible for movie owners to protect their content and control the number of times it is viewed after downloading, and how viewers pay for it, using digital rights management (DRM), which is based on electronic certificates.
The growing demands of multimedia applications on broadband bandwidth is taking its toll on the internet, which is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, and it is impossible to guarantee throughput quality and speed. But the next internet generation will be mostly fibre driven and will enable real-time digital TV broadcast.
This will require tremendous amounts of fibre infrastructure and mechanisms in between that allow for guaranteed bandwidth, says Brauer.
He says once movies can be downloaded and watched quickly and easily in real time using high-speed broadband, it could threaten video stores.
Global revenues generated from online video content is expected to reach $4,5bn by 2012 from $1,2bn this year, according to online research company In-stat.
This growth will be stimulated by an increase in subscription services such as Netflix, which charges a flat monthly fee to deliver bundled packages of online content that can be viewed on home TV sets.
Advertisement-supported video will also start emerging from major TV networks and will be a strong contributor to growth in this market.
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