[Discuss] open protocols for IP-TV

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Tom Metro suggested:
> And the best way to break free of the old-world TV model that the
> existing studios, networks, and cable companies are clinging to is to
> reduce barriers for the new upstarts to reach our living rooms.

Go to Best Buy and take a look at their TV department.  Not much ever changes,
thanks to the fact that Best Buy eliminated virtually all their competition
(anyone remember Tweeter, Fretter, Highland Superstores, Tech Hifi?) and to
the extent they do face competition, for one reason or another you don't find
it in Massachusetts (Fry's Electronics, anyone?)  But there is one fairly new
exhibit on display:  set-top boxes aka media players.

They are all the same price, $99, unless they have local storage.  The brands
currently are: Apple, D-Link/Boxee, LG, Logitech, Roku, Sony, TV, Western
Digital.  Sadly, Roku has gone the exact opposite direction:  after pioneering
the Firefly media server for Linux, the project was abandoned about 3 years
ago in favor of jumping in the sack with pay-TV operations like Netflix.

Roku and Apple aside, the others support the Digital Living Network Alliance
standard which is related to but not quite synonymous with UPnP (most devices
that support DLNA also support UPnP and vice-versa).  This standard seems to
be one thing that everyone (except those two vendors) agrees on in terms of
set-top boxes and media servers.

There are now about 4 DLNA-compliant open source media server projects: 
MythTV, MediaTomb, Rygel and Twonky.  I haven't yet tried the newer ones; my
hunch is that assuming the MythTV developers have completely gone clueless,
the back-end of their 0.25 release should remain a step ahead of these
upstarts.

If we could express this concept simply enough, maybe we could suggest this as
one of the issues that the Occupy Wall Street folks could sink their teeth
into.  And I do think the concept is simple:  as recently as the 1990s (and
even the early 2000s) we had a single device that could play back and record
all TV content regardless of whether it originated on pay TV or broadcast TV. 
We called it...the VCR.

Dire Straits wrote the anthem for this concept:  "I want my MTV!"  Suppose
they changed the lyrics to:  "I want my VCR!"  And suppose instead of
government /being/ the problem, the government could be used to /solve/ the
problem by imposing standards compliance.

Those $99 media players at Best Buy are an endangered species regardless: 
their functionality will be folded into all new TV sets within the next couple
years.

-rich