Originally published November 29 2005
SBC previews future of TV with cross-platform services
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
IPTV (the majority owner of Cingular) will use the internet to deliver "personalized bundles" of services, including wireless communications, video, voice and broadband data. A set-top box will display everything on a TV.
IPTV uses the Internet to deliver a wider range of programmes and services than conventional cable and satellite TV, but uses a set-top box to push the video to television sets rather than computers.
At the Telecom '05 show in Las Vegas, she stood in for Chairman and CEO Edward Whitacre Jr, who had been scheduled to give a keynote address, but appeared briefly by video instead.
SBC has just finished a field trial of an IPTV service and is preparing for a limited offering of it later this year or early next year, Champion said.
Possible cross-platform services could include a family could view a library of all its digital photos on PCs, TVs and mobile phones; a TV viewer could interact with a home DVR (digital video recorder) from a mobile phone while on the road, to set up recordings; a parent could change TV parental-control settings in real time from a mobile phone to keep children from watching a show; a user could maintain one list of phone numbers and email addresses and use it on both a PC and a mobile phone; a subscriber could have a personalized account for delivery of certain types of stock prices, sports scores and weather information, accessible with a single click on a PC, TV and mobile phone.
Tuesday morning's long keynote session at the US Telecom Association show was more about TV than about phone calls, a sign of the times as US carriers add video to their offerings.
Executives from Cox Communications, Starz Entertainment Group, Buena Vista Television, local TV station owner Hearst-Argyle and Fox Cable Networks talked optimistically about new opportunities emerging with telecommunications carriers entering the video business.
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