News - AMD declares the death of television

[HEXUS]

At a reviewers day in Austin, Texas, an AMD executive announced that TV was just a fad and was on its way out as PCs took over

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[Syllopsium]

Is that perhaps because the 58xx drivers are broken with BBC HD FreeSAT (plus other countries like New Zealand), with no sign of a solution in sight - no acknowledgement a problem exists from ATI and the refusal of the ATI forum moderators to comment on a thread they were doing up until a couple of months ago?

PK

[tad2009]

I don't think television will ever really die, change yes, become more interactive and responsive to our growing demands as consumers most definitely.

I do believe that PC's will remain PC's in and of themselves in some form, but that TV's will go on to gain more multimedia capabilities and be better at working with other devices like mobile phones, cameras and even as the center of a media hub where video's and images can be streamed across a home network much like the HTPC.

[GaryRW]

Is that perhaps because the 58xx drivers are broken with BBC HD FreeSAT (plus other countries like New Zealand), with no sign of a solution in sight - no acknowledgement a problem exists from ATI and the refusal of the ATI forum moderators to comment on a thread they were doing up until a couple of months ago?

PK

Can't believe that is still not fixed. That problem's a few months old now isn't it?

[nightkhaos]

I do believe that PC's will remain PC's in and of themselves in some form, but that TV's will go on to gain more multimedia capabilities and be better at working with other devices like mobile phones, cameras and even as the center of a media hub where video's and images can be streamed across a home network much like the HTPC.

Or TVCards will become more common. In fact I think this is likely to happen. All you need to do is a build a laptop with a dual DVB-T card built into it with built in arial (an optional external ariel), market it for about £500 - £600, and you'll get a lot of kids rooms with this in them.

The problem is not the technology, that has been around for yonks, it is ease of use. Until Windows 7, I didn't think HTPCs were any good...

[Spud1]

Well I think it will be many years before TV is "dead" but he's definitely right that its on the way.

I've personally been watching all my TV legally through my PC the past 2 weeks - either via catchup on tvguide.co.uk (has free catchup for almost every single freeview show), the usual iPlayer/stvplayer/4od, or live via a program such as Zattoo.

The quality is good (ok so its no where near as good as SkyHD like we have downstairs) can you can pause/rewind etc..and the main benefit is that I can sit here at the PC working or pokering or whatever and still watch my show. So I can be productive at the same time, without having to move everything I am doing over to my laptop and then go and sit downstairs.

I've only really watched that TV now for shows on SkyHD that I can't get legally upstairs, or when i've got someone else round (TV on your PC doesn't work so well with more than 1 person!). My housemate should be back today so my viewing habits could again change...but anyway point is that TV over the internet is becoming more and more widespread all the time, I didn't realise until the past few weeks..so give it a few more years..

TV Tuner cards? They are not the answer imo - streaming makes a lot more sense, and imo tuner cards are likely to vanish before TVs do. They may however be replaced by dedicated decoder cards for future HD codecs and technologies..or simple CAM modules for subscriptions.

[Syllopsium]

Can't believe that is still not fixed. That problem's a few months old now isn't it?

Yup. Still no word on AMD's forums as far as I can see.

I think I'm taking the advice of other people and waiting till new year on this one. If AMD fix their drivers I suspect I'll go with them - I bet Nvidia won't be able to match their impressive idle power figures.

I've gone completely the other way and got myself a second hand 8800GTX - if my system can handle that at full load, it can also handle a 5870 when they eventually fix it. I know the power usage is high, but I wanted a dual slot card and wasn't prepared to spend lots (over twice the price of this, second hand) on a new one.

PK

[Funkstar]

ATI are waaaaay off the mark when they say the TV is dead. Perhaps in the eyes of the people reading the article, but us technically literate reader (also known as geeks) are a tiny, tiny fraction of TV viewers.

The cost of everyone moving to streaming TV would be massive. Nothing about hardware, the bandwidth costs would be phenomenal.

There has been a lot of fuss about the move to digital from analogue, can you even imagine the upheaval and controversy of moving to an internet streaming model? Requiring a phone line, with decent enough ADSL connection, exchanges that aren't going to get swamped, etc. Set top boxes are going to be a lot more expensive than a basic DVB-T box that can be produced in their millions in China, they will be little PCs after all.

Perhaps one day, but I think it will be a long way off.

[nightkhaos]

TV Tuner cards? They are not the answer imo - streaming makes a lot more sense, and imo tuner cards are likely to vanish before TVs do. They may however be replaced by dedicated decoder cards for future HD codecs and technologies..or simple CAM modules for subscriptions.

I don't think they will, I just think the nature of television will change. Consider that if 64 million people stream television content through their computers in HD, how many bandwidth will that need?

But alternatively, if that single stream can distributed once, and accessed at will... well that's a whole different story. I think the on-demand functions will combine with the live streaming functions to give you more flexiablity, particularly as bandwidth becomes more a concern.

Let me theroise for this, there is a mass content release system, for the purposes of this experiment we will call this the wire. It's a wireless transmission and wire cable transmission that has all the latest content being released in the form of digital transmissions. You can download content directly off the wire, but content will only be released to the wire once. None of this repeats we get now.

If you miss the wire because you didn't know about the program and were introduced to it, or other reasons like powerfailure, you can make an ad-hoc request for that content.

Why will this model be important? Well, some of the things that make television as we know it what it is, and are unlikely to go away, are call in compeititions like X-Factor, interactive content. How can we telly the votes in such a way that we can have such a short turn over if all the content is streamed? We we have a central stream, or "off the wire", which is the "live" broadcast.

There is another reason, and I touched on it before. And that is bandwidth. Now let's take a new program that is released with 2.2 million views, just as a conservative estimate. Assume they are all watching it in 720p, (some may watch it in SD because of bandwidth limitations, others in 1080i because they have ultra-wide-band contections, but 720p is a good average). 720p content is typically about 420kiB/s of bandwidth per stream. Now that means that in order to distribute that content, and for people to get it live, or the equivelent of getting it "off the wire", the BBC, or whomever is distrbuting it, will need to be able to provide bandwidth of about 0.86 TiB/s. And that is just for that one program.

Now althrough this is techically possible to deliver, it is expensive. It is much cheaper to distribute the content via UHF transmission in DVB, or something similar i.e. cable, or a single internet stream, than it is to live-stream the content over the internet.

[Rollo]

In other news, Schwinn declares the death of automobiles, and Campbells declares the death of TV dinners.

Osama bin Laden declares the death of all, Christ declares no death for any.

[this_is_gav]

And Rollo makes a post without mentioning ATI or Nvidia.

[Rollo]

And Rollo makes a post without mentioning ATI or Nvidia.

LOL! Zing!

It HAS been a big day for news I guess!