Review: A better Apple TV doesn't beat competition

[RawAlex]

Originally Posted by TheEnforcer

Broadband will have to become much more reliable for people to make any type of mass conversion. It will be a very long time before this is anything but a very small niche market.

Actually, I thought so too... and then one day I ran across something and my opinion changed entirely.

I have a lot of chinese friends, as many from the mainland as Hong Kong, and i have visited both often in the last 5 years or so. I enjoy the cultures, etc, and I have been trying to learn Mandarin. So I figured perhaps it would help to watch chinese tv or movies. Well, my sat provider (Bell) will grace me with chinese channels, but the prices are insane ($10 a channel per month in some cases), and the quality of the channels is very low. So I went looking online.

CCTV is the chinese state network, they run about 20 channels including news in english, french, russian, etc. There is a product which allows for their channels to be streamed live, at a good enough rate that I watch them on the big screen with very good quality (even the news scroll things on the bottom of the screen are clear and move smoothly).

Shortly after, I also moved to Bell's Fibe product, which gives me 25meg internet speeds. They tested me up to 50+meg on the line, for the new http://www.fibetv.bell.ca fibe tv product coming. Using the other 25 meg of bandwidth, they assure me they can feed 3 to 4 HD TVs with high end programming, replacing the sat dish entirely with the internet connection.

The you see the streaming to cell phone / smart phone deals out there, and it is really clear we are not far away from complete convergence. It may change how many people get their entertainment and programming. The real key will be how many people move away from the computer screen and back onto the sofa, looking for programming in this manner. That will change everything.