Well I've just got the official word that Verizon FIOS TV service will be using Microsoft IPTV technology as the platform for offering digital TV service. The Tampa Bay Area which will first include Pasco County, City of Tampa and Pinellas County will be one of the first rollouts of TV service by Verizon along with three other states that have nearly finished Verizon FIOS deployment. Now as always when Verizon FIOS TV service is offered in say Pinellas County that doesn't mean that every single resident in Pinellas County can get it right away but eventually nearly all of each area will have Verizon Fios based offerings.
Verizon TV Service big news:
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Verizon clicks on Microsoft TV
By Vince Vittore
Jan 28, 2005 4:37 PM
Verizon is expected to announce it will use the Microsoft TV platform for the video portion of its FiOS TV that will run over its fiber-to-the-premises network. Under terms of the deal, which had no financials attached to it, Microsoft will provide middleware for the Motorola set-top boxes that Verizon is deploying.
Microsoft has similar deals with SBC and BellSouth, though both of those carriers have opted to launch video services using an IP platform. Neither has named set-top box vendors, though Alcatel has secured the primary supplier roll for SBC’s Project Lightspeed.
The Verizon deal gives Microsoft TV a virtual lock on tier-one carriers within the U.S., though Qwest has been largely quiet in the current round of telco video deployment discussions.
“It is a commercial deployment agreement; it’s not a trial,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing communications for Microsoft TV. “Trial is part of the process, though. Our goal is to convert all the trials to commercial deployments.”
Despite the architectural differences between SBC and Verizon’s terrestrial video networks, the two companies initially will deliver largely the same services including high-definition video, video-on-demand, digital video recording and interactive program guides. However, in the home, the set-ups will vary, Graczyk said.
“The [set-top] box is different,” he said. “It’s more of a traditional cable box in the case of Verizon. The SBC box is a DSL modem on steroids. It speaks to the flexibility of Microsoft TV.”
By Vince Vittore
Jan 28, 2005 4:37 PM
Verizon is expected to announce it will use the Microsoft TV platform for the video portion of its FiOS TV that will run over its fiber-to-the-premises network. Under terms of the deal, which had no financials attached to it, Microsoft will provide middleware for the Motorola set-top boxes that Verizon is deploying.
Microsoft has similar deals with SBC and BellSouth, though both of those carriers have opted to launch video services using an IP platform. Neither has named set-top box vendors, though Alcatel has secured the primary supplier roll for SBC’s Project Lightspeed.
The Verizon deal gives Microsoft TV a virtual lock on tier-one carriers within the U.S., though Qwest has been largely quiet in the current round of telco video deployment discussions.
“It is a commercial deployment agreement; it’s not a trial,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing communications for Microsoft TV. “Trial is part of the process, though. Our goal is to convert all the trials to commercial deployments.”
Despite the architectural differences between SBC and Verizon’s terrestrial video networks, the two companies initially will deliver largely the same services including high-definition video, video-on-demand, digital video recording and interactive program guides. However, in the home, the set-ups will vary, Graczyk said.
“The [set-top] box is different,” he said. “It’s more of a traditional cable box in the case of Verizon. The SBC box is a DSL modem on steroids. It speaks to the flexibility of Microsoft TV.”
Connecticut is supposed to get this service next week, I am thinking about upgrading my phone to get the Audiovox phone which is FOIS compatable.
The thing that will keep me getting it is if the service is $15 a month to watch TV AND they charge you airtime to watch it. I am not sure how that all works yet.
The thing that will keep me getting it is if the service is $15 a month to watch TV AND they charge you airtime to watch it. I am not sure how that all works yet.
SBC is not providing Fios. It will be providing Fiber to the Node. Once to the node about 500 homes will be served via existing twisted copper via VDSL.
Curious Scott, how did you hear CT is getting the service next week. The last thing I heard was SBC is just taking bids for the engineering of the project. (code named Project Light Speed).
Curious Scott, how did you hear CT is getting the service next week. The last thing I heard was SBC is just taking bids for the engineering of the project. (code named Project Light Speed).
rtt2 said:
Yes you read the article but I've been told what areas will be rolled out first and their will be 9 areas or markets within several different states that will be part of the first trial if you will and that is planned to occur close to the end of the year. I've been told that Verizon will be putting more workers in both the City of Tampa and Pinellas County to have as many areas ready to go for launch because those areas have all the latest services and is a very big market that has DirecTV rolling out locals in HD.
Mark my words for those in the Tampa Bay area but most in Pinellas County will be getting Fios internet and TV service around the first of the year of 2006. Now here is what I've been told about the deployment plans.
These new boxes will have either a firewire or USB2 port or both and to get DVR features you would just buy an external hard drive and plug it into the port and you have a DVR. They are going to make these boxes very cheap and because local HD and national HD will be compressed using WMV9 they can use cheaper decoders so a basic lowend cable box can work as an HDTV cable box and if you want an HD DVR just plug in a bought external firewire HDD into it. Also the Tampa Bay area is planned to have this HDTV and Premium VOD lineup below.
Local HD to include PBS HD, NBC HD, CBS HD, ABC HD, FOX HD and UPN HD. The lineup will not include WB HD.
National HD to include:
Premium Movie channels...HBO HD East, Cinemax HD East, Showtime HD East, TMC HD East, Starz HD East and Encore HD East.
HD Pak to include HDNet, HDNet Movies, InHD 1 & 2, ESPN HD 1 & 2, TNT HD, Universal HD, NFL Network HD and Discovery HD Theater. Also they will offer Starz HD movies on demand.
They will offer HBO On Demand, Cinemax On Demand, Showtime On Demand, TMC On Demand, Starz On Demand (some movies in HDTV) along with PPV HD On Demand.
They will offer an all digital channel lineup with over 300 channels. Also here is the Premium channel lineup I've been told.
HBO East and West
HBO Plus East and West
HBO Signature East and West
HBO Family East and West
HBO Comedy East and West
HBO Zone East and West
HBO Latino East and West
HBO HD East
Cinemax East and West
MoreMax East and West
ActionMax East and West
ThrillerMax East and West
WMax East
OuterMax East
@Max East
5StarMax East
Cinemax HD East
Showtime East and West
Showtime Too East and West
Showtime Showcase East and West
Showtime Beyond East and West
Showtime Extreme East and West
Showtime Next East and West
Showtime Family East and West
Showtime Woman East and West
Showtime HD East
TMC East and West
TMC Xtra East and West
TMC HD East
Starz East and West
Starz Edge East and West
Starz Kids and Family East and West
Starz Cinema East and West
Starz Comedy East and West
Starz In Black East and West
Starz HD East
Encore East and West
Encore Drama East and West
Encore Love East and West
Encore Action East and West
Encore Westerns East and West
Encore Mystery East and West
Encore WAM East and West
Encore HD East
Now I was very confused by the Starz lineup and I told the guy that the Starz channels aren't named like this and all he could say is those are the channels that he was given from Verizon and he actually has the channel numbers but he can't tell me those.
Sorry I meant EDVO not FIOS.
Check out more about this at:
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=547969
Check out more about this at:
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=547969
i am in tampa (hillsborough county) and might be moving to (pasco county) later this year. i have been waiting for this for a while. it gives me a fourth option for tv providers. looks like they have the four major hd movie channels covered. i see the will have nbchd, which our cable company does not have yet.
Is Starz Edge just a rebranded Starz Theater or what? And I thought Starz Comedy was abandoned? When's that supposed to launch? I take it Encore Drama is just a rebranded Encore True Stories as well?
DBSOgre said:
What you said was what I thought. I thought I read something about Starz doing some type of change with their channels pretty soon. For some reason March is pinned into my head with this topic.
But with all that said I was more suprised with the mention of Starz offering HD movies as part of Starz On Demand.
Uplink said:
Yes this is another cable service but it doesn't run via copper lines. This has nothing todo with DSL so customers can have DSL service and still not get this service. This service runs via fiber and Verizon calls it FIOS service or you can called it FTTP or fiber to the premises. Fiber has more bandwidth than cable systems have. Also to get any fiber service including internet you have to have all your existing copper cables ripped out and replaced with cat5 ethernet cables. You phone service would also come into your house via fiber and cat5. The installers also install an ONT in the back of your house. I currently am one of the lucky few that has fiber and here is the process to just get internet but getting TV service when its offered will be very easy.
Firstly I had to wait for my central office to upgrade to fiber. Secondly I had to wait for Verizon to run fiber over the poles around the area. Now because of how new our area was we had fiber run underground and they used a switchbox to support copper services. So my CO got fiber and Verizon replaced the main pole wiring with fiber. So once that was done I could order FIOS service which I did.
The installation required three Verizon trucks with about 5 techs who all spent between 8am in the morning and didn't get done until about 3-4pm. They replaced the copper from the box in my back yard and ran fiber underground the 35 feet to the back of my house. They installed the ONT box on the back of my house and hooked up the newly ran fiber from the ground into this ONT box. One crew did this. The second and third crew showed up about noon and started ripping out my existing phone copper cables. After that they ran new cat5 cables to all of my 6 phone jacks. They than hooked up all the ethernet cables into the ONT box outside. Once that was done they provided little cat5 to copper adapters so my current phones would work with the new system. Once everything checked out they installed my router and activated my internet service. I'm paying 39.95/month plus a 3.00/month FUSF type fee and this gets me 30Mbps down and 2Mbps UP. Even with BHN upgrading speeds to 5Mbps down for about the same price per month actually about one dollar less per month Verizon gives me 25Mbps more download bandwidth for less and BHN only offers 384Kbps upload so Verizon again for one buck less per month gives me 2000Kbps upload or 1768Kbps more upload bandwidth than BHN.
To give you an idea I can download the latest DVD ISO image of Fedora in about 20-30 minutes and remember that download is about 4 gigs. My last download of a linux iso clocked in at a transfer rate of 2.7 megabytes per second.
Thats a lot of people over a pretty long period of time just to get one house wired up. Im surprised that they dont leave the old copper wires up (for backup or other uses) and Im also surprised that they dont run the fiber to the poles then in the air to the house. It would be more likely for someone to hit the fiber in the ground than in the air. Maybe they do it this way so that nobody steals the fiber seeing how expensive it is but there is also that expense of getting it run underground to the customer's house.
Stargazer said:
Well that is what needs to be done for a few fiber installs. In my case it took a while because they had to run fiber further than most areas because I'm on about 2 acres of land. Also seeing as they have me as a customer in three states all in very high end areas they might do more because I'm loaded with money. Again not many people can spend over 300/month in just TV service and not feel it hitting your pocket book.
Also I had a custom install which did cost me about 600 upfront because they had to wire cat5 cables throughout three stories and two jacks towards the other end of the house.
You have a new friend here, LonghornXP. I've been mislead by your name for too long.LonghornXP said:
TuxCoder said:You have a new friend here, LonghornXP. I've been mislead by your name for too long.
I'm glad we got that cleared up. I do use windows when I have to but I mainly use Macs and Linux is just pure fun but I tend to lean more towards portage based distros but I do like debian based distros. I would try many more if they would upgrade to alsa 1.0.8 so it supports my soundcard. For some reason I'm getting tired of having to install asla from source. Also fixing samba when it breaks gets old but linux has indeed come a very long way. Now I haven't learned howto program stuff for linux yet but when I learn I'm planning to create a program that can do the following below.
Firstly it would be a GUI all the way. It would install software via apt-get, RPM and portage. It would have a built-in list of repositories that a user can click on and select todo a speed test. It will support installing from stable, untested and unstable trees. It would handle everything with ease and I would wrap it into an easy installable source based file with a GUI so a user on any distro can install it from source with a full GUI interface.
I think yum extender is very close to what most people would want. The biggest question I get from my friends who use apt-get is where can they find a list of repositories to put into their sources.list file.
Oh and there happens to be a whole lot more interesting things I do that I can't tell you even if I wanted too. This stuff is done every now and again at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
korsjs said:
It looks like Verizon can't start laying fiber in Pinellas until second half of this year because of their agreement with Knology when they bought out Verizon Americast. Now with that said they will have tons of workers coming into the Tampa Bay Area with quite a bit of them in Pinellas County but either way most if not all of Pinellas County is scheduled to be complete by the end of 2006 maybe early 2007 but well over 50% of Pinellas County would be done by summer of 2006 with average weather.
are you going to be considering this when it does come out? if the price is comparable, i will jump in. things look good with the hd channels they say they are going to have.
TAMPA - Cathy Vonderheide isn't happy about paying nearly $50 a month for standard cable television service. But for now, she's sort of stuck with Bright House Networks, if she wants to give her household of six the Cartoon Network, ESPN, the Food Network and more of what they want.
``I haven't checked out anyone else because Bright House Networks is the only one in this area,'' said Vonderheide, who lives in the Meadow Pointe subdivision in Pasco County.
Well, not quite, but close. Bright House Networks is the dominant provider of pay-television in Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Hernando, Citrus and Manatee counties.
Officials for Bright House Networks contend that there are alternatives. They say the cable company competes with satellite providers Dish Network and DirecTV throughout its seven-county territory.
But the first reward of competition, lower prices, is seen only in nine Pinellas County communities, where Bright House Networks competes directly with another cable operator: West Point, Ga.-based Knology Inc.
That may change sometime this year if New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. begins its pay-TV service on schedule. Since last year, Verizon has been installing a fiber- optic network t plans to use for cable TV, as well as phone, Internet and other services. Verizon has said it plans to invest about $100 million over several years on its fiber network in the Tampa Bay area as part of a much larger, multibillion dollar investment to use fiber throughout its system.
For now, however, limited choice has translated into higher prices for hundreds of thousands of pay-TV customers in the Bay area. That means Bright House Networks customers pay as much as $14.54 a month more in Hillsborough County than Dunedin residents in Pinellas County pay for the same service.
``It's just something that's been difficult for us to deal with, where we have that situation,'' said Dan Ballister, a St. Petersburg-based spokesman for Bright House Networks, a unit of Syracuse, N.Y.-based Advance/Newhouse Communications Inc. ``We know that customers, our customers, are sensitive to that issue, and so are we. And we've been trying to do something about it.''
The monthly charges can vary substantially for Bright House Networks' standard service, which offers some 80 channels, from local television stations to national cable news and sports networks.
Ballister said the large differences between Hillsborough and Pinellas are because the competing cable system for parts of Pinellas County offers a ``very unrealistic price.''
Mitch Bernatsky, general manager at Knology in Pinellas County, said charges $34.95 for a package that is comparable to Bright House Networks' standard service. He said the price is reasonable, considering how competitive parts of Pinellas are.
Ballister said Bright House Networks' typical price of $46.49 is in line with other cable operators around the nation. But as of the end of 2004, the national average price for a similar package of television programming was $38.23, according to data gathered by Kagan Research LLC and reported on the Web site of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
Paul Rodriguez, spokesman for the cable operators' trade association based in Washingston, said the cable industry likes to focus on value, not price. He said the number of channels continues to increase and the quality of service is constantly improving.
``We feel cable is presenting huge value for what you pay,'' he said. ``What do you get? A lot of channels, something for everybody in the family. Compare that to what it cost to go to the movies or ballgame.''
Still, Verizon may soon become a deciding factor in such value versus price reasoning. As Verizon establishes a new fiber-optic network, it plans to launch television services in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties in the third or fourth quarter of this year.
Bob Elek, Verizon's spokesman in Tampa, said Bay area residents can expect pay-TV prices to drop when its video service hits the market, although he would not disclose pricing information.
``That's why the free market is such a beautiful thing,'' Elek said. ``You've already seen what it means. Where there is a competitive service, [Bright House Networks'] rates are not as high.''
Vonderheide, who now gets her high-speed Internet service and telephone over Verizon's new fiber network, said she plans to drop Bright House Networks once Verizon begins pay-television in the Bay area.
``Bright House just seems to continue to increase,'' she said.
Reporter Will Rodgers can be reached at (813) 259-7870.
This story can be found at: http://money.tbo.com/money/MGBOQ2ACE6E.html
``I haven't checked out anyone else because Bright House Networks is the only one in this area,'' said Vonderheide, who lives in the Meadow Pointe subdivision in Pasco County.
Well, not quite, but close. Bright House Networks is the dominant provider of pay-television in Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Hernando, Citrus and Manatee counties.
Officials for Bright House Networks contend that there are alternatives. They say the cable company competes with satellite providers Dish Network and DirecTV throughout its seven-county territory.
But the first reward of competition, lower prices, is seen only in nine Pinellas County communities, where Bright House Networks competes directly with another cable operator: West Point, Ga.-based Knology Inc.
That may change sometime this year if New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. begins its pay-TV service on schedule. Since last year, Verizon has been installing a fiber- optic network t plans to use for cable TV, as well as phone, Internet and other services. Verizon has said it plans to invest about $100 million over several years on its fiber network in the Tampa Bay area as part of a much larger, multibillion dollar investment to use fiber throughout its system.
For now, however, limited choice has translated into higher prices for hundreds of thousands of pay-TV customers in the Bay area. That means Bright House Networks customers pay as much as $14.54 a month more in Hillsborough County than Dunedin residents in Pinellas County pay for the same service.
``It's just something that's been difficult for us to deal with, where we have that situation,'' said Dan Ballister, a St. Petersburg-based spokesman for Bright House Networks, a unit of Syracuse, N.Y.-based Advance/Newhouse Communications Inc. ``We know that customers, our customers, are sensitive to that issue, and so are we. And we've been trying to do something about it.''
The monthly charges can vary substantially for Bright House Networks' standard service, which offers some 80 channels, from local television stations to national cable news and sports networks.
Ballister said the large differences between Hillsborough and Pinellas are because the competing cable system for parts of Pinellas County offers a ``very unrealistic price.''
Mitch Bernatsky, general manager at Knology in Pinellas County, said charges $34.95 for a package that is comparable to Bright House Networks' standard service. He said the price is reasonable, considering how competitive parts of Pinellas are.
Ballister said Bright House Networks' typical price of $46.49 is in line with other cable operators around the nation. But as of the end of 2004, the national average price for a similar package of television programming was $38.23, according to data gathered by Kagan Research LLC and reported on the Web site of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
Paul Rodriguez, spokesman for the cable operators' trade association based in Washingston, said the cable industry likes to focus on value, not price. He said the number of channels continues to increase and the quality of service is constantly improving.
``We feel cable is presenting huge value for what you pay,'' he said. ``What do you get? A lot of channels, something for everybody in the family. Compare that to what it cost to go to the movies or ballgame.''
Still, Verizon may soon become a deciding factor in such value versus price reasoning. As Verizon establishes a new fiber-optic network, it plans to launch television services in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties in the third or fourth quarter of this year.
Bob Elek, Verizon's spokesman in Tampa, said Bay area residents can expect pay-TV prices to drop when its video service hits the market, although he would not disclose pricing information.
``That's why the free market is such a beautiful thing,'' Elek said. ``You've already seen what it means. Where there is a competitive service, [Bright House Networks'] rates are not as high.''
Vonderheide, who now gets her high-speed Internet service and telephone over Verizon's new fiber network, said she plans to drop Bright House Networks once Verizon begins pay-television in the Bay area.
``Bright House just seems to continue to increase,'' she said.
Reporter Will Rodgers can be reached at (813) 259-7870.
This story can be found at: http://money.tbo.com/money/MGBOQ2ACE6E.html
