This is a good example of why journalism majors shouldn’t review technology, from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News:
Sonicblue is also promising to launch a free service called “iChannel” by summer that will offer Replay TV 4000 owners a menu of TV programs available for download through the Net.
This all sounds wonderful in theory — we could break the chains put on us by broadcasters and cable networks, sharing programs with one another and finding previously unknown gems online.
But the reality is another future imperfect slap in the face. Today’s high-speed home Internet connections aren’t nearly fast enough for video, especially because almost all providers put a cap on “upload” speeds — the rate at which data moves from your house to the Internet — of a paltry 128 kilobits per second, little more than twice the speed of clunky dial-up phone lines.
Langberg makes multiple errors. First, the 128 Kb cap is only on AT&T Cable Internet – DSL from Pac Bell caps uploads at a more reasonable 384 Kb. Second, and more significant, the upload cap doesn’t limit the speed at which a movie can be downloaded from a web site setup to serve video-on-demand. Here, the relevant metric is the download cap, around 1.5Mbs for both DSL and cable. With MPEG4 compression, you will be able to download movies across broadband connections at close to real-time; that is, 2 hours, more or less, for a 2 hour movie.
But this is Silicon Valley, where everybody who understands technology does it for a living, and doesn’t write about it in the newspaper.