France leads the way with Freebox HD

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For those who are interested in community video French operator Free is providing one of the most interesting services around at the moment. They are offering you a user generated television channel and the technology to broadcast content live from the comfort of you own home. All you need is a subscription to ADSL 2 and the Freebox HD box.

The idea behind this service is to bring community video straight to the user. Youtube gives people the chance to upload poorly produced content so that the masses may view them. Current TV provides a website where users submit content and hope that it works it’s way up to being broadcast. Blogtv allows people to chat and is interesting for live events. Operator 11 is currently my little favourite thanks to it’s ability to switch from one webcam to another with participants from around the world. It’s great and offers you the ability to plug in a dv camera but is let down by picture quality.

Free are revolutionising the process. They are providing the user with break out boxes that take the video content, either via s-video or another method and encode the content within the box. From this point on there are two options. The first of these is to provide the content live at a lesser quality level or share it differed, in other words once the data has been transferred from one point to another. According to SVM the compressed video is around 1,4 gigabytes for an hour. Normal DV streams would be 12 gigabytes per hour but with the correct encoding they’ve saved on space.

If you want to find out more about this service then the SVM article can be found here. It includes a video. The content is only in French though.