An interesting development delivered by a commercial company leveraging the JANET network to deliver TV directly to campus PCs. The bandwidth usage is limited by the fact that JANET supports IP multicasting - so only one external connection is made per stream. If a university doesn’t already have TV wiring in rooms, this sort of thing is probably a lot more economical than installing the wiring, since it leverages existing infrastructure.

If you are a student on the campuses in Leeds or Liverpool then you should be able to receive the new TV over broadband service from Freewire. The service delivers a variety of channels including the standard five channels, plus E4, CBeebies, Film4 and others. Currently the service only streams onto a PC and uses a 2.5Mbps MPEG4 mulit-cast stream

The student service uses the Janet network to distribute the multi-cast signal down to Ethernet sockets in student accomodation. The eventual aim of the service is to sign deals with other service providers, in particular unbundled providers. Once the BT 21CN roll-out is complete and an IP network available to exchanges around the UK, it may become more economic to provide a multi-cast video stream to large numbers of people in the UK.

Freewire also seems to have plans to roll-out its own broadband service, which if launched as detailed looks almost too good to be true, a rate adaptive up to 8Mbps ADSL service for £19.99 with unlimited usage.

(Via ADSLguide.org.uk)