• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 3, 2010

Most hot tech companies get only one over-hyped product launch day per item. Sony's PS3, Nintendo's Wii, Verizon's DROID? One day, press sees if there are lines at the local store, interview some of the geeks with "Wii Rulez!" t-shorts, "more at 11" - move on to the next story. Apple, of course, is special. They don't get one over-hyped roll-out for the iPad. They get two. The lines were forming late in the afternoon at some Apple stores as the next wave of iPad shoppers sought their 3G.

But things backfired a tad this weekend as tech mavens got their hands on the 3G variant of the iPad only to find that running big-screen video over a cellular network designed for teeny-tiny screens has some glitches. Charles Starrett at Apple-centric site iLounge reports in his review that YouTube video on the iPad running over the 3G network "strips both standard and HD videos to a dramatically lower resolution over the cellular data connection." While video previews from the iTunes video library seem to run at familiar higher-res, as does Netflix, YouTube is throttled. TechCrunch queried AT&T on this and was told that it was a "question for Apple."

Meanwhile, in an even stranger twist, it turns out that ABC's very popular player app for streaming full length episodes won't work at all on a 3G network. iLounge's Starrett got the message "Please connect to a Wi-Fi network to use this application. Cellular networks are not supported at this time."

According to other reports, this may come down to a rights issue. Transmitting these shows over a cellular network may involve a different set of property rights than transmitting over WiFi. Who saw that one coming?

But the issues regarding shared bandwidth for streaming media over a 3G signal is one that everyone should have seen coming. This will just get worse as more devices come online and as we enter into another phase of the apparently relentless battle of standards that accompany every new media technology.

Everyone loves to hate AT&T, and so the first fingers are pointing to the carrier, but I am not at all sure this is the case. Personally, I have not had any big issues with the carrier in the years I have had my iPhone 3G and then 3Gs. More often than not I have been astonished at my ability to stream video at decent clarity just about anywhere on a small screen. My review phones from Verizon, using both 3G and MediaFLO signals, give me the experience in my area that others say they get from AT&T - poor and dropped signals.

Once you kick that resolution up, however, the story is different for any network. Then, we are back in bandwidth badlands where just about anything can happen. On my laptop's wireless broadband connection (over Sprint) Web page loading and video is catch-as-catch-can. I never know what I am going to get. But I do know that things work best at about midnight when I am working from the top floor.

The point being ... digital video anywhere is a dream deferred. There are many competing transmissions standards, WiMax, LTE and other flavors of 4G, a 3G network that has already been built out, and an upcoming digital TV standard being embraced by local TV owners. And every one of those technologies still will have to contend with people sharing bandwidth to receive massively large streams of data.

The iPad 3G is one of those technologies that steps forward just enough to show us how much farther we have to go.