Way Over The Top: Data To Your Home

With Sony’s announcement of an IPTV module for its new sets and the Media Center features built into Windows Vista™, a lot of people might soon be watching streaming video on their TV, not watching those channels that our cable companies charge us way too much for.

So what’s a cable company to do? Continue claiming that its internet service is faster than the phone company’s or throttle back the bit rate and charge you extra for those streaming IPTV shows? Stay tuned. (Or should I say – logged-on?)

(Remember – in our digital world its all zeros and ones: your phone call, your TV show, your e-mail. It’s time to stop thinking of it as a wire and start thinking of it as a pipe.)

Son of WebTV

Some analysts just don’t get Media Divergance, (like Todd Chanko of Jupiter Media) even though there are lots of people paying to watch last night’s TV on their iPods. When asked by TelevisionWeek to comment on how Microsoft Vista will promote integration between the computer and the TV, he said: “They are searching for a problem that doesn’t really need solving.”

Young geeks are all over Slingbox and Xbox. Buy one Media Center PC and a bunch of Xboxes. Feed your recorded TV shows all over your house, the whole dorm, the whole world. With Sony’s announcement of an IPTV module for its new sets, gee – it might be a good time to start an Ippy TV network!

What’s All This About Ippy TV?

There’s been so much news on the IPTV front recently that even Roseanne Roseannadanna would have heard about IPTV by now.

First was the announcement by a consortium of Japanese TV manufacturers announcing their push for an IPTV standard. Then there was Apple’s peek at their iTV product.

And lots of little things as well…
MatrixStream began shipping their 1080p capable IP set top box in June. NeuLion has their own box and content management platform – just add your own channels.

All this hardware… If the boys from Japan can get some momentum going on a box standard, this IPTV thing might just take off.

Makes you want to start your own channel. How about the Emergency Responders Channel? Reruns of Adam 12, Rescue Me and Justice Files 24/7 ! (And how about a comedy block with Car 54 Where Are You?)

And if you don’t think that I Pee TV isn’t going to be big, just check out the article in the New York Times Circuits section on 9/27/06 !

That’ll Never Work

Gee, I wish I could see into the future. Well, maybe I can. When I saw, then made, my first QuickTime™movie I thought it was, well – useful. But beyond making video previews, I didn’t think it would ever be as big as “full motion video.”

When AVID came out with ‘AVR24’ resolution and called it ‘broadcast’ I laughed to myself. “That may fly on cable, but it’ll never air on network TV!”

And cell phone video, how great is that ?

Well, my 2 year old computer does a decent job at playing 720p video at 24fps. George Schlatter Productions used AVR24 to edit skits on his 1994 series “She-TV“. And YouTube is getting lots of hits with it’s cell phone camera and webcam uploads. So what’s next? Nah, downloading Hollywood features over the internet will never be big. Right !

In 1996, GENE JANKOWSKI, the former President of CBS, told an interviewer from the BBC:

“The Internet I associate more with cable and with phone companies. It has nothing, the Internet has nothing to do with why people want to watch 60 Minutes or ER or Dallas. In the last couple of years there’s been a tremendous amount of attention focused on technology and the new equipment and digitalization etc and so forth and my attitude is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that it’s not technology that gives value to man, but rather it is people with creative ideas that give value to the technology. We don’t go out and buy a VCR just because we want to own a VCR, we buy it because it gives us the opportunity to see the creative programming that we can play through our VCR.”

Sign of the Times ?

This week while waiting for the commuter train I overheard T.C. Mits*
say "I’m going to watch it on the web." I’m not sure I had the context
right, but from the snippets of conversation I overheard, it appeared
they were talking about something that they had missed on TV. Divergence
continues…

(* T.C. Mits = The Common Man/Woman in the Street.)

The Unbundled Newsroom

This web article has been around for a while, but today I came across a link to it in an e-mail I had sent a friend a few months ago:

“The Unbundled Newsroom” by Terry Heaton

Convergence?… No, Just Evolution

To those of you who thought we’d all be watching TV on our computers (or using keyboards on our TV’s) – the future is coming into focus, and it’s divergence.
Here are the some of the signs:

• Craigslist is cutting into classified advertising revenue in Bay Area newspapers.
• A news aggregator (Yahoo News), not a news gathering organization is the top news website. (Source: Nielson – Net Ratings)
• People are paying to download last night’s TV shows to their iPods®.
• Beginning January 3rd, ABC News will use its Evening News anchors to anchor a Webcast.

And some signs of desperation as entertainment / media companies
scramble to retain share:

• Good Morning America will have a satellite radio edition.
  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1409392
• Everyone and their mother is doing VOD cell phone deals, HBO is the latest.
  http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/cingular/23356/

At one network, the left hand said one thing but the right hand did someting else.

So, just as radio news changed the newspaper business and television changed the radio and motion picture businesses, technology is changing the way we consume media. OK, that’s obvious… but a seismic shift? No, just evolution.