aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, July 29, 2005
The future of television will be on television
Andrew Kantor: CyberSpeak, “Music is released. Television is scheduled. That’s going to change:”
The future isn’t video on the Internet in a little window on your computer. The future is full-quality video over the Internet to your television.
The steps are being taken. There’s IPTV that I just mentioned; so the technology exists to use the Internet infrastructure to carry television. There are faster and faster data pipes coming into your home. There’s incredibly cheap storage; a $200 TiVo can hold more than 80 hours of DVD-quality television. There are services such as MovieLink, MovieFlix, and even Netflix that will (or in Netflix’s case, will soon) let you download movies to watch on your PC.
There are Media Center PCs, sold by big names like Gateway and HP, that let you watch and record television shows on your computer.
Those are small steps to the on-demand finish line. A larger one is Microsoft’s Media Center Extender Set-top Box. It connects to your television to your PC, so you can not only watch the networks, you can also access the music, photos, and video that are on your computer.
Now imagine that CBS decided to archive all its shows at cbs.com a month after they aired on traditional television. You could access these shows through your PC, which was connected to your TV.
Or imagine that a company produced a show or movie that they couldn’t get a network interested in, so it they post the video on its Web site. You could watch it not by changing TV channels, but by telling your TV to go to that site.
This is where we’re headed - away from the notion of channels.
All of which bodes well for we TV. His conclusion:
So just as the World Wide Web lets an individual have as much of a presence as a big corporation, Internet-based television will allow anyone with a digital camcorder and a good script get as much attention as NBC.
And that will change everything.
Via Thomas Hawk.
