aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Vint Cerf predicts the end of TV as we know it

The “godfather of the net” in a Guardian profile, predicts the end of TV as we know it:

The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player.

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”

Dr Cerf, who helped build the internet while working as a researcher at Stanford University in California, used the festival’s Alternative McTaggart Lecture to explain to television executives how the internet’s influence was radically altering their businesses and how it was imperative for them to view this as a golden opportunity to be exploited instead of a threat to their survival.  [...]

Dr Cerf predicted that these developments would continue, and that we would soon be watching the majority of our television through the internet - a revolution that could herald the death of the traditional broadcast TV channel in favour of new interactive services.