End of TV - where does all the fuss come from?
Over years some internet types have proclaimed that the end of the masscommunication era will come to an end soon and that TV for its part as the last incarnation of significance in this era will fall. I personally did a live video broadcast to 5 simultaneous users in 1999. So all the fuss about "IPTV" or internetTV or iTV as in iPod is more then half a decade old - there have been endeavors by big companies like Microsoft to bring IPTV to the home 5-6 years ago in the bubble age - none of them worked and all projections about the TV overtaking the internet (anyone remember the ugly setop boxes which you could surf on? the browser got old just at the time when you bought one and you couldnīt upgrade) or the internet taking over TV.
Yet in the last year we have seen more and more coverage of the interenet TV revolution and I am a voicy advocat when it comes to predict the death of TV in this decade. Yet I have wondered where all this renewed interest into this matter comes from. An article on arstechnica made me think. It seems to be the Telcos themself seeing a chance to tip the whole entertainment communication iceberg towards their fiber lines. In America they have fierce competition from the cable providers who had the advantage of a coax cable infrastructure that has been good at scaling up the speed to the home and have eaten the Telcos Voice services for lunch with their uneventfull rollout of Voice over IP services. So now in return the Telcos want to get a bite out of the cable companies by getting into the Television delivery market. They are making big noise by doing so drawing lots of attention to their concept of Multicast IPTV and I think that is where a lot of the heat lately comes from.
Yet as I read through the article on Arstechnica I found so many stumbling blocks that I think the recent push of big companies into IP TV is about to fall as flat as the last one - because anybody up there seems to think that IPTV has to look exactly the same as current TV. This is the point where I am seeing there mistakes haunting them into their own dug graves. Yes its true that "live shows" and some other obscure formats need a continuus stream - but if you get a 25 Mbit connection to your home all of the sudden on demand and "view as it downloads" looks much more interesting because you can take out the biggest problem of TV - its schedule. You can choose the shows you wanna watch whenever you wanna watch them - news, comedy and about 95% of TV shows today have absolutely no need to be "broadcasted live" they are on tape before broadcast anyways. That in turn means that the whole "we bring you 300+ channels of streaming television to a new $200 settop box that will be old in less then a year when we roll out a new version of the service" will fail as well as the old "$200 dollar setop box where you could browse the net on your TV". I do firmly believe that people actually do want choice and total control over their time and that is where the current TV model falls as flat on its face as it could ever fall flat on a face and that future "IPTV" that is based on streaming channels is about to utterly fail. Yet again Apples/Googles concept of downloads together with a few sites offering streamed "live shows" and the platory of indies selling their stuff on their own or finding other clever ways to market their moving picture creations will be the way to go in the future and the time tiered television concept will be a dark shadow of the past.
Yet the roadblock for all this are still the telcos - who first of all would like their own model to succeed because then they are not only getting money from the consumers who pay their line but also from the producers who probably have to pay hefty fees to get a spot in the setop box and the telcos would be in control over the content - something that is of tremendous political value when you look at how the Bush administration uses the media for their propaganda and look how certain companies in support have gained so much market value (FOX) since the first inauguration of THE President. So having control over who displays what and when will help push through some nifty legislation outlawing the free internet as we know it that could threaten the telcos. If politics do not help for the Telcos vision to win then they are presenting us with the other hammer they still have in the closet: Tiered pricing. That so much traffic goes through their backbones is a thorn in their eye and they want to get money from everyone offering anything that uses bandwidth - everyone ever encoded a video for the net knows that it is indeed a bandwidth killer - with the right kind of pricing the telcos could cut out any other IPTV service then their own and with television corporations not really wanting the net to take over their cake and eat it all at once they will heavily support any move by the telcos to limit indies and creative concepts to fly off.
Yet all is not bad yet and the above is true for the US - in Europe things will go along the same lines but much much too late to change the true revolution coming from within and seeing sweden having a new political party that was formed from the users of a very very well know bittorrent tracker trying to overthrow the copyright laws and openly speaking out for the freedom of the media I do see a bright future for true independent programming without limits on this side of the pond.