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The future of television

Tue, Feb 27, 2007

Social effects

Watching television is going to change in the next couple of years. You don’t have to be a visionary to see that. But what is going to happen? The old telecom companies and cable companies all are putting a lot of money in digital television.
But for now digital television is just like analog television, with some extra channels. And some weird hard to navigate interactive content.
I have tried KPN mine and digital television from UPC and I have to say I am really disappointed. The solutions are slow, not very user-friendly and expensive.
The technology is closed and does not seem to be very state if the art. Where are the tivo like functions other countries have? We have to rely on the supplier to come up with new innovations.
Is this the future of television? I think not. Once again the web seems to be the place where all the innovation happens. Youtube ofcourse is a prime example. But there are a lot of inititiaves. The web has a lot to offer to television:

  • It’s world wide
  • It’s open and not dominated by one party. Competetion drives innovation.
  • It can be used to reach small and big audiences
  • Easy to personalise

The web also has a huge problem, video uses lots of bandwidth.
A very nice solution is being created by Joost a company that has been in the news the last couple of weeks. Joost was started by the people that also started Skype and Kazaa. Joost uses peer to peer technology to deal with the bandwidth issue video causes on the web. Joost gives unprecedented features to both user and advertisers. Advertisers are able to advertise to all viewers of a program in a certain zipcode.
Now this sounds a lot better compared to the non-web companies.
Here is what I hope to find in digital television:

  • Ease of use, no special boxes. Just a television/ computer
  • I don’t have to record anything
  • It should support active searching for a great program
  • It should support just mindless watching
  • It offers ads I am interested in, for products I really need.
  • Content not only directed at large audiences. Content further in the Long tail
  • Fast access to new features
  • Transparancy in moving all my settings to a new supplier
  • Anyplace any time

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5 Comments For This Post

  1. Alyssa Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    Hey….interesting post about where television is headed. Once we can get Joost right on our TV sets, and not just our computers, there will be some serious competition with cable operators (and the new telecom offerings). The crazy thing is that the cable companies own the pipes that will be the battleground.

    There’s an interesting essay about how the data layers rides on top of the cable TV layer, over at Media 3.0. The article is called “Over the Top” — a term used to describe this.

    Anyway, thanks for the good post. I’ll try to check out your blog in the future, for more insight.

    - Alyssa

  2. Andreas Lindeboom Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 12:29 am

    Just a quick linkdrop as I haven’t really got the time: CBC Newsworld have an excellent three part documentary called ‘The End’. The three parts discuss the end of radio, the end of print and the end of tv. (of which the last one might be interesting in the light of this post)

  3. Andreas Lindeboom Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 12:29 am

    (sorry, forgot to include the link)

    http://www.cbc.ca/theend/index.html

  4. Niels Bruin Says:
    February 28th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Very interesting article Raymond, and I totally agree on that.

    Problem is, that you don’t watch TV on your computer and you don’t use internet on your TV. I think that’s because they still didn’t find the right interface en they didn’t find a suited input device. The closest thing for me is a mediacenter.

    I got a plugin for my Xbox mediacenter so I can watch Youtube movies. Do I use it a lot? No, because if I want to search with the remote, it takes too much time. Also the quality of the video is poor.

    So for me webTV has to have some advantages, and that’s better quality and better experience.

    I also see a future for WebTV on mobile devices. I hope that connections with internet on mobile devices will become a lot cheaper, because the speed is allready there (HSDPA).

  5. Raymond van Dongelen Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 am

    In response to Niels:
    I think there is a future for the web just as an (invisible) infrastructure for television. I don’t have the need to know how it works, and I don’t want to do any configuration or searching :-)

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