The Coming Television Revolution
The revolution is just getting started and will begin to make
its mark this year. By 2010, it will begin to take off. By 2025,
it will be the standard for all TV viewing. It's called Internet
Protocol Television, or IPTV for short. IPTV works with a
set-top box connected to any broadband interface and to a TV. It
will allow users to choose among thousands (and eventually
hundreds of thousands) of hours of programming, including
movies, sports, classic TV, etc., and download their selections
from the internet to the hard drive of the set-top box.
Initially, set-top box hard drives will be able to store up to
300 hours of programming at a time, but capacity will expand as
the technology becomes more refined. Also, download times will
become shorter and shorter as broadband connection speeds become
faster and faster. Eventually, a two-hour movie will be fully
downloadable in a couple of minutes. Once the programs are
downloaded to the hard drive, they can be viewed on the
connected TV at any time via a DVR-type interface provided by
the set-top box. Besides the convenience of an all
video-on-demand (VOD) environment, IPTV will provide a much
wider range of programming than broadcast, cable, and satellite
TV, or even major video chains, could ever provide. Because the
programming is available from the internet, it will be almost
completely unlimited and unconstrained. Programming from all
over the world will be available along with every imaginable
genre of niche programming. Also, previously unreleased
independent films that have been sitting on shelves for years
due to the lack of a distribution source will suddenly become
available to the masses via IPTV. Films that previously could
not be made at all will become a reality and be available on the
IPTV services. Long forgotten films and TV shows will have new
life breathed into them by IPTV. To top it all off, much of this
programming will be eventually be available in high definition
(HDTV)! Most IPTV platforms will be divided into "channels", but
not the same kind of channels that we have grown accustomed to
with traditional TV services. In this case, a "channel" is
defined as a division of an IPTV service by individual content
provider. Each content provider carried by a given IPTV platform
will have its own guidelines for delivering programming on its
channel. Some will provide their content for free to everyone
who owns a given IPTV product. Some will be subscription based,
i.e., everything on their channels will be available for a
monthly or annual subscription. Others will be all pay-per-view.
Still others will provide a combination of all of the above.
Several entrants into this market have either already debuted or
plan to debut sometime this year. Among those are Akimbo
(www.akimbo.com), DAVETV (www.dave.tv), TimeShifTV
(www.timeshiftv.com), and VCinema (www.vcinema.com). Please see
their respective websites for more details, as each one will
offer a slightly different variation of IPTV technology. In
addition, a joint venture between TiVo (www.tivo.com) and
NetFlix (www.netflix.com) will be starting up later this year.
TiVo plans to eventually make the entire Netflix DVD library
available to its customers on an on-demand basis via a broadband
connection to a TiVo box and a TV. Other potential IPTV
contenders will be announcing their intentions over the next
year or two. One of these nascent IPTV services headquartered
near my home has already started placing "help wanted" ads in my
local newspaper. Within the next 20 years, all the fuss over
broadcast TV indecency will become irrelevant, as there will be
very little other than news and live sporting events on
broadcast TV. The major networks will shift most of their
entertainment programs to IPTV to avoid all the broadcast
content restrictions currently being enforced by the FCC.
Eventually, broadcast TV will cease to exist. Cable and
satellite services as we know them will also become extinct.
Yes, there will still be cable and satellite platforms, but
they, along with DSL and wireless internet services, will exist
merely as conduits for bringing broadband internet into homes
and offices. There won't be any more cable and satellite TV, per
se. The now 60-year-old paradigm of television schedules in
which programs air at specific times on specific days of the
week will pretty much be a thing of the past. Everything, except
what's left of broadcast TV, will be exclusively available on
demand via an IPTV platform. These developments in no way mean
that all TV programming will become more risqu