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Forget about the 500+ channel TV universe...
TiVo came to the rescue about 5 years ago and changed how my family watches TV. Everyone has heard of how if you normally use TiVo, you can’t watch TV without it. My non-tech wife is prove of this phenomena. But simply taping a show for later viewing and pausing live TV isn’t enough anymore. The problem is that you and I have become content owners, and that content is all digital. We own music (that we rip into MP3s), we take digital pictures, we shoot digital videos of the vacation or the wedding, and more and more, we acquire TV shows and movies in a digital format. This begs for a new architecture in the home; one that is distributed and not ‘so 1930s’. With all of this content, we need a place to put it. Today we place it on our PCs and while this may be great for Microsoft and Apple, it isn’t palatable to the mass-market. True Media Servers have not hit the market yet, but everyone is talking about them. Instead of a $2000 PC, these small router-sized boxes will house a hard drive and a wireless connection. Your home will have a network server and a wireless network as prices drop and availability increases. Your TV, stereo, and PC will become viewers/clients of content transmitted from your central Media Server. Your cable, satellite signals will be processed by that Media Server and that content will be kept for viewing when you feel like it. Going one step further, why do you even need a traditional cable or satellite provider? With Internet bandwidth increasing, why not subscribe to an Internet Content Provider that will stream content, and perhaps even archive your own content? This is ready to take shape today! Check out Roku Labs or D-Link’s Home Lounge line of products. Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and Apple’s Rendezvous protocols allow for that architecture and there are products out today and lots more coming out that support it. This will force a shake up in how content is distributed and who the players are. Hollywood isn’t the only content owner with a stake in this. Think about all of the content owners who sell to the TV networks. In fact, TV networks will eventually have to look completely different in how they distribute and how they generate revenue (i.e. TV ads will need to morph into something else). We should be able to go directly to a content creator/owner such as ‘Jacque Cousteau’ and order up every episode, have it transmitted to our Media Server, and watch when we have enough time. The biggest issue in all of this is security! When content is digital, it almost is never secured and thus can be copied and shared. This should represent huge losses of revenue for content owners. Revenues can be offset though due to the wider distribution of content as has been witnessed in the music industry. Go and ask your friend’s teenage daughters and sons how they get their music. If they have a high-speed Internet connection at home or at school, I’ll bet you 90% of them say downloading them freely by using some Peer-2-Peer software. Do you think when they grow up and get a job that they will go out and purchase a CD? No, because they don’t see the value in music as it has always been free to them. The Genie is out of the bottle! The same can be said about all digital media content, including movies and TV shows. When consumers are able to easily acquire/view/listen to their digital content with very little limitations, the media industry will not be able to put the Genie back in its bottle. And time is running out. Without interoperable access control (e.g. DRM) that is user friendly, not cost prohibitive and does not alter or limit our viewing experience, the traditional media industries are heading down a dead end road where most of them will not survive. [ Edit | New ] |
