[IP] Television Reloaded
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 23, 2005 7:34:26 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Television Reloaded
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Television Reloaded
It's a transformation as significant as when we went from black-and-
white to color—and it's already underway. The promise is that you'll
be able to watch anything you want, anywhere—on a huge high-def
screen or on your phone.
By Steven Levy
Newsweek
Updated: 6:25 a.m. ET May 23, 2005
May 30 issue - Forty-four years ago, when Newton Minow famously
described television as a vast wasteland, he might have hit the
bull's-eye on the wasteland part. But he didn't know from vast. TV
back then—a few black-and-white channels with a test pattern after
midnight—was a sleepy three-light town where everybody hung out at
the same dull places because there wasn't much else going on. As
monochrome moved to color, and we got pay TV, more channels, remote
controls, VCRs and cussin' on HBO, television sprawled much wider.
But compared with what's coming, our 2005 experience is only half vast.
Tomorrow's television? Now we're talking vast. Start with the screens—
wide, flat, high-definition monsters that delineate tire treads on
NASCAR rigs and zits on an anchorperson's chin—and move to the
programming choices, which will expand from a lousy 200 or so
channels to tens of thousands of 'em, if you figure in video-on-
demand (VOD). It'll be a cosmic video jukebox where you can fire up
old episodes of "Cop Rock," the fifth game of the 1993 World Series,
a live high-school lacrosse game, a ranting video blogger and your
own HD home-movie production of Junior's first karate tournament.
While it's playing, you can engage in running voice commentary with
your friends, while in a separate part of the screen you're slamming
orcs in World of Warcraft. Then you can pay your bill on screen. And
if you ever manage to leave your home theater, you can monitor the
whole shebang in your car, at a laptop at Starbucks or via the
laundry-ticket-size screen on your cell phone. The ethos of New TV
can be captured in a single sweeping mantra: anything you want to
see, any time, on any device. "We are at a watershed moment in home
entertainment," says Brian Roberts, CEO of the cable giant Comcast.
To paraphrase sci-fi author William Gibson, the TV future is already
here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. Early adopters have
jumped on the new stuff because they offer two qualities
traditionally lacking in the fading era of broadcast television:
personalization and empowerment. All of which is worse news than a
crummy Nielsen rating for the major networks, whose market share has
already plummeted in the past decade.
Start with the hardware. Ever notice that no one uses the term "TV
set" anymore? That's because people can watch on anything from a
traditional box in the den to their computer, to a screen on the seat
back of a JetBlue plane. But when it comes to the living room, the
standard is a big-screen monitor that delivers high-definition
quality. After years of hype and wrangling about standards, prices
are down and a quarter of all TVs sold are now high def. Once you get
one, you're hooked. "You find yourself mesmerized," says Mark Cuban,
an entrepreneur who used his dot-com earnings to buy the Dallas
Mavericks—and now has started HDNet, a cable-and-satellite offering
that hosts about 20 hours of original high-def programming a week.
"You'll always give the benefit of the doubt to something in HD," he
says. That's good for Cuban, who snags viewers with homegrown
productions like "Bikini Destinations." Meanwhile, HD is a must-have
for network prime-time dramas, and just last week ABC announced that
"Good Morning America" would go HD.
Another transition well underway is time-shifting, the ability to
rearrange the schedule to watch programs at your convenience, not the
networks'. Though videocassette recorders have enabled this for
decades, those devices were always too hard to use and too dumb to
really shape our habits. But a digital video recorder —(DVR) can
easily grab your favorite shows—even if you don't know they're on—and
allows you to freeze-frame fast action and jump commercials. Former
FCC head Michael Powell called it "God's machine." As DVRs are
offered in cable and satellite set-top boxes, more people are finally
enjoying the benefits.
Video-on-demand provides another way to bypass what programmers offer
at a given moment—and millions are already experimenting with it,
commonly choosing old episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to the usual
prime-time fare. VOD libraries will inevitably expand to the
equivalent of the mammoth music boxes of iTunes and Rhapsody. And if
you ever get tired of old movies, you'll have a chance to watch
flicks at home while they're still in theaters. "All the studios say
it's a matter of not if but when... new movie releases will quickly
air on cable TV," says Comcast's Roberts.
Some people believe that between the recorders and VOD, people will
follow schedules only for real-time events like sports and election
night. Fox TV president Peter Ligouri says, "People want to watch
shows like 'American Idol' live, in the moment." But everything else
can wait. "Look behind any programmer's desk and you'll see a chart
with the prime-time schedule—in 20 years that model will be as
obsolete as the nickelodeon," says Steve Perlman, CEO of Rearden,
Inc., and founder of Web-TV.
While time-shifting changes the when of television, "space-shifting"
tinkers with the where. Now that you've stored your show on a TiVo,
it's only logical to take it with you on your laptop, hand-held
viewer or PSP game player. A company called Sling Media sells a
device that allows you to watch the program playing in your living
room on your computer, anywhere in the world. Other schemes are
designed to beam programming directly to gadgets not normally
regarded as TV devices. MobiTV, a service that sends programs to cell
phones (like CNN and Discovery Channel), has 300,000 subscribers. It
may call to mind the characters in "Zoolander" squinting into their
microscopic mobiles, but Idetic CEO Phillip Alvelda reminds us that
people once scoffed at mobile phones. "The truth is, mobile devices
have a lot of advantages over television," he says. "For one thing,
it's personal." And while you might not want to watch a viewing of
"Lawrence of Arabia" on your Razor, new programming ("Mobisodes")
will fit the size and time constraints of commuter-potato viewing.
All these elements come together in what may be the most significant
development of all—the movement of the television platform to the
Internet. IPTV hopes —to merge the lay-back culture of the living
room with the bustling activity of the lean-forward Net. "This is the
future," gushes Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has a $400 million
deal with telecom giant SBC to implement it.
"Moving from broadcast TV to broadband TV changes the whole
industry," says Gates's IPTV czar Moshe Lichtman. While cable and
satellite companies have limited channel capacity, the Net—which,
you'll recall, can host billions of Web pages without a sweat—has
room for everything. You can stack as many shows on the screen as
your eyes can handle. When you watch baseball, you can monitor
several games at once, or choose to view the game from several
different angles at the same time. A future presentation of the
Masters Tournament might let you follow any golfer for every minute
of his round.
[snip]
With Brad Stone and Jennifer Ordonez
URL: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7935915/site/newsweek/>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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