isen.blog

A recent article chronicles the telcos' slow start in cable TV. I don't think the telcos stand a chance of succeeding in cable TV. Instead, if they're to succeed at all, they'll probably buy or form alliances with existing cablecos. (Dale Hatfield put it most memorably when he said, "Duopoly is an optimistic assumption.") But they'd better start swimming, because the times are a changing; I think four things will make the video entertainment space different in the near future: new devices, RSS, faster than real-time downloads and the end of the Kontent Kartel. Here's an article I wrote last year for VON Magazine about that:

Title: Clues about the Future of TV
Author: David S. Isenberg
Citation: VON Magazine, Nov. 2006, p. 64.

Science students carried slide rules when I began college.
Calculators were mechanical. They weighed a hundred
pounds. When they did long division they sounded like a
Vespa with a bad crank. Electronic circuits with dozens of
transistors were not yet rolling off the line. Then the
transistorized calculator appeared; it could add, subtract,
multiply and divide, but it couldn't do tangents or
cosines, so slide rule makers felt smug. Then a couple of
years later, it could do tangents and cosines. The slide
rule was dead. Slide rule makers never saw it coming.

If telco and cableco executives don't pay attention to
blogs, they risk being slide-ruled out of the next
generation of TV. At one cableco I know, the senior
managers are all, "Blogs, shmogs, what's that Internet
hippie stuff got to do with us?" They don't keep a blog,
they don't read blogs and they don't listen to podcasts.
They don't understand how podcasts evolved from blogs, or
how this could have anything to do with them.

End-user Content and RSS

There are several aspects of blogging with lessons for the
future of TV. The first is end-user generated content. It
is easy to sample a few random blogs and scoff, "Who'd want
to read this?" But blogs like Engadget and BoingBoing are
good, hence popular, so they've risen to become primary
sources of news, entertainment and, yes, culture. Global
Voices bloggers in dozens of countries have become first-
hand sources. On-line security bloggers like Ed Felten,
Avi Rubin and Bruce Schneier outclass all the official
security sites put together.

The second aspect is RSS, Really Simple Syndication, a
protocol that creates a machine-readable description of
each participating blog article at a public Web site where
other machines can access it. These other machines collect
"feeds" you subscribe to (e.g. Bloglines) or search for
(e.g. Technorati) so you can scan blogosphere for the
information you want.

RSS is the engine behind podcasting too. Because the
Internet does not care what it carries, it carries audio as
easily as blog postings. Indeed, podcasts are little audio
blog postings consisting of music, speeches, dramatic
readings, chapters of talking books, newscasts, whatever.
If there's a particular audio-blogger you like, you
subscribe to her feed. When she publishes a piece, your
software discovers it via RSS and downloads it to your
computer.

Devices and Faster-than-real-time Downloads

Devices are a third critical aspect of blogging. I didn't
understand why podcasting was useful until I got my first
iPod.

The fourth aspect that's critical is faster-than-real-time
downloads. It was a revelation that I could plug my iPod
into my computer for two minutes and snarf a couple hours
of audio -- audio I actually wanted to hear -- and then
listen to it anywhere anytime I wanted. By trial-and-error,
by asking friends and by judiciously using search engines,
I found feeds like "The Gillmor Gang" (a tech talk show),
"The Nashville Nobody Knows" and NPR's "On the Media."
It transformed what I did when I walked, drove and flew.
It made an immediate, major cut in my TV-watching time.
Adding the iPod to user-generated content, RSS and faster-
than-real-time downloading created an emergent, life-
changing new thing.

The Internet treats video like audio. Apps based on user
content, RSS, new devices and fast downloads are emerging.
YouTube is but one weak signal from TV's future. It's an
18-month old Web site that already attracts millions of
video viewers. It gets tens of thousands of new videos,
made by its users, each day. It features RSS subscription,
of course. The amateurish quality of most videos obscures
the fact that, like blogs, the good ones certainly rise to
the top. It is certain that the next Vidor, Hitchcock,
Kurosawa or Tarantino will soon understand the new video
medium in yet-undiscovered ways and can't be bothered by
how Hollywood used to work.

If you're somebody whose job depends on understanding the
future of TV, start a blog, get an iPod, get the fastest
home Internet connection you can, subscribe to some RSS
feeds and check out YouTube. When the future runs you
over, at least you'll know what hit you.

[Von Mag's link here]

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Cableco, Comcast, Telco, Verizon, video