Image: Splashlight; Courtesy of Broadway Video Enterprises and NBC Studios, Inc. (SNL icon)
In Brief
- High-quality video is migrating online, but forces in the cable and entertainment industries are trying to slow down and control the process.
- The structure of broadband access in the U.S. subordinates Internet content to cable television delivery.
- Viewing Internet content on your television requires a user interface that is powerful enough to find and organize the near-infinite content available online but easy enough to use with a simple remote control.
It should not be so difficult. In an age when nearly all forms of media are digital, where broadband signals course through the industrial world as surely (and as critically) as electricity and freshwater, it should be possible to sit on one’s couch, push a button or two, and call up to your television any form of video-related entertainment you desire. New-release movies. Last week’s Lost. The first season of Cosmos. Setup should not require an electrical engineering degree, and you should not be forced to sift through 10 incompatible search functions to find the shows you desire.
Yet it is not easy to watch what you want when you want to. The reasons are not easily parsed and depend as much on technological circumstance as they do on the well-placed fears of entrenched industry powers. Digital distribution threatens their business models like nothing in the history of media, but as the music industry so dramatically illustrated, fighting the consumer’s desire for limitless content is a loser’s game. “I guarantee that five years from now TV as we know it is gone,” says Doc Searls, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “It will have been a 60-year-old experiment that will be followed by something else.” The major film studios are beginning to upload onto the Web their most precious material, and a plethora of devices are emerging that promise to help the confused consumer pull the richness of the Internet into his or her television. Behind the digital scenes, battles are now taking place that will shape the future of video for decades to come.
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17 Comments
Add CommentThe internet is NOT changing the way the deaf use TV. There is still NO CLOSED CAPTIONING on any video shown on the internet today. This is a violation of the 1996 Telecommunications act.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is absolutely false. Closed captioning isn't common in online video, but it is in use. YouTube, for example, allows users to upload video with CC embedded, as explained on this help page: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=100079
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat needs to be done is to encourage more content owners to demand and use CC in their online video.
CC Should not be embedded in the video but be available separately as text or some other medium. Also the software for the blind needs to be updated something fierce.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, just what we need -- even more stuff to clog an already overloaded backbone. Then, I can look forward to sciam's website loading like the good ol' days of dial-up. They already had the old airwaves which worked just fine and then the government saw fit to force a system change that, as succinctly as I can say it, sucks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sorry, Senator Stevens, but the tubes are not "clogged". There is no SINGLE "backbone" of the Internet, it's a distributed system with multiple routes and failover paths. The fact is, even with the explosive growth of online media, everything's as fast, if not faster, today than it was 13 years ago when I first got a cable modem. Your statement belies your ignorance of the field and technology involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs to your opinion of HD, I share it to a point...meh. The problem isn't the quality of the picture, it's the quality of the content itself. Sure, things look prettier now, but it's still the same banal crap as before.
But, to address the overall article itself, it's really not THAT hard to get an online digital living room experience. I've had one for about a decade. Windows Vista comes with Media Center, and every major computer vendor sells a PC that can sit comfortably and quietly in the living room with either s-video or HDMI out. They also come with a remote and usually a wireless keyboard and mouse. Vista's Media Center has links and hooks into Netflix and other VOD on demand providers and makes watching new releases as easy as selecting them. And, since Netflix has DVD collections of TV shows, you can watch an entire season of a show without leaving the house. For about $400, you can plug and play into this content. There are even plugins available for MC that will grant you access to Youtube and other streaming sites. Again, requires a little more knowhow, but not too hard. The kid down the street who's "good with computers" should be able to help you out.
For current TV shows, nothing beats the new Hulu Desktop. It provides 10-foot viewing experience and usage and since it's sponsored by most of the major TV networks, their shows typically show up the day after they're broadcast. For most 22 minute shows (the length of a half hour show when most of the commercials are taken out), you'll have to sit through two commercial breaks that are one commercial long, and few are more than 15 seconds. It does take a little bit of know how to get Hulu "integrated" with Media Center, but there's ample help out there to make it happen.
Finally, not everything is available via any of the above channels. It requires some loose scruples, and again a little more know how than your typical grandmother might have, but Bittorrent sites will provide you with access to an even greater wealth of media.
My wife and I got rid of cable about four months ago, and using the above technologies haven't missed it a bit. We don't watch a lot of TV to begin with, so it was stupid to spend almost $100/month on a product we barely used. Now, it's the cost of my cable modem and a Netflix subscription.
I usually cannot watch Hulu shows in the busy Internet traffic times. Online TV is the future, but still there is a lot to do for the speed!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI gave up cable this year to cut costs, intending to rely on my antenna and internet connection, but the plans that are offered for internet only are really stifling. While I am able to stream some tv sources, it is pretty bad quality. Unfortunately, there are no providers in my area (Central NJ) that offer over 1megabit but below 15 megabit internet to get a decent connection that is still conservatively priced. To make things worse, anyone intending to go internet only will hit penalties for not bundling up services like phone and tv. In my area that penalty is $20/month extra.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI watch Hulu with a 756kb cable connection on a 4 year old computer with no problem. And I am in the middle of an internet void. The nearest hubs are Winnepeg and Minneapolis 600 miles away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI watch Hulu during the evening, peak "Internet" times, and never had a problem with it...once I switched the Quality from High to Medium. I notice no significant difference in video quality (and when watching House and The Office, who cares?), but a significant improvement in jumpiness. Perhaps try decreasing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHulu works for me on a lower setting. Netflix usually looks pretty bad. ESPN360 is too choppy to handle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBig Telcom doesn't want you to be using IPTV. We need to bypass them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is using its control of the public telephone network that taxpayers funded to choke bandwidth to IPTV applications like HULU, keeping the bandwidth for their own cable tv or IPTV service. Despite having a 2000% profit level on broadband they don't have to expand their networks to higher capacities and speed. Doubling capacity would add a buck a month to your bill. US broadband is now so slow and expensive that a lot of developing countries have better service.
We all need to be yelling at our local and state politicians to reestablish a public utility that provides a high speed one gigabit per second ethernet pipe with internet access into every household/business. This would cost very little if our existing public power utilities combined an ethernet pipe with the communications requirements of smart meters.
At every block a wireless N access point would be available connecting to home wireless mesh repeaters, smart meters and mobile smartphones.
Why internet/wifi voip/voip/iptv should be carried in anyway different to natural gas, power, or water is largely a result of a political process lead by incompetent and corrupt politicians.
Citizens can also do it for themselves with a cheap open-mesh router for $25 or so which lets you share your internet and secure your home network at the same time. And the more of them you plug in the more they mesh up. No fuss no programming just plug em in. Open-mesh allows you to restrict the amount of your bandwidth available to your neighbors. You can also require logins, resell it if you like, restrict on mac addresses, and boot heavy users.
If people with enlightened social attitudes or a just a dislike of the phone company, switched to open-mesh WiFi routers from their junk easily compromised equipment Big Telecom sells, Big Telecom would be taking a serious beating and the world would be a better place.
Then open up competition for whats left to all and sundry.
The internet is NOT legal for TV. It doesn't have an standardized encoded method to deliver Closed Captioning. Groups are getting together to STOP all video over the internet unless this is stopped immediately and streams are standardized to include CC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, good luck with that. You do know that there are countries outside the US who don't have to follow the ADA, right? Beyond that, the ridiculousness of your comments are indescribable. 90% of the content streamed today on the Internet is created by individuals. I'm certain that individuals aren't required to follow the ADA. If I don't have to provide a ramp in my house in case someone with a wheelchair visits, I certainly don't have to provide closed captioning to the deaf visitors to my site.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a question to all the above. Can I just buy a super sized monitor and use that as a t.v. instead of having to do all the steps to hook up one to the other as mentioned above?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou'll find it's cheaper to purchase a TV instead of a really large monitor. I was just out shopping today, and a reasonably good 42" LCD will run about $800. A similarly sized monitor is generally 2-3X as much. As long as your computer has a DVI output on the video card, you can get a DVI-HDMI cable and just plug it in. There's really not a whole lot effort involved.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find it amazing that the article doesn't mention gaming consoles as one of the major ways to get video off the net. The Xbox 360 and PS3 are very commonly used as the primary device to get video contents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTake a look at: www.tvfriendly.com, it is a browser add-on that enables to surf the web by using only the arrow keys (hence, without a mouse). It’s pretty much answering one of the problems presented in the article about the need for a user interface that will enable to operate an internet site with a simple remote control.
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