The future of television
Watching television is going to change in the next couple of years. You don’t have to be a visionary to see that. But what is going to happen? The old telecom companies and cable companies all are putting a lot of money in digital television.
But for now digital television is just like analog television, with some extra channels. And some weird hard to navigate interactive content.
I have tried KPN mine and digital television from UPC and I have to say I am really disappointed. The solutions are slow, not very user-friendly and expensive.
The technology is closed and does not seem to be very state if the art. Where are the tivo like functions other countries have? We have to rely on the supplier to come up with new innovations.
Is this the future of television? I think not. Once again the web seems to be the place where all the innovation happens. Youtube ofcourse is a prime example. But there are a lot of inititiaves. The web has a lot to offer to television:
- It’s world wide
- It’s open and not dominated by one party. Competetion drives innovation.
- It can be used to reach small and big audiences
- Easy to personalise
The web also has a huge problem, video uses lots of bandwidth.
A very nice solution is being created by Joost a company that has been in the news the last couple of weeks. Joost was started by the people that also started Skype and Kazaa. Joost uses peer to peer technology to deal with the bandwidth issue video causes on the web. Joost gives unprecedented features to both user and advertisers. Advertisers are able to advertise to all viewers of a program in a certain zipcode.
Now this sounds a lot better compared to the non-web companies.
Here is what I hope to find in digital television:
- Ease of use, no special boxes. Just a television/ computer
- I don’t have to record anything
- It should support active searching for a great program
- It should support just mindless watching
- It offers ads I am interested in, for products I really need.
- Content not only directed at large audiences. Content further in the Long tail
- Fast access to new features
- Transparancy in moving all my settings to a new supplier
- Anyplace any time