Will the internet kill TV?

Jerry, I think your time horizon is too short here. The Internet is killing the CD, it’s just taking its time about finishing it off. I haven’t seen any radio statistics, but I would be shocked if the story weren’t the same there. I can’t remember the last time I listened to broadcast music, because I’ve got an iPod in my car. (I do tune into NPR sometimes)

As for video, the broadband speeds necessary to do video properly are just now coming online. So I don’t think you can read too much into the state of today’s broadcast video market. As speeds continue to increase, I think you’ll see a proliferation of new video services. Keep in mind that YouTube is barely a year old. It’s almost impossible to predict what kind of video services will be around 5 years from now.

I don’t think finding video to watch will be as cumbersome or as daunting as you suggest. There are all sorts of ways that video content could be organized for consumer convenience, including faux “channels” for consumer who want that. But I doubt many will. How many of us would like to go back to CDs, where your only option is to listen to songs in the order they appear on the CD? What reader of blogs wants to go back to only reading newspapers, with all content laid out in static pages? I don’t know how video content will be organized, but channels today are what CD tracks and newspaper columns were a decade ago.

You do have a good point about live broadcasts: those won’t be quite as easy to replace, and so broadcast TV will likely to stick around for a while. But eventually, the growth of the Internet will overtake live broadcast too. Or, perhaps, telecom companies will begin blurring the line between online and broadcast video, rebroadcasting a wide variety of “channels” transmitted from across the Internet.

Video is just data, and the Internet is the most efficient and powerful data transmission medium ever invented. Sooner or later, the Internet’s inherent advantages will overtake other transmission media. It might take 10 or 20 years, but I think it’s going to happen.

I suggest you take a look at BBC’s live multicasting of the last Olympics, lessons learned etc. With IPv6 and large-scale implementation of multicast, channel-surfing live digital programming is damn near as easy as watching analog TV today.

But I suspect that the acceptance of DVRs will have some impact on TV watching in the future, downgrading the importance of channel-surfing. Multicast will still be necessary to keep traffic loads under control, however.

The impact of on-demand services and such things as YouTube demonstrates one clear path for the enhancement of TV, via on-line archives of canned content, but that’s only one part of the story.

Jerry, I think your time horizon is too short here. The Internet is killing the CD, it’s just taking its time about finishing it off. I haven’t seen any radio statistics, but I would be shocked if the story weren’t the same there. I can’t remember the last time I listened to broadcast music, because I’ve got an iPod in my car. (I do tune into NPR sometimes)

As for video, the broadband speeds necessary to do video properly are just now coming online. So I don’t think you can read too much into the state of today’s broadcast video market. As speeds continue to increase, I think you’ll see a proliferation of new video services. Keep in mind that YouTube is barely a year old. It’s almost impossible to predict what kind of video services will be around 5 years from now.

I don’t think finding video to watch will be as cumbersome or as daunting as you suggest. There are all sorts of ways that video content could be organized for consumer convenience, including faux “channels” for consumer who want that. But I doubt many will. How many of us would like to go back to CDs, where your only option is to listen to songs in the order they appear on the CD? What reader of blogs wants to go back to only reading newspapers, with all content laid out in static pages? I don’t know how video content will be organized, but channels today are what CD tracks and newspaper columns were a decade ago.

You do have a good point about live broadcasts: those won’t be quite as easy to replace, and so broadcast TV will likely to stick around for a while. But eventually, the growth of the Internet will overtake live broadcast too. Or, perhaps, telecom companies will begin blurring the line between online and broadcast video, rebroadcasting a wide variety of “channels” transmitted from across the Internet.

Video is just data, and the Internet is the most efficient and powerful data transmission medium ever invented. Sooner or later, the Internet’s inherent advantages will overtake other transmission media. It might take 10 or 20 years, but I think it’s going to happen.

I suggest you take a look at BBC’s live multicasting of the last Olympics, lessons learned etc. With IPv6 and large-scale implementation of multicast, channel-surfing live digital programming is damn near as easy as watching analog TV today.

But I suspect that the acceptance of DVRs will have some impact on TV watching in the future, downgrading the importance of channel-surfing. Multicast will still be necessary to keep traffic loads under control, however.

The impact of on-demand services and such things as YouTube demonstrates one clear path for the enhancement of TV, via on-line archives of canned content, but that’s only one part of the story.

Tim,

I take your point about time-horizon, but I think it will be a very long while. I also don’t think that television channels as we know them (or radio stations for that matter) will ever go away. We might see the day when there is no more TV or radio over the air because the spectrum can be put to better use (e.g. as data networks that can themselves carry video as well as anything else). However, consumers will still want a Discovery Channel and a Food Network with a prepackaged stream of shows.

Additionally, content producers (the Discovery Channels and CBSs of the world) have no incentive to take their channels completely online. Discovery and the rest are paid by the cable and phone companies for the privilege of carrying the channel. I don’t see how they’ll make up losing that revenue if they take it straight to the consumer. Instead their online offerings will be a new, complimentary revenue stream for a long while.

Richard: No doubt capacity and technology can be developed to move TV (including live programs) online. But it will require a huge investment and, again, I don’t see who has the incentive to make it. Mark Cuban points out today how the studios still don’t have the incentive to go online, either.

Jerry,

Part of this debate probably ends up being a matter of semantics. There will probably always be something called “the discovery channel,” because that’s what people will be used to calling it, the same way I can get “The New York Times” at nytimes.com. But the Discovery Channel of 2025 probably won’t be a traditional broadcast channel. It’ll be delivered via the Internet and it may have options to pause and rewind shows, deliver personalized ads, have more interactive content. etc.

And yeah, there will probably be terrestrial TV and radio broadcasts for the foreseeable future, just as there were telegrams throughout the 20th Century. But they’re likely to be increasingly irrelevant. Hell, broadcast TV is already nearly irrelevant, given that 80% of TV viewers get their broadcast TV content via cable or satellite already.

As for channels’ incentives to take content online, I think you’re underestimating the ruthlessness of creative destruction. I can’t predict how the market will shake out, but my guess is that as online content proliferates, the market power of the big cable channels will gradually evaporate. They’ll stick around, but they’ll just be medium-sized fish in a much larger video universe. Cable companies will recognize this and demand price cuts from the cable channels. Eventually, a cable channel will be just another online video stream, just as nytimes.com is just another news website.

Tim,

I take your point about time-horizon, but I think it will be a very long while. I also don’t think that television channels as we know them (or radio stations for that matter) will ever go away. We might see the day when there is no more TV or radio over the air because the spectrum can be put to better use (e.g. as data networks that can themselves carry video as well as anything else). However, consumers will still want a Discovery Channel and a Food Network with a prepackaged stream of shows.

Additionally, content producers (the Discovery Channels and CBSs of the world) have no incentive to take their channels completely online. Discovery and the rest are paid by the cable and phone companies for the privilege of carrying the channel. I don’t see how they’ll make up losing that revenue if they take it straight to the consumer. Instead their online offerings will be a new, complimentary revenue stream for a long while.

Richard: No doubt capacity and technology can be developed to move TV (including live programs) online. But it will require a huge investment and, again, I don’t see who has the incentive to make it. Mark Cuban points out today how the studios still don’t have the incentive to go online, either.

Jerry,

Part of this debate probably ends up being a matter of semantics. There will probably always be something called “the discovery channel,” because that’s what people will be used to calling it, the same way I can get “The New York Times” at nytimes.com. But the Discovery Channel of 2025 probably won’t be a traditional broadcast channel. It’ll be delivered via the Internet and it may have options to pause and rewind shows, deliver personalized ads, have more interactive content. etc.

And yeah, there will probably be terrestrial TV and radio broadcasts for the foreseeable future, just as there were telegrams throughout the 20th Century. But they’re likely to be increasingly irrelevant. Hell, broadcast TV is already nearly irrelevant, given that 80% of TV viewers get their broadcast TV content via cable or satellite already.

As for channels’ incentives to take content online, I think you’re underestimating the ruthlessness of creative destruction. I can’t predict how the market will shake out, but my guess is that as online content proliferates, the market power of the big cable channels will gradually evaporate. They’ll stick around, but they’ll just be medium-sized fish in a much larger video universe. Cable companies will recognize this and demand price cuts from the cable channels. Eventually, a cable channel will be just another online video stream, just as nytimes.com is just another news website.

Cuban owns HD-NET, and cable channel, so he has in interest in downplaying alternative delivery vehicles for TV. He’s written very critically about IPTV, for example, but it’s in his interest to do so. He’s an interesting character, of course, but look what happened to the Mavs in the NBA playoffs: they blew a 2 games to 0 lead. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the cheap shot.)

The leading edge of television is always sports and porn, and both are already adopting the Internet as a deliver vehicle. Much of the Internet’s infrastructure is actually funded by porn, but nobody likes to talk about it a whole lot. And ESPN is doing some very interesting things combining traditional broadcast with digital broadcasts with multiple camera angles and ESPN 360, a subscription service in the Internet that delivers live broadcast with some bells and whistles.

There’s a lot of inertia in the couch-potato space, certainly, but the potential exists for greatly enhanced TV delivery and related services. Companies like ESPN have the same incentive as everybody else to develop the Internet as a delivery vehicle for TV: eyeballs and subscribers. As do the studios, who seem to have learned from the record companies that stonewalling doesn’t help the bottom line.

So first we get porn, then pirated movies, then sports, and finally subscription services such as “Survivor” with enhanced side-notes and background for the fanatics.

This stuff is inevitable because there exist several different audiences for each show, not just the one that traditional broadcast serves.

Cuban owns HD-NET, and cable channel, so he has in interest in downplaying alternative delivery vehicles for TV. He’s written very critically about IPTV, for example, but it’s in his interest to do so. He’s an interesting character, of course, but look what happened to the Mavs in the NBA playoffs: they blew a 2 games to 0 lead. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the cheap shot.)

The leading edge of television is always sports and porn, and both are already adopting the Internet as a deliver vehicle. Much of the Internet’s infrastructure is actually funded by porn, but nobody likes to talk about it a whole lot. And ESPN is doing some very interesting things combining traditional broadcast with digital broadcasts with multiple camera angles and ESPN 360, a subscription service in the Internet that delivers live broadcast with some bells and whistles.

There’s a lot of inertia in the couch-potato space, certainly, but the potential exists for greatly enhanced TV delivery and related services. Companies like ESPN have the same incentive as everybody else to develop the Internet as a delivery vehicle for TV: eyeballs and subscribers. As do the studios, who seem to have learned from the record companies that stonewalling doesn’t help the bottom line.

So first we get porn, then pirated movies, then sports, and finally subscription services such as “Survivor” with enhanced side-notes and background for the fanatics.

This stuff is inevitable because there exist several different audiences for each show, not just the one that traditional broadcast serves.

Incidentally, I have a one-word rebuttal to Mark Cuban: BitTorrent.

Incidentally, I have a one-word rebuttal to Mark Cuban: BitTorrent.

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