What happened to the CD? It went to the Internet. Why? More than ten years ago peer-to-peer softwares such as Napster and Kazaa made it possible for people to share music and other files over the Internet in a new easy way. For many years, record companies battled agains pirates as they call those who illegally shared music from their record labels. Record companies denied that a new business model was emerging and only after Apple opened their iTunes music store, a new chapter was written. Now people were able to buy and listen to music legally from the Internet. The same is happening all over again to TV.
Technology Revolution
Movie and TV industry has been facing similar revolution, but it has been taking longer as it has taken time before enabling technologies such as TV’s, internet cable speeds, hard drives and so on were developed enough to allow distributing large good quality video files over the Internet.
Now hard drive space is relatively cheap to buy, so it is not a problem to download and store media files that can be size of several gigabytes. However, not all people will be buying more and more hard drive space to accommodate all video files. Thus, media stores such as iTunes, need to think of distributing media files from the media cloud where people could be streaming content to their TVs. Hulu is an advertisement powered video service that works in a such streaming approach. The media cloud concept is discussed more in the earlier article here.
Social Revolution
However, TV as we know it needs to transform before it fits to the new business model in the internet. To my mind, the social TV could be the next big thing. Boxee Social Media Center is one good example on the developing trend. When bringing a PC to Home Theater, it allows the user to be in control on the content they consume. The on demand type of watching will change the user behavior dramatically. I think recommenders will become a new profession in the coming years when the web goes to TV. There is an overwhelming amount of content for example in the YouTube that needs to be somehow filtered to the viewers. Trusting recommendations from friends and other trusted parties will play an important role in this transformation.
So these are my thoughts on how TV is going to the internet in the coming years. Let me know your views and any examples on how Internet has already changed how you watch TV.
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