Television Reloaded

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: May 23, 2005 7:34:26 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Television Reloaded
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com


Television Reloaded

It's a transformation as significant as when we went from black-and- 
white to color—and it's already underway. The promise is that you'll  
be able to watch anything you want, anywhere—on a huge high-def  
screen or on your phone.

By Steven Levy
Newsweek
Updated: 6:25 a.m. ET May 23, 2005

May 30 issue - Forty-four years ago, when Newton Minow famously  
described television as a vast wasteland, he might have hit the  
bull's-eye on the wasteland part. But he didn't know from vast. TV  
back then—a few black-and-white channels with a test pattern after  
midnight—was a sleepy three-light town where everybody hung out at  
the same dull places because there wasn't much else going on. As  
monochrome moved to color, and we got pay TV, more channels, remote  
controls, VCRs and cussin' on HBO, television sprawled much wider.  
But compared with what's coming, our 2005 experience is only half vast.

Tomorrow's television? Now we're talking vast. Start with the screens— 
wide, flat, high-definition monsters that delineate tire treads on  
NASCAR rigs and zits on an anchorperson's chin—and move to the  
programming choices, which will expand from a lousy 200 or so  
channels to tens of thousands of 'em, if you figure in video-on- 
demand (VOD). It'll be a cosmic video jukebox where you can fire up  
old episodes of "Cop Rock," the fifth game of the 1993 World Series,  
a live high-school lacrosse game, a ranting video blogger and your  
own HD home-movie production of Junior's first karate tournament.  
While it's playing, you can engage in running voice commentary with  
your friends, while in a separate part of the screen you're slamming  
orcs in World of Warcraft. Then you can pay your bill on screen. And  
if you ever manage to leave your home theater, you can monitor the  
whole shebang in your car, at a laptop at Starbucks or via the  
laundry-ticket-size screen on your cell phone. The ethos of New TV  
can be captured in a single sweeping mantra: anything you want to  
see, any time, on any device. "We are at a watershed moment in home  
entertainment," says Brian Roberts, CEO of the cable giant Comcast.

To paraphrase sci-fi author William Gibson, the TV future is already  
here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. Early adopters have  
jumped on the new stuff because they offer two qualities  
traditionally lacking in the fading era of broadcast television:  
personalization and empowerment. All of which is worse news than a  
crummy Nielsen rating for the major networks, whose market share has  
already plummeted in the past decade.

Start with the hardware. Ever notice that no one uses the term "TV  
set" anymore? That's because people can watch on anything from a  
traditional box in the den to their computer, to a screen on the seat  
back of a JetBlue plane. But when it comes to the living room, the  
standard is a big-screen monitor that delivers high-definition  
quality. After years of hype and wrangling about standards, prices  
are down and a quarter of all TVs sold are now high def. Once you get  
one, you're hooked. "You find yourself mesmerized," says Mark Cuban,  
an entrepreneur who used his dot-com earnings to buy the Dallas  
Mavericks—and now has started HDNet, a cable-and-satellite offering  
that hosts about 20 hours of original high-def programming a week.  
"You'll always give the benefit of the doubt to something in HD," he  
says. That's good for Cuban, who snags viewers with homegrown  
productions like "Bikini Destinations." Meanwhile, HD is a must-have  
for network prime-time dramas, and just last week ABC announced that  
"Good Morning America" would go HD.

Another transition well underway is time-shifting, the ability to  
rearrange the schedule to watch programs at your convenience, not the  
networks'. Though videocassette recorders have enabled this for  
decades, those devices were always too hard to use and too dumb to  
really shape our habits. But a digital video recorder —(DVR) can  
easily grab your favorite shows—even if you don't know they're on—and  
allows you to freeze-frame fast action and jump commercials. Former  
FCC head Michael Powell called it "God's machine." As DVRs are  
offered in cable and satellite set-top boxes, more people are finally  
enjoying the benefits.

Video-on-demand provides another way to bypass what programmers offer  
at a given moment—and millions are already experimenting with it,  
commonly choosing old episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to the usual  
prime-time fare. VOD libraries will inevitably expand to the  
equivalent of the mammoth music boxes of iTunes and Rhapsody. And if  
you ever get tired of old movies, you'll have a chance to watch  
flicks at home while they're still in theaters. "All the studios say  
it's a matter of not if but when... new movie releases will quickly  
air on cable TV," says Comcast's Roberts.

Some people believe that between the recorders and VOD, people will  
follow schedules only for real-time events like sports and election  
night. Fox TV president Peter Ligouri says, "People want to watch  
shows like 'American Idol' live, in the moment." But everything else  
can wait. "Look behind any programmer's desk and you'll see a chart  
with the prime-time schedule—in 20 years that model will be as  
obsolete as the nickelodeon," says Steve Perlman, CEO of Rearden,  
Inc., and founder of Web-TV.

While time-shifting changes the when of television, "space-shifting"  
tinkers with the where. Now that you've stored your show on a TiVo,  
it's only logical to take it with you on your laptop, hand-held  
viewer or PSP game player. A company called Sling Media sells a  
device that allows you to watch the program playing in your living  
room on your computer, anywhere in the world. Other schemes are  
designed to beam programming directly to gadgets not normally  
regarded as TV devices. MobiTV, a service that sends programs to cell  
phones (like CNN and Discovery Channel), has 300,000 subscribers. It  
may call to mind the characters in "Zoolander" squinting into their  
microscopic mobiles, but Idetic CEO Phillip Alvelda reminds us that  
people once scoffed at mobile phones. "The truth is, mobile devices  
have a lot of advantages over television," he says. "For one thing,  
it's personal." And while you might not want to watch a viewing of  
"Lawrence of Arabia" on your Razor, new programming ("Mobisodes")  
will fit the size and time constraints of commuter-potato viewing.

All these elements come together in what may be the most significant  
development of all—the movement of the television platform to the  
Internet. IPTV hopes —to merge the lay-back culture of the living  
room with the bustling activity of the lean-forward Net. "This is the  
future," gushes Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has a $400 million  
deal with telecom giant SBC to implement it.

"Moving from broadcast TV to broadband TV changes the whole  
industry," says Gates's IPTV czar Moshe Lichtman. While cable and  
satellite companies have limited channel capacity, the Net—which,  
you'll recall, can host billions of Web pages without a sweat—has  
room for everything. You can stack as many shows on the screen as  
your eyes can handle. When you watch baseball, you can monitor  
several games at once, or choose to view the game from several  
different angles at the same time. A future presentation of the  
Masters Tournament might let you follow any golfer for every minute  
of his round.

[snip]

With Brad Stone and Jennifer Ordonez

URL: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7935915/site/newsweek/>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>



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