ON THE FUTURE OF INTERNET TV AND ALL MEDIA

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

This Washington Post article titled "Future of Internet TV is coming into View" (via memeorandum), caught my eye, as it offers a good round-up of products and services in this area from the recent CES show, AND a bit of future prognostication on what these services might look like in a few years from now. 

While my recent posts on the subject have dealt with the various obstacles in the way, and the things needed to be done to address them, it's good to take a step back and envision what this stuff may actually look like once all the thorny business model, regulatory and vertical silo/"walled garden" issues are potentially worked through over the next few years.  We all could use a break from real-world realities in the near-term.

So the WP article has a good description of how a consumer will consume internet TV via his/her PC or cell phone like device.  But it then also describes what this process may look like at home on a "TV":

"Back home the next day, those same custom Internet channels show up on my living room wall, which looks like a gigantic mirror when my Internet TV is turned off. So I switch it on, tune into my personal "Yahoo GO" channel and watch a slide show of my captioned Vegas photos on my 200-inch, high-definition wall display.

Then I change the Internet channel to Google Video and skip around inside the TV newscasts I missed while I was out of town. My custom Google channel does a nice job of flagging news segments on topics of interest to me so I can jump right to them, regardless of where they occur inside a newscast."

Fred Wilson and Mark Pincus also have a couple of good posts on the "Future of Media" that are worth reading in the context of envisioning of what all this may look like a few years out.

Fred reiterates his four rules of The Future of Media, while Mark pithily counters with the following from his Blackberry:

"i will posit that the future of media is found in the past. the advent of every new form of video delivery has started in the same place - porn. this is followed by a lot of failing attempts to get people to pay for marginal crap, which is finally followed by a few ballsy guys like the rupert murdochs who place huge bets on super high value content like box office movies (HBO)."

For me, I'll take the version of the future that Garfield offered yesterday, especially given that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of potential channels (click for larger image):

Comments

[patil]

Mike,

With Microsoft's adLabs technology, the world will change to Shop Live, Don't Search. I have prepared a presentation on flickr

[Nolan Eakins]

http://nolan.eakins.net/node/257

I say no more.

[Free TV]

I just want to watch an episode of A team or Star Trek when i want without buying DVD's

So TV on Demand please