TV can avoid the music industry’s fate and survive the digital age (via The Atlantic, Michael Hirschhorn)

The Atlantic has a good feature on the future of TV here. Some of it really rocks, some of it I would question.  As usual, here are some highlights and comments:

"My friend Mike and his wife had done away with their TV entirely and instead had set up their 20-inch iMac wide-screen as the focal point of a kind of jerry-rigged home theater; with no grievous loss in quality, they were feeding it with content from iTunes, various other Web-based media services, and DVDs. In doing so, they had dispensed with those hefty cable bills and had asserted an icono­clastic form of control over their media lives...."

My comment: This is exactly what I am planning to do at my home - if this trend holds up it certainly changes the TV landscape ;)
"In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony Bravia taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer—now “user”—to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question...."

Well put!

"According to a recent study, the majority of Internet users watch roughly 3 hours of video on the Web each month, compared to the average person’s 4.5 hours of TV each day. For all the hype surrounding Web video, it was not surprising that NBC, responsible for 40 percent of iTunes’s video sales, had earned only $15 million last year on those sales..."

My comment: good stats (but it's not the same outside of the U.S.!), so yes indeed, we are early - much like digital music 3 years ago. But now it's the only game in town. It takes longer but when it hits it's huge.

The next quote is very important since it addresses the differences between Music and TV:

"The traditional-TV model is altogether more user-friendly. It’s free, or at least the costs are buried in cable bills (where, my Houston friends notwithstanding, years of learned behavior dictate that this is simply a cost to be borne), or they are buried in the more recent “triple play” offerings from Comcast and other companies that bundle cable with phone and high-speed Internet, obscuring the costs even more..."

My comment: this maybe a key point to the future of music - the costs must be bundled more, obscured if you wish, made less painful... i.e. feels like free!

The next paragraphs is where I don't quite agree:

"In the past couple of years, the TV networks have thrown their shows onto the Web willy-nilly, some on their own sites, some via AOL, Yahoo, and so forth, and some on new ventures like the aforementioned Hulu. The logic is that if they don’t, someone else will; indeed, a dedicated surfer can find most any show through sub-rosa peer-to-peer file- sharing systems that are used by an astonishing proportion of Web surfers, perhaps as much as 70 percent of the total. In the age of distributed media, you give the people what they want when they want it, where they want it. “If they want their show to succeed, they’ve got to get it out in front of as many people as possible,” an analyst for the technology research firm Forrester said of the Big Four broadcast networks, articulating the moment’s conventional wisdom and following it with a typical note of alarm: “The window is very short.”  But as the music industry learned very quickly (and the newspaper industry before it), this model swiftly turns you from a business to a charity, undermining the value of your product even as it brings your content to a larger audience. This is because advertisers and broadcasters have yet to settle on a protocol to sell advertising to accompany the near-infinitude of available content, and consumers are not yet ready to spend a lot of money paying for downloads. As NBCU’s Zucker put it in announcing the end of the network’s iTunes deal, “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.”

My comment: This is a real valid concern, of course, but here is the bottom line: you may not like it but you don't have the choice of withholding your content from the digital networks, and from those users that will convert, slice & dice, and upload them, as they see fit. Yes, in principle, you have copyright laws, you have enforcement tactics, you have leverage - but will the insistence on Copyright Law and the long- standing tradition of Exclusive Control actually make you money in the future?  Will the old system i.e. the good many $$$ you made while ruling the analog world still be available? Will you have the luxury of choice and prior approval? Will you be able to refuse the license? Refuse participation?

Well, I think the answer is clearly NO. While this may be upsetting it's not the end of the world -it's just the end of the media-tollbooth system of the past; i.e. who pays who for what, and when. Spend your energies on setting up a new tollbooth logic, and not on enforcing what worked in the past. Read my TV2.0 post.

Michael (the author), finishes it off with a nice twist, then: 

"As TV and the Internet converge into something generically known as broadband, the distinctions between the two will soon become nugatory from a consumer point of view. But will this resulting hybrid be more like TV, plus interactivity; or more like the Internet, plus TV? The distinction will be worth billions to whoever gets there first and organizes this mess in a fashion that’s satisfying for consumers. The networks and cable companies, therefore, will need to move quickly to find a way to package the different streams—professional and user-made, broadcast and Internet—into a huge, interactive library, all easily and pleasingly accessible on demand and portable to whatever device people are overpaying for at that moment. When they do, they can call it Web 3.0, and everyone will want to get it...." 

Comments

[Jon Smirl]

A TV channel is nothing more than a playlist that you don't control.

The Cablevision DVR lawsuit is very intertesting but they lost the appeal. Cablevision was going to make a centralized DVR. The central DVR would record every show on every channel "just in case you missed it". It would have converted the entire TV network world to on-demand.

A central DVR is easily buildable with current technology. It's only the lawyers stopping it.