The golden age of streaming, moving from the hard-drive to the cloud (Steve Gillmor): ACCESS first, not Copy

TechcrunchIT has a great post on 'the golden age of streaming', written by Steve Gillmor (yes, of the Gillmor Gang) - he always has some very sharp things to share.  Here are some highlights and comments, as usual:

First, some nice stats:  "As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers - 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers - the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD.."

Now these kinds of stats will put some serious fear into broadcasters and cable companies - if this trend continues (and once streaming gets over its inherent bandwidth and bottleneck problems), who would want to spend all that cash on cable TV (even if the do have DVRs build-in)? P2P streaming, anyone?

Steve goes on: "It used to be that having physical control of entertainment and other software was critical to the user experience. Record and film companies kept accelerating the quality levels of their products to stay ahead of the pirates and the growing ability of consumers to capture and archive content off the radio and television networks..."

How true: physical possession is no longer really needed, in the very near future (right now this is still mostly geek-land stuff) - and copyright will morph into usage right based on revenue shares.

Steve goes on:  "This, of course, is the same shift software has undergone from shrinkwrap to service, from Outlook to Gmail, Office to Google Apps, and from the hard drive to the cloud. In effect, productivity apps are now streamed to and the data from the user. With the data stored redundantly in the cloud, we are more comfortable with a streaming situation than with the former illusion that we “owned” our data locally"

Yes!  And now some final marvels: "Once the user has undergone this reworking of trust, devices such as the iPhone and the Slingbox have extended the notion of streaming to the car, the hotel room, to a friend’s house, anywhere...The shift seems to be from ultimate quality to ultimate utility, to fit the data into the time available to consume it...Once the underground streaming economy reaches a critical mass, media companies will reach some form of accommodation. Whether it takes the form of advertising supported models or the emergence of viral talent going “direct” to consumers, the end result will be the Net-based delivery of high value content under user control"

Great stuff, Steve, all around. Despite some of the more negative comments on this post I think you are onto something really crucial here. Maybe someone will eventually come up with a good P2P streaming solution to solve the bandwidth paradox (i.e. the fact that the more people use the content the higher the cost becomes - unlike regular broadcasting where it costs the same no matter how many people watch). I also agree with some of the other comments that this is not at all about P2P vs Streaming - it's a question of radically changing user behaviors which will impact everything else including advertising, marketing and the entire entertainment ecosystem: now it's access first, then copy (if at all). And this does indeed signal The End of Control for a lot of the major players in current media ecosystem (i.e. studios, cable companies, broadcasters, mobile operators..). Read more at my End Of Control book preview site.

 

Comments

[Jon Smirl]

A TV station is just a play list you don't control.

The bandwidth problem is easily addressed by CDNs (content delivery networks). By caching the video close to the user bandwidth demand is greatly reduced. You could even build a cache in those neighborhood distribution boxes.

Things like CNN can be handled using multicast. Mbone multicast is very efficient for live streams.

Of course the cable companies like their $60/mth for video.

Note that the new Comcast 250GB limit sound high but look at it in the context of HD viewing. It works out to about 2.5hrs of HD video a day. That is way too low for a family with multiple viewers. Bittorrent is just a smoke screen, that cap is there to stop you from disconnecting your $60/mth video signal.