There is an interesting article in the latest issue of The Economist about the convergence of computers and TV and what the business model of that convergence will look like. Briefly, the article discusses three models:
Pay Per Show: In this model, you pay for each show you download. Once you've paid and downloaded it, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Burn it to DVD, lave it on your hard drive, move it to your iPod, etc. The Economist notes that this is the model Apple has established with the iTunes.
All-you-can-eat: This is the model being established by Netflix and some others. Basically you pay a fee for access to a service and you can watch all the content from that service that you want. In this model, they generally stream your selected show to your TV and there isn't a way to permanently store the show for later watching in the future.
Free: This is the model being implemented by Joost a new peer to peer protocol being developed by the same guys who brought you KaZaA and Skype. In this model, the content will be free just like TV is today but it will contain commercials. Not so many as current TV. They are claiming 3 minutes per hour. Joost will have things called "channels" but they won't be programmed to a schedule. They will in effect be play lists of TV shows which you can pick from.
Of the three, Pay Per Show is the one that comes closest to describing what I want. I guess my attitude on this is at we're all paying for our TV in various ways now. In theory, TV is free, but in practice, we all get that cable bill or satellite bill every month. So my opinion on the matter is that I want to minimize the amount of my payment that goes to infrastructure for delivering the content and maximize the amount of my payment that goes to the writers, actors, and other creative people that actually produce the content. (And for the record, I include producers as being part of the creative team too since they effectively have to buy in to the vision of the show and assume the financial risks).
What I want is TV that works just like a combination of a Tivo and the RSS subscription model used by podcasts and video podcasts, Let's call it the RSS model. So today I can brows the internet and find all kinds of interesting podcasts and video podcasts. Sometimes I find them by word of mouth from friends, sometimes I find them by browsing directories of podcasts. Sometimes I just run across them on various sites. Regardless, once I've found a podcast I like, I can basically subscribe to it with a single click. No more difficult than clicking a hyper-link. OK, well, in practice it's actually a little more complicated than that. But still, it's pretty darn easy.
The thing that is appealing to me about that model is that _anyone_ can do it. Everyone is on equal footing. Just like anyone can have a blog, anyone can be a TV producer. The same mechanism can be used by CBS and NBC to produce and distribute their hot new shows. The same mechanism can be used by the local amateur theater group to distribute videos of their production. The same mechanism could be used by the corner church to distribute video of their Sunday services. A key fundamental feature of the RSS model is that no one has a monopoly on the distribution infrastructure.
Currently as far as I am aware, virtually no one requires payment for RSS subscriptions. But it is technically possible work out billing and usage and payment options into the RSS technology. This gives me the most flexibility. In the RSS model, I could choose to subscribe only to free content, or I could choose to pay money in exchange for a subscription to my favorite TV show. And in the RSS model, my payment would go directly to the people who are producing what I enjoy. No more paying money to the cable industry as a whole and letting money trickle back to the various cable TV channels, some of whom I like and some of whom I despise.
Once I've done a one click subscribe and possible made a payment to receive the show. I want the episodes to get downloaded to my "Tivo" and stay there for as long as I want. I might want to watch an episode once or twice or 5 times. I might want to burn it to some other media for long term storage so I can watch it over and over again. I can accept license agreements that prohibit me from giving away licensed content to my friends. But when I pay for a show, I expect that I have it available to watch whenever I want to.
In the great TV/Computer convergence movement, an RSS model would favor the computer side of the convergence. And frankly, that has always made the most sense to me. I can imagine computers getting smarter about content distribution and understanding how TV is encoded. That's largely what we have today. We mostly just need to scale up the capacity of personal computers to accommodate the amount of video we're talking about. On the other hand, I can't really see TV's getting smarter to the point of being able to do all this. And even if they did, what would they appear to be if not a networked computer on the web?
So in the long run, an RSS model for TV content would mean that your TV is eventually replaced by a "media center" PC and that thing that displays the video will no longer have a cable TV connection, or a satellite dish connection. It will simply be a very expensive, high quality monitor for your home server.
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