It took 19 days for the iTunes store to sell one million videos for its new iPod. Bittorrent, the popular file-sharing protocol that accounts for over a third of the Internet's bandwidth, has eliminated the overhead in the transfer of movies and TV shows over the web. TiVo and, to a lesser extent, OnDemand cable, allow viewers to watch what they want, when they want.
The familiar glowing cube'or flat-screen, if you're lucky'that dominates living rooms all over the world is going to see some profound changes in the next few years.
TV executives have learned from the music industries' ham-fisted reaction to file-sharing and other technological upheavals'Disney's deal with Apple to make five of its television shows available through the iTunes store is a step in the right direction. Now that it's clear there is a market for mobile video and pay-per-download TV, more needs to be done.
For one, take up a 'Long Tail' business model. The Long Tail, a much-discussed concept devised by Wired Magazine's Editor in Chief Chris Anderson in an article of the same name, suggests that, if content can be easily found, is cheap and available, someone out there will buy it.
Anderson cites Amazon.com sales as evidence of a successful Long Tail execution.
'Combine enough non-hits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet, more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles,' Anderson wrote in 'The Long Tail.' 'The market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are.'
Though some suggest Anderson's estimates are exaggerated and Amazon's Long Tail sales may fall anywhere between 20 to 40 percent, it is still a novel concept.
Long Tail logic extends to television. Re-releasing canceled or obscure TV shows as downloadable content is a no-brainer. With broadband growing more ubiquitous by the day, setting up the videos as 'torrents,' or downloadable bittorrent files, would virtually eliminate distribution costs.
As far as demand is concerned, rabid cult followings will pay up for long-lost episodes of their favorite shows. DVD sales of resurrected series like Family Guy, Upright Citizens Brigade and Freaks and Geeks are great evidence of this phenomenon.
Content providers would be advised to give these consumers what they want'if they don't, the fans will eventually find it on the file-sharing networks anyway.
Ashley Highfield is the Director of BBC New Media & Technology. In a speech entitled 'TV's tipping point: Why the Digital Revolution is only the beginning,' he said the industry needs 'to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wreaked havoc on the music industry.'
Highfield, along with other analysts, suggests that a way a to find video content must be established''a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in''??a Google video search, if you will.
But before the friendly Technicolor search engine starts indexing every video in the world, a new generation of computers must move its users away from the desktop and onto the couch.
Microsoft is trying to do just that.
With its new, hard-drive equipped Xbox 360 and a bevy of 'media center' PCs poised to infiltrate living rooms everywhere, Highfield suggests that this 'killer combination' of a computer and a television screen 'will be in half of all UK homes, in one form or another, by the end of this decade.'
At that point, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Henry Jenkins wrote'in 'I Want My Geek TV!''that a market outside of the major networks could develop, with 'media producers selling cult-TV shows directly to their niche publics.'
'Future TV may be unrecognizable from today, defined not just by linear TV channels, packaged and scheduled by television executives, but instead will resemble more of a kaleidoscope'thousands of streams of content, some indistinguishable as actual channels,' Highfield said. 'These streams will mix together broadcasters' content and programs, and our viewer's contributions.'
Then again, this could be just another case of technophilic hype. Even if it is, you have to admit'it's a pretty nice pipe dream.
