HDTV, Internet TV - Discontent, Dat content and a Dose of Reality TV

This week is CES, and a slew of electronic gizmos and gewgaws are being hawked to the general consumerati, including a whole lot of stuff around the Internet based TV media arena. Having read some of the breathless commentary over the last few days, it seemed that a timely bit of history would not go amiss. Those who do not recall the past.....

Firstly, Quality of Content vs Quality of Picture

Recall when satellite TV first came into the UK. The picture quality was a little better than you got out of a VHS recorder, compared to the much higher quality of PAL TV. (US based NTSC-watching readers may not have seen much of a difference However, the customers went for the new services like there was no tomorrow. The content was novel for the UK mass market, and consumers lapped it up. Picture quality was....well, "good enough" for the purposes of watching this content. A similar point can be made for MP3 vs higher fidelity digital music, as Clay Shirky does here.

Second - Quality of Content vs Quantity of Consumers

There is a corollary to the above point - no one could sensibly claim that the quality of the satellite TV content was better than what the UK already had on offer. In fact, much of it was poorer on every qualitative scale you can imagine except one - mass market appeal. Dumbed down and spiced up, it was the way forward and raced up the viewing figures - there was no going back, and Sky was the limit.

Third - Its not the Technology....

From VHS through to iTunes. it is seldom the best technology that wins - it is the best overall business system, the approach that makes it easiest to connect good (see above for what is meant by "good") content to customers easily and conveniently. I am amazed (and saddened) by this slew of point solution devices coming out that do (badly and with proprietary models) what one can do with a PC, a WiFi and a TV fairly easily and extremely flexibly. The only hope I see is that there is such profusion confusion that people will put off purchase and thus force a number of "de facto" standards to emerge, as has happened frequently in the past - mass customers like mass standards.

Anyway, thus armoured with the past, some thoughts on all the hoopla of the present Future:

(i) All those Web TV / IPTV plays emerging - the main thing about GooTube is not that its TV on a PC, its that it doesn't serve standard TV content. Business plays that serve the same old same old over the Internet are really in the "why?" category. No doubt there is some market for watching TV over PC, but can one really believe that Ad revenue will phase-shift just to serve the same basic content to a more fragmented audience? To succeed there will have to be significant differentiation over "good enoughs".

(ii) HDTV - what does it offer over todays' "Good Enoughs" technologies - and at what price? Given the same content base, the higher quality device does not necessarily win if the overall business system offers no significant benefits. Imho, for HDTV to really take off the overall experience has to be markedly better than is realistic today, especially at current prices. Mark Cuban disagrees, arguing that the networks aren't making the benefits of HDTV clear enough, but I think his comments prove my point

(iii) The plethora of devices serving old media onto new (mainly wi fi) channels - get a standard! So many of the solutions want to file / organise / encrypt / store / play / move your standard data in non standard, unshareable ways.

(iv) Software vs Tins - The big difference between the Broadband media and previous generations is that the software supply chain is inherently more efficient than tins. Expect quite an interesting battle between (free, downloadable and slightly harder to configure) software vs (more costly, proprietary yet easy to plug in) consumer devices over the next year or so.

At Broadsight we have been designing, building and running various interactive, online media rigs for 2 years now - it really is not hard to connect a broadband PC to a TV and configure it via fairly basic software to do all sorts of things in an integrated manner.