Gates Proclaims Internet to Revolutionize TV in 5 Years 314
adamlazz writes "With an explosion of online video content on sites like YouTube and Google Video, Bill Gates believes that the Internet will revoloutionize the television within the next 5 years.
'I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had,' Gates told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum. "
As a Comcast customer outta Redmond... (Score:3, Interesting)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Score:1, Interesting)
Excuse me if I don't put too much stock in Gates' predictions.
Star Trek: an accurate prediction? (Score:4, Interesting)
He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No chance (Score:4, Interesting)
At the same time, my ISP is rolling out an IP television system. That makes me take any bandwidth whining with a large grain of salt.
I'm Ready for IPTV (Score:3, Interesting)
I already do the 'IPTV' thing with a couple BBC programs. And the only reason I'm not paying for them is because they're not available on iTunes in the US, and my wife is completely addicted to Torchwood and Dr. Who. My Powerbook and iPod dock both support S-Video out, so hooking them up to my TV is trivial. An AppleTV (and a faster Mac for converting from DiVX to MPEG) would make it even easier.
The only problem I've run into, and this is recently, is that BitTorrent consumes a lot of upstream bandwidth so people I call with Vonage sometimes get choppy audio on their end. I worked around this by doing some QoS filtering in my router and writing a couple shell scripts to turn Torrents on and off on my Mac Mini home server. A better broadband connection, with >1Mbps upstream, would allow me to use BitTorrent all the time.
Really, the only reason I even have cable is because it costs just as much to get cable broadband with cable TV as it does without. If I could get fiber or DSL at similar speeds with no server restrictions (as in, port 22, 5600 and an http port open) I would probably drop cable altogether and get all my media and phone service over the internet.
I think monthly fees are ludicrous, and refuse to pay them if there's an alternative. I'd rather use the iTunes model: Pay $2 for an episode or get a season pass for a discount of, say, $30 for a 26 episode season. That way I can check out new shows for cheap and get the shows I like for less. And, even better, without commercials. And my money could go directly to the group producing the show, not through a network of middlemen all taking their cut. If a show's cheap enough to produce, as few as 10,000 people, scattered across the globe, could keep episodes being aired.
An analysis of The Road Ahead, 10 years later (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/02/08/road_ahead _billgates/ [bit-tech.net].
I found this using Google, of course. ;)
Re:The Museum of Bill Gates Proclamations (Score:3, Interesting)
Will digital delivery change film/TV? (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO online delivery will obviously have a huge effect on video watching habits: 5 years? 10? It'll vary depending on how much of an early adopter you are (or your country is), but it'll come for sure.
BT Vision, recently launched in the UK, has a quite interesting hybrid model, where one interface gives you access to digital broadcasting-through-the-air (for watching news, sports, etc) as well as to VoD and the stuff you've got on your PVR. Could solve a lot of the obvious issues around live broadcasts watched by millions crashing IP networks.
Moving on slightly -- the interesting question, I think, is whether it will change the nature of film and TV: i.e. is digital, networked video just a distribution method, or is it a new medium.
A further quote from BG, from a conference a couple of years ago...
Bill Gates: "the difference between watching TV or film and playing a video game won't be the black and white difference that it is today; soon, there will be a spectrum of shades of grey".
Now before you write this off, note the following from Peter Jackson about six months ago...
Peter Jackson: "what's interesting is...conveying stories using (digital) technology which will allow an interactive component - but they're not movies and they're not games... there should be another form of entertainment... what's interesting is the crossover"
And Guillermo del Toro (director of "Blade II" and the amazing "Pan's Labyrinth"): "in the next 10 years, narrative media will shift to a hybrid of video games and movies"..."like the shift from silent movies to talkies; some movie people will be able to make the jump, but many won't."
There's a possible parallel with the development of film: in the early days, some filmmakers thought film was basically like theatre: so in their movies, the camera didn't move, the scenery was theatrical flats, the actor's whole body was shown, there were few cuts. With time, people realised film wasn't a distribution medium for theatre -- it was a whole new medium. And with it came close-ups, moving cameras, outdoor locations, etc.
IMHO we're at a similar stage now, where people are starting to see that broadband (and possibly digital cinema, later) is not just a distribution method for traditional linear film and video, it's a whole new medium with its own unique characteristics. Like any medium, it rewards those who understand and work with its characteristics.
This does NOT mean naive (and doomed) movies where you "choose-the-ending". In broadband, it means creating pieces where, within the limits of the technology, you can converse with stars, explore artworks, listen to talks customised to your interests and level of knowledge, play beach volleyball, etc. There are a number of interactive video pieces online demonstrating that this sort of thing works.
What Gates and Jobs see as the future of video devices is just the beginning of opening up the creative possiblities of video with interactivity.
He missed the boat again (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh, just what I needed... (OT) (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of something William Gibson said about the opening line to Neuromancer:
I don't have an exact quote, but his comment was that a change in the way TV manufacturers dealt with dead channels completely changed the meaning of that sentence.
I digress; back to your regularly-scheduled comments.
Re:Oh, just what I needed... (Score:2, Interesting)
TV will change drastically, with more and more crappy youtube quality videos throughout. While there will be some stars in amateur hour, the bulk of decent TV will still be produced by professionals for at least the next 10 years. I'm not willing to make a prediction beyond that.
What will become of todays broadcasters then? (Score:4, Interesting)
For most of these years, our biggest expense after payroll and related expenses is the power bill. We have, by way of charging the seller to advertise his product, called a commercial, been able to survive, and even pay our better employees fairly well.
To bring enough bandwidth into being to do this for all the broadcasters, and there are around 800 of us, sufficient bandwidth buildout will be a major expense, and will of course be charged for accordingly.
Our power bills range from say $5k/mo for a vhf operation, going up to maybe $10k for a full power digital running in parallel, and back to maybe $7k/mo once ntsc is turned off in 2009. For UHF broadcasters, multiply those figures by about 3x.
We would need up to 30MB/sec per channel transmitted this way in full HD, and at todays charges for bandwidth, would make our power bill look like pocket change. That of course is a CODB.
Now, while its going to be technically feasable at some point in the future, I detest people who are only passing fans of a dog in this fight, with little of their own money invested yet, making predictions as to when this will happen.
There are all sorts of regulatory hurdles to contend with, starting with the market access exclusivity that the designated ADM's the FCC has setup, preventing to a large degree, access to our local market by outside stations. I personally am a bit ambiguous about that, but it goes a long way toward keeping our broadcast material flavored with the local area culture, and this is a Good Thing(TM), while at the same time effectively keeping ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WTBS/KTLA's time peddlers from walking the streets in our market and effectively stealing our income.
OTOH, folks would like to be able to grab the network signals without all those local commercials and the clamor for exactly that is being heard about the land and in our governments reactions to that in the form of the SHVA acts. But, stop and think about the downside to that too if there were no SHVA. If CBS, whom we are an affiliate of, were to be allowed free access to 'our' market, a couple of things would happen, one because of their networks construction, they would have the power to hit several differnt locales around the country with commercials taylored to that locale and they do that right now, sending a dog food commercial to the deep south and a toothpaste commercial to the west coast, etc etc. They would have to do that because there is not enough time to do all of what they could sell if they used our rate card unless they could resell that time slot several times. They'll have to use our rate card or lose the sale as in this market there is no one that could afford a
The other thing is that because we could not realisticly compete in that un-limited access scenario, we would have no choice but to fold our tents and go away, leaving maybe 10 super powerfull 'stations', all of which will be at the governments mercy and be fed pablum for news and we would then be no better off than the russian people were at the height of Stalins power. You could be summarily shot if found in possession of a radio capale of picking up the VOA broadcasts.
Because there are now many of us, maybe as much as a third with full time 10 or more employee news departments, supporting in our own case over 3 hours of local news a day, we can shine a lot of sunshine on things that aren't always as they seem, and we make it a point to do just that. If one of our reporters is denied access to a city council meeting, its on the 11 oclock news because its a blatant violation of the sunshine laws here in WV. Yes, that local news is a cash cow to us, but still, where would this co
Gates is way behind on this one (Score:4, Interesting)
We have a couple of Panasonic PVRs (one with an 80GB hard drive and ethernet port) for standard time-shifting and protection in case of interruption, but I even use those less and less. Typically what I have done is watch the first few episodes of the season, then once I get behind, I simply wait for the DVD set to come out at season's end.
However, even that is now shifting to buying episodes from iTunes -- and that's the real innovation. And now that my wife has a 30" cinema display on her Mac, it's not as though there's any real loss of quality. And, as with the DVDs, it's so nice not to have to even use the 'CM SKIP' button to jump over commercials.
I'm less convinced about the future of streaming video over the internet. We already have streaming video into homes: it's called cable and satellite. They have the bandwidth. The internet, as yet, does not, particularly at the final mile. While I'm a Netflix subscriber and fan, I haven't tried their streaming video service yet, and probably won't; if there's a movie I want to watch that badly, I'll order the DVD from Netflix (or simply buy a copy) and watch it on my living room TV.
The major innovation I'm waiting for is for a series to be financed in part or all by advance subscriptions. For example, suppose that SciFi decides not to pick up Battlestar Galactica for a fourth season. Then suppose that the production company offers to create a fourth season if enough people subscribe in advance, each paying, say, the combined cost of an iTunes 'season pass' and a complete DVD set. Those funds are held in escrow until the necessary amount is reached, and then the season goes into production. All subscribers get a season pass, a DVD set, and their names listed as 'associate producer' in a special credits feature on the DVD set. The production company could throw in some other perk as well; e.g., each subscriber gets a pass for two people to an end-of-season wrap party (yeah, it's a big party, but so what?). The next step would be for a production company to do this for a brand-new series and bypass broadcast TV altogether.
There was a brief, unsuccessful (and unauthorized) effort to resurrect Firefly this way, but that was pre-iTunes TV.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...) will be selling first-run episodic video content of quality matching current TV shows but not appearing on TV (or only appearing after a delay -- sort of the reverse of what happens now, where a given TV episode becomes available on iTunes a day or two after initial broadcast). However, even that will require some bandwidth enhancements along the way; right now, with a solid broadband connection, it can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes to download an 'hour-long' (typically 43-minute) episode. If iTunes is releasing first-run content on a weekly basis, then we can expect massive download spikes each time that occurs.
So, as per my title: if Bill Gates is just now saying that "internet will transform TV within 5 years", he's merely making an obvious statement rather than a perceptive or unexpected prediction. The net is already transforming TV.
Re:Oh, just what I needed... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only major component still lacking is a slick set-top box with Internet integration. But 5 years is a pretty safe guesstimate for that to happen IMHO.