A few months ago I wrote two posts on what I think will be an important trend in the next two years: the arrival of Internet TV to the living room.
In the first post I argued that convergence was not just a matter of technology or content. Every medium needs, or is defined by, a set of consumer and producer practices: where and when people use it (in the office? at home? at night?), who uses it (teenagers? investors?), social context (in company or alone?), etc. Further, as I've argued elsewhere, successful products are embodied in practices that become commonplace and transparent, so that the device 'disappears' from your consciousness and you can focus on the 'content'. And, as I've also argued, successful practices are socially shared and universal, so that you can say things like 'did you watch the news last night?' and expect to be understood, without making reference to the technical contraptions involved.
In the second post I said that the launch of movies on the Xbox heralded the arrival of this trend to the mainstream (notable precedents notwithstanding), with Apple and Sony soon to follow. I also said that for the time being these new platforms would not be like the web: they would be closed walled-garden affairs much like Compuserve and Prodigy before the web (as Jeff Jarvis later said, this will be "not unlike your damned cable system"; see also Andy Kessler on 'virtual pipes', and this WSJ piece on the iTunes store). The reasons for this are clear: DRM is still a work in progress; the first systems are proprietary, and their owners have no incentives for opening them; and even if they wanted to, the standards still need to become established (although TV Anytime is a promising start).
Since then, a number of announcements have brought this trend into focus: Sony is embedding some functionality into high-end TV sets; Netgear is selling a box with BitTorrent in it; and of course Apple has finally announced its long expected box. These products join Akimbo, Neulion and Microsoft's many devices in what is quickly becoming a crowded space.
What can be added at this point? At least three things:
First, this may be part of the Internet but it is not part of the web, because:
- It is not open: the various systems' owners can decide what is available and promoted, and what is not
- Technically and in terms of user experience, websites don't work on TV sets.
- There is no guarantee that, even if all the systems eventually converge into a single open paradigm, this will support the forms of expression we have on the web: the ability to link to third-party content; to do this as part of one's own content; to link with the expectation that links can reliably be followed by anyone; to publish one's content with a public URL that anyone can use; etc (for an attempt to list the web's key aspects see this). All of this is possible but it may not happen.
Second, even while this new medium is taking shape, it will threaten old media players will begin to feel threatened in ways that web video never could: this is direct competition for prime-time viewing.
Third, as practices emerge and a family of similar platforms begins to take shape, content will begin to change; this is not just a new delivery mechanism for what we are used to calling content. A key feature that all of these platforms have in common is that they can offer unlimited choice. With this, it becomes sensible to produce and publish content with less budget aimed at smaller audiences. Time restrictions disappear, and it is no longer necessary to make sure that your programme fits in the 8pm slot. Everything could have its 'director's cut'. Importantly, TV stops being all about digestible, summarized content; it becomes a medium suitable for in-depth contemplative discourse.
Add to this the ability to make links between content in a standard way (a big assumption), and you could have news bulletins lasting five minutes that link to in-depth versions of all the reports mentioned in them; take this further, and linear TV itself becomes a sampler, the ultimate temporal aggregate that we all share, and from which we jump to what we want. This may be a few years away, but it may well happen.
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