Web : Future TV

In 2002 I set up a company called Set Loose Movies to take advantage of the, apparent, demand for viral marketing in Europe. Established mainly to deliver emailable mpeg videos (viral ads) we soon realised that there should be a great opportunity to use video online in not just advertising but in editorial (website content).

We were probably three years to early for a market still new to broadband, an industry struggling with streaming issues and software embattled with codec compatibility problems. Despite some early success we had to mothball Set Loose after a year. We always believed that the web could be the future of TV, however.

In 2003 I wrote a piece on Ecademy entitled ‘Is the future of interactive TV, the Internet ?’ where I argued,

"The internet has always been driven by the user because of its freedom of choice. The broadband user can find an endless choice of rich media that they’re interested in. TV provides that user with a restricted broadcast schedule and iTV with its walled-garden environment restricts the freedom of choice further."

Fast forward to today and BitTorrent. More than 20 million people have already downloaded the application. Each week dozens of shows are shared by hundreds of thousands of people. "The Simpsons," "Family Guy" and "Friends" top the most-popular list, but even "SpongeBob SquarePants," "Trading Spaces" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" landed in the Top 20 for the week ending Jan. 16, according to file-sharing monitor, Big Champagne.

And ripping from the TV isn’t too difficult to do these days. About thee same time I set up Set Loose Movies, Isaac Richards was unhappy with the cable box provided by his local operator (dismayed by the sluggish channel-changing capability and the sparsely informative program guide), so he decided to build a better cable box from scratch, the NY Times reports.

Three years since Isaac, a 26-year-old computer software programmer from Ohio, embarked on his quest, hundreds of thousands of do-it-yourself television viewers are using Myth TV, the free software program he wrote to turn desktop personal computers into customized cable boxes, complete with the ability to record shows, surf the Web and strip out unwanted commercials.

Microsoft are already providing a wireless system through the Extender that broadcasts content from your PC to your stereo and TV and their recent deal with Verizon will blur the boundaries further.   

Combine Microsoft’s push into the home with Myth TV with BitTorrent and what do you get?

It’s no coincidence that shows like "The Simpsons" who make a profit of $15 million in the old school way of sales, syndication and DVDs are the most traded P2P files out there. The NY Times reports that TV execs believe that such systems could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication. And it could further endanger what for the past 50 years has been television’s economic linchpin: the 30-second commercial.

Seth Godin last week wrote about BitTorrent suggesting the most interesting part of the service is this:

"When everyone can watch high resolution DVD quality video on their screen without breaking your server, what will you do about that? … This, folks, is the real 500 channel universe. It will probably turn out to be more boring than Seinfeld, but way more specific. A billion infomercials, all the time."

So maybe this is the glimpse of what I suspected all along. Video as compelling content on the web, maybe even the primary content. It challenges TV, Advertising, Film - and creates amazing new opportunities for these mediums too. vLogging indicates where personal broadcasting may go, Google and Yahoo are ready for video-search and we already have web-based films: maybe one day we’ll have web only TV networks.

How could TV pay for itself? A CBS study gave viewers the chance to build their own night of television, where they could choose among a select group of pay-per-view shows in addition to the regular schedule of free programming that night. More than half of the 211 respondents chose to pay extra for at least one show. "This is the way people want television delivered," Mr. Poltrack of CBS said. If iTunes worked out how to make money from music so can, erm, CBS. Erm, maybe not - let’s just predict iTunes ??

And in terms of advertising.. as Hugh MacLeod says on his GapingVoid blog,

"I often get asked by my readers, "If Advertising is dead, what will replace it?" Short answer: Stuff like this. Not that advertising is dead. Just the more comfy bits."

Maybe it’s time to get those dust sheets of Set Loose Movies after all and shout ‘Action’!

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