The Future of Television

Near the end of The New York Times's article on new NBC TV downloads, Jeff Gaspin, NBC TV's president, says "Our research shows that 83 per cent of the viewers would still rather watch on a TV than a PC."

This doesn't necessarily seem relevant to me. I would want to watch shows on as high-quality a display as possible but whether that display is a "monitor" connected to a computer or a "television" connected to a cable box doesn't matter at all. I don't, in practice, connect my TV to my computer but if you made it possible to download files that were worth watching on a large high-definition screen, then I'd do it in a minute.

Meanwhile, he also claims that pricing disputes weren't the main motive for leaving the iTunes Store. Rather, "piracy was and is our No. 1 priority." The piracy obsession from the content industry continues to be depressing. The nature of the internet is that if a single pirate copy lands on the world's peer-to-peer networks, then a pirated version of your content is available. Unless your copy protection scheme is literally impossible to break, the only real safety against piracy is either for your product to be really unpopular or else to try to sell people a product that's superior (in terms of, e.g., convenience) than the one they can get illegally. This quest for "better" anti-piracy measures doesn't lead anywhere. Instead, by crippling their product, content-producers are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis illicit copies.

Photo by Flickr user Jot Punkt used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

This doesn't necessarily seem relevant to me. I would want to watch shows on as high-quality a display as possible but whether that display is a "monitor" connected to a computer or a "television" connected to a cable box doesn't matter at all.

That's not really all it comes down to, though. I have, as I suspect many of your readers do, a relatively small one-bedroom apartment in DC. In it, I have a TV and a computer. My computer is on my computer desk, and my TV is in front of my couch. And I don't ever want to come home and plop down in front of my computer desk and watch a show.

Short version: When it becomes practical to put computers in front of couches (or something), then the computer/TV distinction will become meaningless. Until then, computer and TV are fundamentally different experiences for more reasons than just picture fidelity.

Posted by Daniel Munz | September 20, 2007 10:27 AM

The future is now. I got addicted to Battlestar
Galactica, and found out that season 3 was available
on iTunes already even though it isn't on DVD.
We downloaded it (to a 500GB fileserver that only
cost $140, but that's another story), hooked up
the hi-def 32" TV to the PowerBook with a DVI-to-
HDMI cable ($60 in the stores, about $5 on the web),
and it's great.

The key pieces of technology are here already:
big cheap LCD TVs, big cheap disks, fast Internet
connections, fast cheap cpu/graphics for the
decoding, and the DVI/HDMI digital video interfaces.
And over the next couple of years it's going to
get even better, with cheap cpu/graphics chips
fast enough for hi-res video decode. Right now
you can do it if you have a bit of technical
expertise; a year or 18 months from now it'll be
easy for everyone.

Posted by Richard Cownie | September 20, 2007 10:43 AM

Matt you have to keep in mind that even the cheapest monitors have better resolution than HDTV. You can get high quality programs and shift it to your TV easily. Many TVs even have VGA inputs. Yes using video optimized for video iPods won't be a good idea. And the quality will be worse than over the air HD signals. But it will in general be better than standard cable.

Posted by Rob | September 20, 2007 10:52 AM

More details of our setup:

Philips 32" LCD TV w/ 2 HDMI inputs

Connect PowerBook to TV with DVI-to-HDMI cable
(video but no audio) and mini-stereo-jack-to-RCA
audio cable

Have to tweak the TV configuration to make it
understand the video-from-HDMI + audio-from-RCA
setup.

SimpleTech SimpleShare 500GB NAS file server.
A season of 1-hour shows in DVD-quality MPEG2
takes quite a bit of disk space - I think about
2GB/hour.

Use a wireless multimedia presentation remote
to control the playback on the computer - about
$60 last year.

Posted by Richard Cownie | September 20, 2007 10:57 AM

I have a 46" tv that gets no reception, and I refuse to pay for cable. The *only* tv I watch is what I download - but I don't watch on my computer.

Instead, I download it to my computer, then put it on my Creative Zen media player and play it on my tv.

Posted by McKingford | September 20, 2007 11:27 AM

In practical terms, I find the ability to view the disk is directly correlational to the integrity of the license. Most of the disks I bought off eBay were just so much money down the drain.

But that's just a practical approach to actually seeing movies, not a comment on the profound theory of the thing.

Posted by serial catowner | September 20, 2007 11:30 AM

"This doesn't necessarily seem relevant to me. I would want to watch shows on as high-quality a display as possible but whether that display is a "monitor" connected to a computer or a "television" connected to a cable box doesn't matter at all."

It matters to me (and to a lot of people, I suspect). By the time I get home I'm tired of looking at a computer monitor. I want to sit on the couch and watch me some teevee.

Posted by too many steves | September 20, 2007 12:13 PM

The broader point is that content providers, protected by legal copyrights, were used to making a mountain of money back before the advent of the Internets. Betamax/VHS showed the weakness of that model, but still copying was prohibitively expensive (ie, took too much time for the average user) that copyright providers still made a ton of money.

Digital copying has changed the equation, making copying incredibly easy and efficient. The kneejerk response by content providers was to 1) go after copying in the courts and 2) build better anti-piracy measures.

Both will fail* in the long run because at some point the cost of suing millions of direct infringers will become prohibitive.And, as MY says, anti-piracy measures must, by their very nature, be exploitable.

The content providers will soon learn that the only way to beat piracy is to offer content at a sufficiently reasonable price and in as many formats/media as consumers want. The studies are very clear on this. People in general don't pirate because they love pirating. The pirate when the cost of the content is artificially inflated such that value of pirating content outweighs the risk of getting caught plus the time and hassle of pirating.

Posted by Joe Strummer | September 20, 2007 12:19 PM

if you made it possible to download files that were worth watching on a large high-definition screen, then I'd do it in a minute.

Uh, well, it is possible. Just illegally download Hi-Def rips.

Posted by Freddie | September 20, 2007 1:11 PM

More specifically he says on piracy:

"But, Mr. Gaspin said, “piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.” He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes."

Which is an incredible distortion of the situation. There is a
lot of free exchange of music on the internet, iTunes is the largest source of paid for music and in fact does not facilitate free exchange at all, unless it is sanctioned by the label.

Posted by Stephen | September 20, 2007 1:19 PM

I don't, in practice, connect my TV to my computer but if you made it possible to download files that were worth watching on a large high-definition screen, then I'd do it in a minute.

That's how a person could have -- hypothetically -- watched the current seasons of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and the recent Jekyll adaptation, and they looked great. Would have looked great. Yeah.

Posted by DonBoy | September 20, 2007 1:25 PM

The advent of cheap photocopying put an upper limit on the price of books. If the price was high enough, students could and did go to the library, and make their own. But, the thing is, cheap photocopying was just one aspect of a general progress of technology, which made publishing and printing a book -- even a book with a low sales-volume potential, as they say -- cheaper. It has taken a long-time, but publishers have, mostly, adjusted.

The thing about, say, an .mp3, is that copying and distributing it (physically) is fantastically cheaper -- by an order of magnitude or more. Cheaper means that it requires fewer resources to get a song into the hands of consumers. Those resources, which are no longer needed to publish and distribute music, are people and corporations and capital wealth, and those resources should be out of a job.

Content protection schemes are not about protecting "content" -- they are about protecting the employment of resources in an obsolete, and now very wasteful, business model.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | September 20, 2007 1:26 PM

The tech savvy types who post here would probably be willing to download shows, save the files, and plan out their watching. But your average American couch potato can barely get it togther to check a TV schedule or record a program on a VCR; most just plop down and watch whatever happens to be on. That's going to be a limit which will slow down implementation of a lot of this new stuff.

Posted by Virginia | September 20, 2007 2:00 PM

Piracy from iTunes? Most, if not all, of the episodes of "The Office" I've illegally download have some sort of logo from a television network in the corner. No matter, you'd think that NBC would want their shows, most of which are struggling in the ratings even if they are inching upwards, to gain as wide an exposure as possible.

Posted by Brian | September 20, 2007 3:04 PM

Rob: Matt you have to keep in mind that even the cheapest monitors have better resolution than HDTV.

This is not actually true.

The HDTV spec calls for two resolutions. One is "720p," which is progressive-scan with 1280x720 frames. The other is "1080i," which is interlaced (i.e. every other scanline is updated every 1/60 sec., rather than all of them at once) and has a resolution of 1920x1080.

Very few computer monitors have a higher resolution than 1920x1080. A lot of LCD monitors top out below that. Only the Apple Cinema displays and their Dell knockoffs go much above it.

Posted by Josh G. | September 20, 2007 10:45 PM

Unless your copy protection scheme is literally impossible to break

Security experts know that it is theoretically impossible to make a bulletproof copy protection scheme. Cory Doctorow has a very good explanation in layman's terms why this is true:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/04/lightspeed

Posted by Stine | September 21, 2007 1:35 AM

My TV has been hooked to a computer for over a year (longer if you consider the fact a TiVo is just a computer with specialized software). It's brilliant - I use MythTV to record shows (in HD) and watch them when I want, and if for some reason I'm unable to record a show (scheduling problems with the once-ever network broadcasts, weather knocking out the satellite, etc) I can download the show and... watch it on the same TV. 90% of the material I watch on my HDTV comes via my MythTV computer. The other 10% via my old TiVo.

Hell, my Xbox360 can also download shows (including in HD) for viewing right on my TV.

Posted by Brian | September 21, 2007 8:52 AM

Of course I'd rather watch it on a TV. That's what I bought a big-ass plasma screen to do. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to download it.

Posted by TW Andrews | September 21, 2007 9:33 AM