I want a better television — but it’s not ready yet

Here’s a great Busi­ness­Week arti­cle about the cur­rent state of television.

If you’re will­ing to buy and inte­grate sev­eral dif­fer­ent pieces of soft­ware and hard­ware, you can have a tele­vi­sion that:

1. Finds and records the pro­grams you want to see, based on pre­vi­ous view­ing habits and key­word searches
2. Finds and shows video from cable, satel­lite, Net­Flix, YouTube, and other sources
3. Pro­vides an easy way to sched­ule and watch programs
4. Use a sta­ble, DRM-free file for­mat that works on dif­fer­ent com­puter systems
5. Saves video for long-term storage

How­ever, there’s noth­ing avail­able that will sat­isfy all of these require­ments. Sure, there’s MythTV – but most con­sumers don’t want to build their own television.

Apple has its own solu­tion, while Microsoft con­tin­ues to sell its Media Cen­ter soft­ware. But both prod­ucts trap video and audio into one of sev­eral for­mats, com­plete with a healthy dose of DRM.

If I’m going to save video, I’d like to save it for­ever, not until next month.

Some­times the pub­lish­ers and copy­right own­ers are to blame. Major League Base­ball exam­ple is a good exam­ple. Last month, MLB switched off its DRM server for its Dig­i­tal Down­load ser­vice. Fans could buy and down­load dig­i­tal video of old base­ball games and doc­u­men­taries. How­ever, MLB now main­tains that fans did not have a per­pet­ual license to view these pro­grams. These pur­chases were “one-time sales”, and when MLB dropped its con­tract with its DRM provider, no one could watch the video files.

Is Major League Base­ball “evil”?

Google made a sim­i­lar change a few months ago when Google Video’s store was dis­con­tin­ued. After a few days, Google decided to give pur­chases full refunds.

Some exexu­tives seem to under­stand the prob­lems. Viacom’s Sum­ner Red­stone may be one of them, based on this brief New York Times arti­cle.

As more view­ers stop watch­ing live tele­vi­sion, we’re start­ing to see another strate­gic inflec­tion point. An ear­lier strate­gic inflec­tion point occurred in the 1980s, when the VCR and tape rentals let peo­ple watch movies and record tele­vi­sion pro­grams at home. In the late 1990s, TiVO and the DVR gave view­ers much more con­trol in their time-shifting.

The advent of YouTube and devices like the Sling­Box have over­turned the basic assump­tions that built the tele­vi­sion indus­try. The com­puter and the Inter­net have forced US broad­cast net­works to offer more news, sports and real­ity shows — real-time pro­grams that have imme­di­ate enter­tain­ment value and may offer long-term rev­enue from clips and licensing.

The cur­rent writ­ers’ strike has just made these prob­lems worse, by tak­ing scripted tele­vi­sion shows off the pro­duc­tion sched­ule dur­ing a prime view­ing month in the US cal­en­dar. It’s ironic that a major point of con­tention in these strikes is DVD rev­enue. Stu­dios and broad­cast net­works had relied on box set sales to off­set decreas­ing adver­tis­ing revenues.

Tagged as: Apple, cloud, copyright, DRM, Google, inflection, Microsoft, point, sip, strategic, television, USA, video, YouTube