Media 2010

I think TV as we know it is dead. The internet is at a breaking point to be THE media delivery mechanism of the future.

This has already begun both legally and illegally, and I much prefer this method of getting TV. (of course the downside is that I am watching more TV. BUT, no commercials and at whatever time I want.) iTunes inked a deal with ABC that put episodes up for download to the iPod for $1.99. I call that a good start, and the 20 Million downloads in the first 2 weeks that there is HUGE potential. The problem with that is I can get the same show for free and in HDTV using a bit-torrent client. Here are the things that need to happen to make it work.

1. Embrace bittorrent. This fixed the only bottleneck for releasing all this content to everyone. Currently the main expense is the bandwidth. Every bit you download from a server has to be paid for, and this expense can get huge. When you start talking about 300 - 700 MB files and millions of downloads that cost can become prohibitive. Bittorrent is a Peer to Peer sharing protocol that works very well and efficiently. Using this technology, the cost of bandwidth would be exponentially reduced due to all of the users sharing the cost.

2. Make it easy access. Right now it is only fairly savvy geeks are truly capable of taking full advantage of the internet. Yahoo and Tivo have made a deal recently that can fix all that. Tivo, a box that is already installed in millions of homes and is already connected to your television, and Yahoo one of the largest providers of internet content out there. If they put their shared recourses together and build a bittorrent client into the box and offer $1-2 downloads of a show, I think that will be the end of cable companies as we know it. Either that or they will become who we all pay for our internet connections. (which allot of us already do.)

If that all happened I would be the first to sign up.. Think about it, Cable already cost $50-80 a month, so I say ditch that, pay $45 for a high speed connection and say $1 for each show you want to watch. OK, here is an example for me, there are maybe 5 TV shows that I want to watch, and most of them come out once a week. That’s $5 a week, $20 a month, that brings the total to $65 a month. I am totally willing to pay that and I would not feel it is wasted because I am paying for what I want and only what I want. The Networks should not feel bad because if you have 60-70 Million watchers a week, they all pay their dollar, suddenly that’s $60-70 Million an episode. That has to be a healthy chunk of profit.

Now I know that there are probably a million things that I ignored to make this work but this is the way I think things should be, and if all goes well it will.

I’m going to keep watching what Yahoo an Tivo do, and the moment I hear something like this down the pipeline and am buying all sorts of Tivo stock… (well that and their stock is super cheap right now.)

UPDATE 12-5-05: I told you… times are changin, now you can get a live stream of the news… CNN: Pipeline

UPDATE 12-6-05: iTunes just added a bunch more shows to their store. all they need is better resolution and Im sold..