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Television Reloaded
theodp writes "The TV times, they are a-changing. Over at Newsweek, Steven Levy offers a serious tome on the future of television, including time-shifting ("people will follow schedules only for real-time events like sports and election night"), space-shifting ("Now that you've stored your show on a TiVo, it's only logical to take it with you on your laptop, hand-held viewer or PSP game player") and the move from broadcast TV to broadband TV. Meanwhile, Conan O'Brien lightens things up with his own vision of the TV future ("Toddlers' bowls will have a television at the bottom, and children will be encouraged to eat all of their mush so they can see Morley Safer.")."
I'm already watching most of my TV on the subway on my way to work using my PSP. MythTV records what I want and then I use PSPvideo9 with avisynth to transcode with just a few mouse clicks.
I believe an on-demand system could work very well the way state-subsidised public service television works in a lot of european countries.
Here in Sweden, anyone who owns a TV set (or, nowadays, a computer with a TV-reciever, or a television mobile phone), has to pay a TV-license of a couple of hundred kronors per year ($30-40). For this we get two channels with excellent quality content and no commercials. Most people add on to this with paying for cable channels that cost a lot more, and include commercials. But imagine a system where you could have just a large number of the public service channels for a proportionally higher price. There would be the traditional time-dependent broadcasts, without commercials but any old programming (that has already been aired) would also be available on-demand, perhaps by a bittorrent-type distribution network, that has proven very effective.
By the way, I've been wondering about the legality of downloading shows that I have payed for with my TV-license. A lot of american sitcoms, that are normally shown in America with commercials, for example, is shown on one of these channels. Would it be illegal for me to download an episode that has already be shown on Swedish television, since I have technically paid to see it, commercial free?
Believe it or not, Comcast already does this.
They have this on-demand feature built into their digital cable boxes. The selection's a little lacking, but in effect, you can play any TV show or movie they have any time you want, it just costs a few bucks. They even have a fair amount of free content (no doubt to get people using the service), and the selection's not too bad. It seems most HBO shows are on it, and a lot of major cable networks seem to be on board; Discovery, Comedy Central, the History Channel, and quite a few others.
I'm no big fan of Comcast, but I've got to say, they really nailed this one.