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Gates Proclaims Internet to Revolutionize TV in 5 Years
adamlazz writes "With an explosion of online video content on sites like YouTube and Google Video, Bill Gates believes that the Internet will revoloutionize the television within the next 5 years.
'I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had,' Gates told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum. "
...the blue screen of death on my TV set.
Television is just a passing fad... : p
This guy's the limit!
In other predictions... people will still be downloading music and movies... the RIAA will still be crying... most TV shows will still be craps and the most secure version of windows yet will be just around the corner
My prediction is: Bill will tell us that the next version of Windows after Vista is going to be really secure this time.
When did Gates predict that we were going to beat spam?
I've had Microsoft's attempt at whatever they think they're doing for a couple years now. Not only does it fault more, and perform less responsively that what Comcast deployed to their cable boxes before. It has significantly fewer features. Sure it looks prettier, and it has a crappy capability to deliver poorly rendered news blurbs, but it's slow, craps out more, does less. I'm sure that people in the future will laugh at the kind of TV Microsoft delivers to me (in fact I've considered recording hours of it crapping out and malfunctioning then sending it to satellite providers). But me, I'm not laughing. Fucking 120ft trees immediately south of me.
Bill is leading the charge again. Where does his vision come from? It's like he can see things that nobody else can. It's lucky thing that google and youtube have him to thank - again.
Okay, so Gates hired dozens if not hundreds of developers in the 80s and early 90s who were very familiar with the value of the Internet, yet they missed the bandwagon in incorporating TCP/IP features and protocols until it was already commonplace in the market? And all the while, Gates was smugly declaring that he didn't own a television set and had completely disconnected from the Joe Sixpack culture of sponging in front of a boob tube like the rest of America. Yet, somehow he feels he's adequately informed to see the way that the television culture will shift to an Internet culture in a given timeframe? The only reason that this sounds at all plausible is because Apple and Sony and TiVo and Google and other companies already have been working in that direction. Welcome to the 2000s, Bill.
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As a non-US resident, all the good US and UK shows get here with a delay of at least a year. And then there're all the crappy advertisement breaks.
Screw that, I'm downloading all the TV shows I watch. I get it not 24 hours after it's shown in the US/UK, easily spoiler-free (which is important when it comes to high-profile shows), ads free, and with the added benefit of watching it whenever I choose (no TIVO here) and without issues of missing an episode.
I've gotten to the point of not watching TV for nearly 5 years now. I have no idea what's on, and I don't care. I get everything I want. Cable is around $50 here. If I could pay that to do what I do--completely legally--I'd sign up in a blink of an eye.
I can definitely see what Gates is talking about; but I'm afraid the the legality of this will never catch up, as world-wide distribution is still not feasible from an advertising point of view.
In one Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Data states that television, as the form of popular entertainment as we know it, did not last much beyond 2040... could this turn out to be remarkably accurate?
Here's exactly how he'll do it: He'll piss off enough people with Windows that they will be driven to Apple, where they will be watching TV shows purchased on iTunes on their iPod, iPhone, computer, or iTV. People will laugh at more than just "what we had..."
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2B1ASK1
Your TV will have to be manufactured by Cray.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
I believe TV, albeit in a different form, will continue to exist for a long time. What a lot people dont seem to realize is that the lack of interaction and choice with TV can be an advantage. The passivity of the watching experience is actually its best selling point, the ability to arrive home tired from work(and likely to have been in front of a computer) and just sit down and watch mindless junk for a couple of hours. TVs role will diminish but I would be doubtful if pre-programmed channels(even if over the internet) will ever disappear.
Except that only a small percentage of people even know what bittorrent is. Imagine if EVERYBODY used it.
At the same time, my ISP is rolling out an IP television system. That makes me take any bandwidth whining with a large grain of salt.
Except there's no evidence that he ever said that.
This poo is cold.
Gates lucked into an OS deal where he wheedled and dealed and even tried to shut out a partner.
Then he tucked together pieces he plucked to form Office, where creative MS programmers put it all together.
But then listen to all the BS that came out of BG since and between Cairo, ME & CE, etc & the constant use of similar adjectives used to describe the next MS product or version, and what floats high on the surface of the water?
"S--t", thats what.
Why does ANYONE take this guy seriously? At this point all he is, is a rich philanthropist!
Sheesh.
This is Slashdot. When did we start caring about proof when it involves bashing Microsoft?
Why does this always get modded insightful? Some countries have 100megabit internet as the standard. The US is still stuck around 7-10mbit for the majority of us. 7-10mbit is PLENTY to watch TV on. Are you saying that business will be unable to cope with giving the customer what they want to pay for?
In processing power terms, that's like saying 'Nobody will be able to play these 'nextgen' video games because the processing power isn't there.' (Yes, people said that. We have gone FAR beyond that point now.)
In data storage terms, that's like saying games will never look real because you'd have to distribute too much information. (Yes, people said that. CDs came in and kicked this idiocy to the curb. Then DVDs. Then HD-DVD/BluRays.)
The market will be there to provide what we want as soon as we have a use for it. You can count on it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I already do the 'IPTV' thing with a couple BBC programs. And the only reason I'm not paying for them is because they're not available on iTunes in the US, and my wife is completely addicted to Torchwood and Dr. Who. My Powerbook and iPod dock both support S-Video out, so hooking them up to my TV is trivial. An AppleTV (and a faster Mac for converting from DiVX to MPEG) would make it even easier.
The only problem I've run into, and this is recently, is that BitTorrent consumes a lot of upstream bandwidth so people I call with Vonage sometimes get choppy audio on their end. I worked around this by doing some QoS filtering in my router and writing a couple shell scripts to turn Torrents on and off on my Mac Mini home server. A better broadband connection, with >1Mbps upstream, would allow me to use BitTorrent all the time.
Really, the only reason I even have cable is because it costs just as much to get cable broadband with cable TV as it does without. If I could get fiber or DSL at similar speeds with no server restrictions (as in, port 22, 5600 and an http port open) I would probably drop cable altogether and get all my media and phone service over the internet.
I think monthly fees are ludicrous, and refuse to pay them if there's an alternative. I'd rather use the iTunes model: Pay $2 for an episode or get a season pass for a discount of, say, $30 for a 26 episode season. That way I can check out new shows for cheap and get the shows I like for less. And, even better, without commercials. And my money could go directly to the group producing the show, not through a network of middlemen all taking their cut. If a show's cheap enough to produce, as few as 10,000 people, scattered across the globe, could keep episodes being aired.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
"and the Oscar for best picture goes to.." *BZZZTTTTT* -Your TV is not up to date. Would you like to update now? NO! -Would you like to be reminded to update later? Yes yes.. -Your Antivirus is not turned on, would you like to switch on your ant.. NO! GOD! -You have unwatched channels in your TV, click here to have unwatched channels removed from your channel listing OH FOR CHRISSAKE! *Enter crappy looking paperclip* -Hi, i'm TVBuddy! I see you've stopped viewing your program to do maintenance, so I took the liberty of saving the place for you. To continue viewing where you left off, press CTRL+WIN+TV+7+D, to just view in realtime press TV, to go off on a wild goose chase, click HELP. Finally some good news, yes! CTRL+WIN..... -TVKRNL.DLL has experienced a Fatal error, please contact your IT support with error details found in tvcrash.dmp *Windows box flies out of the window*
The Internet is going to revolutionize everything in five years. Again. Every five years. And again.
What's the story here? That Gates has little more to do than repeat the obvious?
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/02/08/road_ahead _billgates/.
I found this using Google, of course. ;)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What Gates didn't say is that one of the most important devices to bring about this change in viewing habits is going to be Apple TV. I would imagine that Jobs would agree with most of what Gates says in TFA.
IMHO online delivery will obviously have a huge effect on video watching habits: 5 years? 10? It'll vary depending on how much of an early adopter you are (or your country is), but it'll come for sure.
BT Vision, recently launched in the UK, has a quite interesting hybrid model, where one interface gives you access to digital broadcasting-through-the-air (for watching news, sports, etc) as well as to VoD and the stuff you've got on your PVR. Could solve a lot of the obvious issues around live broadcasts watched by millions crashing IP networks.
Moving on slightly -- the interesting question, I think, is whether it will change the nature of film and TV: i.e. is digital, networked video just a distribution method, or is it a new medium.
A further quote from BG, from a conference a couple of years ago...
Bill Gates: "the difference between watching TV or film and playing a video game won't be the black and white difference that it is today; soon, there will be a spectrum of shades of grey".
Now before you write this off, note the following from Peter Jackson about six months ago...
Peter Jackson: "what's interesting is...conveying stories using (digital) technology which will allow an interactive component - but they're not movies and they're not games... there should be another form of entertainment... what's interesting is the crossover"
And Guillermo del Toro (director of "Blade II" and the amazing "Pan's Labyrinth"): "in the next 10 years, narrative media will shift to a hybrid of video games and movies"..."like the shift from silent movies to talkies; some movie people will be able to make the jump, but many won't."
There's a possible parallel with the development of film: in the early days, some filmmakers thought film was basically like theatre: so in their movies, the camera didn't move, the scenery was theatrical flats, the actor's whole body was shown, there were few cuts. With time, people realised film wasn't a distribution medium for theatre -- it was a whole new medium. And with it came close-ups, moving cameras, outdoor locations, etc.
IMHO we're at a similar stage now, where people are starting to see that broadband (and possibly digital cinema, later) is not just a distribution method for traditional linear film and video, it's a whole new medium with its own unique characteristics. Like any medium, it rewards those who understand and work with its characteristics.
This does NOT mean naive (and doomed) movies where you "choose-the-ending". In broadband, it means creating pieces where, within the limits of the technology, you can converse with stars, explore artworks, listen to talks customised to your interests and level of knowledge, play beach volleyball, etc. There are a number of interactive video pieces online demonstrating that this sort of thing works.
What Gates and Jobs see as the future of video devices is just the beginning of opening up the creative possiblities of video with interactivity.
High speed Internet connections only recently became available where I live. The local telephone lines in my neighborhood were only good for 26.4K even though I had a 56K modem. I was unable to get cable, but recently the telephone company finally made 1.5 Mbps DSL connections available here (7 Mbps DSL is also now available). What will the bandwidth requirements be for watching this future on-line video content at an appropriate resolution? What resolution will I need for my 13 inch television when watching from my usual chair 14 feet away?.
With Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to have made a huge effort to re-engineer Windows as a secure DRM delivery mechanism that Hollywood and the music studios can trust. Bill Gates is probably hoping that we will all soon be using Windows to watch high-definition protected content on HD-DVDs or to watch online video content. He may eventually be right about that, but personally, I would rather use a separate small dedicated box for that purpose, not a Windows PC. It is doubtful that my Linux PC will be trusted by Hollywood to download their highest definition video content anyway, so for me a small separate box of some type would probably be the way to go.
Here are two links that show the extremes that Microsoft has gone to in adding digital rights management to VistaThe Internet changed the face of television the instant Bram Cohen released the Bit Torrent protocol. Every TV show is available for download, usually within a day or so of initial broadcast, and usually have the commercials stripped out. Besides, if Comcast and the other big boys released an open PVR with swarming capabilities at a reasonable price, bandwidth issues would probably disappear since all that video would stay on their own backbone and they wouldn't be paying peering charges for it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
>The US is still stuck around 7-10mbit for the majority of us
No its not. Your average broadband connection floats around 600-700 kbps. There isnt enough last-mile bandwidth for these schemes and big telcos have very little incentive to roll out huge and expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially when regulators keep giving them sweetheart deals.
>Are you saying that business will be unable to cope with giving the customer what they want to pay for?
Yes. First off, the demand for iptv will evaborate because no one has ever see one. And theres tons of competition that its in demand like cable and satelite.
>'Nobody will be able to play these 'nextgen' video games because the processing power isn't there.'
Thats a lousy analogy. CPU manufacturers are constalty producing fast chips, see moore's law. Telecom companies are not constantly producing faster last-mile solutions.
>The market will be there to provide what we want as soon as we have a use for it. You can count on it.
I've been waiting for a
100mbps connection to my home for a decade. Lets not be too naive here. Businesses would love to get off the t1 system. etc.
Forgive me for piggybacking on the top comment, but speaking of Bill Gates and TV, Gates is scheduled to be the guest on tomorrow night's Daily Show. Don't forget to set your TiVos or whatnot.
comma
Reminds me of something William Gibson said about the opening line to Neuromancer:
I don't have an exact quote, but his comment was that a change in the way TV manufacturers dealt with dead channels completely changed the meaning of that sentence.
I digress; back to your regularly-scheduled comments.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Every experimental "interactive" tv service has failed despite being wildly popular with the participants for the first few weeks. After that interest fails. Much of the time people want animated wallpaper not something that has to be attended to at regular intervals like a demanding pet.
I'm an almost retired broadcast engineer with over 40 years in the field.
:30 in a bowl game at their current rates. And inevitably, the ratio of editorial to commercial time would become even more commercial at the expense of editorial allthough this is supposed to be regulated by the FCC. Insert laugh track here...
For most of these years, our biggest expense after payroll and related expenses is the power bill. We have, by way of charging the seller to advertise his product, called a commercial, been able to survive, and even pay our better employees fairly well.
To bring enough bandwidth into being to do this for all the broadcasters, and there are around 800 of us, sufficient bandwidth buildout will be a major expense, and will of course be charged for accordingly.
Our power bills range from say $5k/mo for a vhf operation, going up to maybe $10k for a full power digital running in parallel, and back to maybe $7k/mo once ntsc is turned off in 2009. For UHF broadcasters, multiply those figures by about 3x.
We would need up to 30MB/sec per channel transmitted this way in full HD, and at todays charges for bandwidth, would make our power bill look like pocket change. That of course is a CODB.
Now, while its going to be technically feasable at some point in the future, I detest people who are only passing fans of a dog in this fight, with little of their own money invested yet, making predictions as to when this will happen.
There are all sorts of regulatory hurdles to contend with, starting with the market access exclusivity that the designated ADM's the FCC has setup, preventing to a large degree, access to our local market by outside stations. I personally am a bit ambiguous about that, but it goes a long way toward keeping our broadcast material flavored with the local area culture, and this is a Good Thing(TM), while at the same time effectively keeping ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/WTBS/KTLA's time peddlers from walking the streets in our market and effectively stealing our income.
OTOH, folks would like to be able to grab the network signals without all those local commercials and the clamor for exactly that is being heard about the land and in our governments reactions to that in the form of the SHVA acts. But, stop and think about the downside to that too if there were no SHVA. If CBS, whom we are an affiliate of, were to be allowed free access to 'our' market, a couple of things would happen, one because of their networks construction, they would have the power to hit several differnt locales around the country with commercials taylored to that locale and they do that right now, sending a dog food commercial to the deep south and a toothpaste commercial to the west coast, etc etc. They would have to do that because there is not enough time to do all of what they could sell if they used our rate card unless they could resell that time slot several times. They'll have to use our rate card or lose the sale as in this market there is no one that could afford a
The other thing is that because we could not realisticly compete in that un-limited access scenario, we would have no choice but to fold our tents and go away, leaving maybe 10 super powerfull 'stations', all of which will be at the governments mercy and be fed pablum for news and we would then be no better off than the russian people were at the height of Stalins power. You could be summarily shot if found in possession of a radio capale of picking up the VOA broadcasts.
Because there are now many of us, maybe as much as a third with full time 10 or more employee news departments, supporting in our own case over 3 hours of local news a day, we can shine a lot of sunshine on things that aren't always as they seem, and we make it a point to do just that. If one of our reporters is denied access to a city council meeting, its on the 11 oclock news because its a blatant violation of the sunshine laws here in WV. Yes, that local news is a cash cow to us, but still, where would this co
Ok, I was around back then. I dont remember the particular event but it was some random press conference right after DOS was released. Some reporter asked Gates why the 640K memory limit and this was his answer. It wasnt any sort of prediction, it was just an offhand comment to a reporter, from what I assumed at the time was a CEO who didnt really know all of the technical details behind what he was talking about. And dont forget that in 1981 640K was a helluva lot of memory (Apple II's shipped with 24K and were upgradable to 128K).
And so on. It's really nothing more than commercialism interfering with content. You want to watch something, so people use that as leverage to try and force you to listen to their sales pitch. The reason that it works is they can slip in under most peoples' tolerance level which is set by how badly they need a mindnumbing experience (e.g. "Oh, GOD. I'll listen to this stupid commercial because I'm tired and I don't want to go to the video store or read a book and fine the commercial will end in 60 seconds and by the next one I will have simmered down and be willing to tolerate it again in exchange for my mindnumbing.")
I'm not sure how any advertiser can be a good person, since they realize they are deliberately finding the maximum level of push that the average person can sustain before they become annoyed enough to shut out the marketing mechanism completely. (In other words, TV has evolved to provide the maximal amount of "tell you what to do, what you need, and how to spend your money" possible without losing the majority of the audience. That's not a pleasant thought. But back to M$, that's the same thing they do. Lace the maximum amount of "buy our $hit into each product" that you will tolerate. "Oh, wouldn't you like to use this integration feature with our other product?" "Wouldn't you like to do this which requires only just a tiny bit more money for a Professional upgrade, and so on." It's all crap.
Is it the same guy who didn't see Internet coming? Are we talking about the same bill Gates that didn't see the iPod taking over the DAP market? The same one who didn't see Search and online services becoming important?
Wny TF would anyone even listen to this guy anymore?
The three major innovations that have transformed broadcast TV in the last several years are: (1) PVRs; (2) DVD sets of TV series; (3) iTunes. There are very few first-run TV shows that I watch in real-time broadcast anymore, and not many that I keep up with during the season (such as it is).
..bruce..
We have a couple of Panasonic PVRs (one with an 80GB hard drive and ethernet port) for standard time-shifting and protection in case of interruption, but I even use those less and less. Typically what I have done is watch the first few episodes of the season, then once I get behind, I simply wait for the DVD set to come out at season's end.
However, even that is now shifting to buying episodes from iTunes -- and that's the real innovation. And now that my wife has a 30" cinema display on her Mac, it's not as though there's any real loss of quality. And, as with the DVDs, it's so nice not to have to even use the 'CM SKIP' button to jump over commercials.
I'm less convinced about the future of streaming video over the internet. We already have streaming video into homes: it's called cable and satellite. They have the bandwidth. The internet, as yet, does not, particularly at the final mile. While I'm a Netflix subscriber and fan, I haven't tried their streaming video service yet, and probably won't; if there's a movie I want to watch that badly, I'll order the DVD from Netflix (or simply buy a copy) and watch it on my living room TV.
The major innovation I'm waiting for is for a series to be financed in part or all by advance subscriptions. For example, suppose that SciFi decides not to pick up Battlestar Galactica for a fourth season. Then suppose that the production company offers to create a fourth season if enough people subscribe in advance, each paying, say, the combined cost of an iTunes 'season pass' and a complete DVD set. Those funds are held in escrow until the necessary amount is reached, and then the season goes into production. All subscribers get a season pass, a DVD set, and their names listed as 'associate producer' in a special credits feature on the DVD set. The production company could throw in some other perk as well; e.g., each subscriber gets a pass for two people to an end-of-season wrap party (yeah, it's a big party, but so what?). The next step would be for a production company to do this for a brand-new series and bypass broadcast TV altogether.
There was a brief, unsuccessful (and unauthorized) effort to resurrect Firefly this way, but that was pre-iTunes TV.
I think that within a few years, iTunes (and its competitors...does it have any competitors?...) will be selling first-run episodic video content of quality matching current TV shows but not appearing on TV (or only appearing after a delay -- sort of the reverse of what happens now, where a given TV episode becomes available on iTunes a day or two after initial broadcast). However, even that will require some bandwidth enhancements along the way; right now, with a solid broadband connection, it can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes to download an 'hour-long' (typically 43-minute) episode. If iTunes is releasing first-run content on a weekly basis, then we can expect massive download spikes each time that occurs.
So, as per my title: if Bill Gates is just now saying that "internet will transform TV within 5 years", he's merely making an obvious statement rather than a perceptive or unexpected prediction. The net is already transforming TV.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
In 10 years, the concept of "channels" as we know it will be supplanted by "shows" and "collections of shows."
95% of Americans who pay for the privilege will be able to watch "Any show at any time" on their TVs, and will get a listing of shows they are likely to enjoy. The channels that do remain will be "playable on demand" for up to a week or more through your cable system or DRM-controlled DVR box, unless the DRM restrictions say otherwise.
Video rental will be dead: Almost every movie or TV show ever pressed to DVD will be available for watching "on-demand." Disney and its famous "Disney Vault" may be an exception.
You will be able to watch "local" community-access shows from anywhere in the country, for a fee. High school sports will be the first to smell the bucks but eventually everything will be available.
In 20 years this will be worldwide among open, internet-connected countries.
The one missing piece:
You still won't be able to legally get blacked-out NFL football games due to DRM.
The one major flaw:
The "big boys" will make sure this only happens once they find a workable DRM.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.