I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
We’re changing the way we’re using broadcast content. Consider these three models.
1. Time-shifting
My mother now time-shifts. She has MySky (NZ version of Tivo) and can now choose to watch the 6:00 news at 6:20 if she so chooses.
The characteristics of time-shifting are:
- It is still content provided by the broadcaster. It is a push model
- Time-shifting is provided by a cache (hard disk)
- Advertising is still local, though it looses value as consumers fast forward
- It is now easy for consumers as it is provided as a consumer product
My mum does not know to call it time-shifting but she will communicate the benefits to all of her friends. Time-shifting is now mainstream.
There are plenty more opportunities for media time-shifting. Radio is a great example. If I drive home at 5:10 I miss the 5:00 news. It would be great if my car radio had 64MB of RAM and could turn itself on at 4:59 to record the news so I can hear it on my 20 minute drive home.Â
Already Sony has worked out that most mobile phones now have bluetooth so have built a generic bluetooth phone interface into their latest head units. Time-shifting car radio is a no-brainer.
2. Internet Radio
Internet Radio is another model where a media appliance can stream radio on a synchronous basis from almost any source. Its characteristics are
- While strictly broadcast, the range of content is so broad it seems that there is infinite choice
- It is not time-shifting but is probably of similar end user value because of the breadth of choice. You can find something that interests you right now
- It works for radio [now], not video [yet] because the bandwidth requirements are relatively much lower
- It is synchronous
3. Content downloading
Self content assembly (I can’t think of a better name) is happening in geek circles. Geeks can pull down broadcast content from any region almost immediately after it is aired. They can watch it on their PC, or even burn it to a DVD and watch it on their normal TV. What is starting to happen is that these DVD’s are being circulated.
While not yet mainstream, it is becoming more common, especially` as DVD’s are circulated ‘non PC’ people are seeing the benefits. The characteristics of this model are
- It is cache based, not synchronous
- Content is king and easily replicated once obtained
- It breaks the local advertising model – while global brand advertising might be less affected, it is hard to measure
The Broadcasters need to understand that this is going on. Playing low value and old content just does not cut it anymore. A classic example is Prime’s playing of BBC Top Gear at 7:30 on Sunday night. It is playing 2 year old shows that are as stale as moldy bread. Richard let out last Sunday ‘hey it’s 2004’. A 2 year old car is just not interesting. Car fanatics are passing around copies of last weeks episode in the UK already.
So what!
What if we had a device that combind all of these things
- A consumer device with a cache (hard disk)
- A global directory of compelling broadcast quality content
- A download manager
It’s already happing in the PC world, but imagine a consumer device where you could subscribe to a bunch of shows have them trickled onto a cache almost continuously so that you could watch anything, when you wanted, in your TV ‘lounge experience’.
The revolution is rapidly being mainstream. Broadcasting is about to change.
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