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That's absolutely fundamental to how the Web is used (of course). It's been about ten years since video streaming got going in a very basic way. Remember those tiny little windows in corporate web brochures, which took 30 minutes to deliver a 60-second clip?
Well, then, where's this all heading? Once we had sufficient speed and compression for UGC, the likes of YouTube. Now we have the iPlayer and Hulu delivering professional, near broadcast quality streaming. So, all of sudden, everyone thinks TV is going to become VoD only.
That's not right, in my humble opinion. People love watching scheduled TV. Nielsen has just put out a report saying that the guys who watch the most online video are the ones who are watching the most traditional TV. Companies like mine, Zattoo, are banking on how much people love traditional TV. And in the last couple of years, the technology has been developed to make it a reality online.
So I agree, Patricia. Success is going to depend on keeping one foot in the TV camp and another at the forefront of technology.
switch on and off your PC,
browse all TV Channels present on the net,
play or stop a dvd in the disk driver or in the hard disk,
turn on/off the speakers and so on.
The key here is laziness. People are lazy, need to sit down on the sofa and just press one or two buttons.
Ant this was about television as a piece of furniture... what about television as content provider? Of course people want to see quality stuff and easily get bored with user produced videos. But this is the market. I mean when all the major TV producers and broadcasters will be on the net and people will be able to browse their content from the sofa, more or less the audience sharing will not change to much in respect to the present. I mean that people which looks for CSI today will look for it tomorrow, and people who look for grass-root citizen journalism on the net today will look for it also tomorrow.
Finally, there is an other point I want to stress: the copyright boundaries. They are structured by that XIX hundred territorial stuff which we still call nations... so providers of TV content on the net restrict the content by IP controls. This is quite irritating for the user. If X produces a TV series and so retains the rights of broadcasting it on the net, why not creating a global distribution copyright? If you are the producer you can sell that right to every internet service of broadcasting and everyone on the net will be allowed to watch at that show.
Someone can say that in this way, if the producer is in the US and probably produce the show in English only English speaking people will watch at it. So it's better to sell it to different countries with different copyrights so it can be translated or subtitled. But not all people in one country want to see a TV show in their homeland language. Heroes in English rocks, in Italian it sucks.
So if the problem is that CBS, for example, will never invest for translating their shows in every world language, this just calls for having rights of distribution related to language and not to territories. I produced that video in English and I distribute it on my platform in English independently if the PC of my fan is physically in Germany or Japan or USA.