Why TV Lost
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Man, is this ever true. I like to watch tennis a lot - which, being a niche sport, is often not on TV. The memphis finals were televised in some places, but not others. There was a web stream, but dig this - it was not available in the US because of broadcasting rights. And it was limited to PCs (not Mac's)!
So I'm thinking about anti-piracy efforts, including a lot of moralizing about how piracy is the equivalent of stealing (which, in some cases, it may well be). A network bought coverage, declined to air it in my area, but also banned a web feed that I would have gladly paid for, but with DRM that prevents it from working on my Mac.
But I shouldn't watch a rogue feed, because Piracy would be, you know, wrong. I should just be a passive viewer and decide to enjoy what the network decided I should be watching that day.
Keep in mind, I'm more than willing to pay. I'm trying to pay.
I'm not sure they're quite that sophisticated, though. I think they're reasoning is more along the lines of "I own that, I decide how and when it will be viewed!" Kind of a total war mentality, where they're even willing to shoot themselves in the foot to defend copyright.
I don't know much about copyright law, but this behavior does seem to run counter to the spirit of the law, which is to encourage the creation and dissemination of content by granting a "temporary" monopoly for the creator. In theory, this would expand the amount of content available to the public. But what I constantly encounter is the use of copyright to restrict access to content by limiting what I can view, see, hear, or read - as well as attacking the technologies that promote the dissemination of content because they are used (extensively, I admit) for copyright violation.
It's all gone so wrong. Because congress has shown a willingness to grant extensions to copyrights that were set to expire, and the supreme court has decided that copyrights with repeated extensions don't qualify as copyrights in perpetuity, it's hard to believe that the monopoly is temporary. For all practical purposes, it's permanent - and the copyright cartel is more than willing to use them to shut down the tech factor.
I do agree with PG that there's no turning back the tide. The computer will defeat the TV. But the temporary delay can be a real pain in the ass.
This kind of fear propagates faster than actual realistic fears because you sound wise by talking about the future. So lawyers can always "add value" by cautioning against some deal that might be disadvantageous in 20 years.
1) TV screens are much bigger and cheaper. They don't need the resolution a monitor does. Watching on a small screen is something you're happy to be able to do on a plane, but would never want to do on a day to day basis.
2) Bandwidth is still not there, especially for HDTV, and progress seems to be stalled. I still have pretty much the same connection for the same price that I did 5 years ago, and I'll likely still have it in 5 years from now. Mark Cuban talks about this a lot. Fiber to the premises may solve this one soon for some subset of the country, but by no means everyone.
3) Live television is nearly non-existent online. It can't handle it. The bandwidth to stream the Superbowl to everyone who wants it doesn't exist. Sports are a huge part of the TV viewing audience.
4) Many people like to watch shows as soon as they're released. The internet is terrible for this. I personally download mine, but I do so knowing that I'm always going to be watching the Daily Show from 2 days ago. If I were a TV addict (i.e. normal American) that would be unacceptable.
5) Content quality is better than ever. Single camera sitcoms, pay channel dramas, reality tv (if you're into that). Almost everyone agrees this is a golden era of television.
If you really think that more people are watching TV on a computer than on a good old-fashioned TV, you need to come down from your Silicon Valley mountain for a while.
I wish I could post the graph of unique visitors that the founders of Justin.TV sent me. But while their actual numbers are presumably secret, I will say that I have never seen a steeper graph of a one-year period from any YC-funded startup. And I have seen some steep graphs now.
I don't think this is something justin.tv is happy about because it kind of transforms "broadcast yourself" into "share your cable subscription with strangers" and inevitably leads to a conflict with Fox+ESPN+friends [and possibly with cable/sat. providers too]
It all comes down to bandwidth. It doesn't exist and the situation is not improving, I'm 100% with Matt here. Even ESPN's premiere 360 offering pretty much sucks, let alone Justin's streams: they're basically backups for people who don't have TV access (on the road, in another country, etc).
Security-minded, TCP-dominant, firewalled to death "Big Internet" is simply the wrong platform to stream live HD video. Having worked at an IP-based HD video surveillance startup I was amazed at how hard it was to reliably push high-def streams over TCP/IP even within a large local enterprise network. Most of our IP was all about bandwidth management. I honestly can't even imagine what would it take to stream even CNN to all their viewers, let alone superbowl.
Easy place to start - start hiring a small TV station for an hour in the morning, somewhere in amongst the informercials, and broadcast a signal that people with TV Tuners can decode. Using some variation of colour 3D barcodes, say. Have the TV Tuner decode software use this hour to pump content into squid or some other form of web cache.
Monetisation strategy: give people the ability to vote on what gets broadcast based on their cache logs.
Perhaps a frame based variation on the bittorrent protocol is the way to go, where you're constantly torrenting sequential blocks of content and viewing with a slight delay. I think people would find that acceptable for live events that aren't popular in their current location, but broadcast is still superior for mass appeal content.
including embedded players: http://www.quantcast.com/p-16uNVwiyGoWyg
Also, some real-time data: http://live.justin.tv/
However, "bandwidth" isn't really what matters. It's the last mile connection to end users. Big CDN's like Akamai have this figured out and can pump millions of simultaneous live streams directly into end user networks without congesting any internet backbones.
It turns out that the main reasons we aren't all watching TV online right now is that big TV networks 1) are afraid of cannibalizing their existing revenue streams, and 2) think it costs a lot money. Neither of these are strictly misconceptions, but they aren't nearly as true as they were even a year ago.
Justin.tv has developed technology and infrastructure that brings the cost of distributing live video below the cost of serving static video, so I guess that makes it all about the revenue streams. It should be interesting to see what happens to this space in the next couple of years.
I guess the majority of people still find it tough to hook their computer up to their TV screen. I can't see what the problem is myself. Surely soon most people will be able to do this soon.
Are you sure about some of the claims you're making?
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2007...
^^^ This article seems to think viewership is down and I've heard that repeatedly over the last few years.
Hopefully IPv6 and global multicast should solve this once we finally rid ourself of this ancient thing called IPv4.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
I see people are saying that the hierarchical address-assignment is to some extent going out the window, but apart from that, how is IPv6 routing going to be a bigger mess than the current IPv4 routing?
According to Nielson, TV viewership is at an all time high (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/tag/total-us-television-...). Also, Oscars had a 13% increase from last year with 36.3M viewers. 50+M viewers watched Obama's inauguration on TV.. not on their computers. And of course, we know that those teenagers who are using social apps still cast more votes for their favorite american idol contestant than the sum of adults cast for president. (btw, if anyone knows where to get an annual histogram of viewership in US, that is what I was really looking for). TV viewership may indeed plummet in the future, but as of right now its at an all time high.
Then, I can't help but notice that I still procure my internet from my cable provider. And that same cable provider is not only actively fighting against network neutrality, but they are also blocking my ability to download anything from Torrent. They are far from beaten.
Lastly, what is the real difference between watching shows on my TV verse Computer. They are both using digital pipes, they both have microprocessors, memory and HDs - one has a bigger screen than the other (usually). The only real difference, and increasingly so, is that one is proprietary, and one is open. TV has not lost.. their content is (unfortunately) as relevant and abundant to the average American as ever.
All TV has lost is utter dominance - much like MS windows lost its utter dominance with the adoption of Linux and the rise of OSX (but they are still #1 by a lot). However, whether its piped through a monitor or an HD flatscreen, the US consumer will continue to glue their eyeballs to the content we call TV today for some time before open content can even begin to realize the same advertising dollars as the proprietary networks do.
Both TV and Microsoft lost. They just aren't quite dead yet - it takes time for giants to fall.
That said I would bet on Netflix or Amazon (or even Microsoft) to give us the next generation of TV before any of the networks do.
Microsoft ain't going anywhere.
Like how people don't buy mainframes anymore. IBM is just another player in the server market and they sold their desktop unit and Macs switched to Intel. Now they make CPUs for consoles where taking over from Intel and MIPs chips.
Similarly I could see Microsoft losing dominance in Operating Systems as more things become web-based. They move more towards web services and Xbox - which is already happening to an extent.
Although, it might not take more than a few years when you stream or download tv shows to your cellphone over broadband wifi, then simply plug your phone into a dumb HD television screen terminal and start watching whatever you have on your phone.
This is probably a huge component in why there are so many more reality shows these days.
Breaking the broadcast model also won't work for those, because their value is precisely in the fact that a lot of people watch them, so that they become gossip points. I know some people who watch reality shows only because they know that's what will be discussed around the water fountain the next day, and so they want to be sure to be "in".
I agree that that's a pretty small niche to fit all of today's TV industry, though.
American Idol is the most DVR'd show in history. Even tho part of the "process" is to watch and TXT your vote (for a fee), it turns out many people are passively watching the show. They DVR it, watch it, and wait it out till next week.
Essentially, this is the first evidence of internet lurking crossing over to Reality TV contests.
But otherwise, you're completely right. TV is watercooler talk.
Also lately I had this thought that maybe it is not even so bad. Consider a person who watches TV shows for all their lives. Chances are their lives will be much more exciting than the average person's live, if they really live with the TV show characters. They'll experience every conceivable and inconceivable human condition there is. Not that I recommend it myself, but still...
For the most part, though, it won't be anything specific -- they'll just sit there and watch literally whatever's on, including even the really awful daytime game shows and the like. They're not very bright, but neither are they especially stupid -- they're both at grammar schools (~top 20%). Neither are they poor, friendless or isolated -- they just enjoy the utter mindlessness of watching whatever is put in front of them. To have to choose what to watch would ruin the experience.
'Switching off the Brain' is a somewhat pejorative way to say it. You don't call a massage 'switching off your back muscles.'
When was the last time you felt relaxed like after getting a massage from watching TV?
1. The content, which, as others here have stated, is here to stay for quite some time. And this is what the networks (NBC/Fox/etc.) do best so I think they're going to be around much longer than the RIAA. It's very inexpensive to record quality music using home equipment (hence RIAA is screwed), but home videos are still far from the quality of network produced shows. There is a downward trend in cost to produce TV shows and movies, but it isn't quite as cheap and easy yet.
2. The big screen in the living room. This too is here to stay, though it will evolve from just a medium to watch TV shows and movies to something that'll be more interactive+connected+social.
My TV watching is basically Food Network, Ovation TV (artist & musician documentaries) some History channel, a bit of Discovery channel (Mythbusters & Dirty Jobs), Cartoon Network adult swim and movies. I haven't watched broadcast TV in almost a decade and I don't get the local satellite feed. My local news comes from the radio during my commute.
Fox, ABC, NBC, etc. simply don't exist for me. CNN I have watched exactly ONCE in the last year: I heard that a plane landed in the Hudson river and I rushed home to watch it on TV then got disgusted by the usual crappy CNN coverage and switched it off.
A local bar could have an open mike night streamed online and I would watch that (with the bar's name prominently displayed in the background) over just about anything on TV. And when I got tired of watching I could go to the bar :-)
He was surprised when I said that it was well within his ability to do this already. Not in a "woohoo I put up my own website with my own shows" kind of way, but in a "I have become my own virtual CDN via EC2 et al" kind of way. He argued that would simply make Amazon and the infrastructure providers into the new middlemen. Perhaps, though that might be like saying that my computer use is being held hostage by the electrical company. In theory it is, but in practice it does not feel like the very exploitive sort of middle management that exists in the entertainment industry.
I've done some work for this industry and the key point you have to understand is that, whereas "Can we accomplish this?" is a matter of technological feasibility to us hackers, it means something entirely different to entertainment industry folks. To them, it is more of a legal matter. The whole industry is mired in a complex web of contracts governing every detailed aspect of intellectual property. So, when we scoff at how long it took the networks to get something like Hulu up on the Internet, understand it was a bunch of lawyers holding up the process. Then, when you get around some of the service's limitations (e.g., geoblocking) understand that too, was a dumb legal requirement. Everyone involved knows these restrictions are circumventable but, they must be in place for the existing contracts not to have to be re-negotiated.
Talk to anyone that's worked on the iTunes infrastructure. From what I gather, at least initially, getting an album onto the iTMS involved dozens of contracts. It made getting an iPhone application onto the App Store a cakewalk in comparison.
Where a startup could provide tremendous value, it would be in overcoming the legal hurdles to distributing content on the Internet. Spend the money on the lawyers to setup all the contracts that you need, so you can get unsigned artists onto your content distribution network, but more-or-less play by the rules of the current industry. These people are afraid of change, so you don't want to come out of left field in the way you operate. Then, when you become the new boss of the industry, tear down the stupid legal constraints that stifle creativity and innovation, and makes the Internet pretend to be something it is not.
The networks are vulnerable. Writers, actors, and other workers hate working for them because they take huge cuts of revenue and then play accounting games to take an even larger portion. There's a reason the unions there are so strong. They're united in their hatred of the middlemen. On the other side of the coin, us consumers hate the networks too. Most of us are tired of their antics.
So, any startup willing to take on this challenge would have a friendly set of content suppliers, and a captive audience. Just get yourself the best lawyers you can probably find, because you will need them ;)
Hulu might make that possible, but it hasn't yet.
I do see your point though. Making high quality video is very hard. It cost Joss Whedon around $200,000 to make. And Joss Whedon has a cult following, so just having his name on it gave the project a lot of P.R. And Joss Whedon has been involved with Hollywood movies and television shows, so he has the experience necessary to make a high quality show.
I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism. Media Companies might be forced to split their services into two sections. They would act like a vc firm and give money to producers in exchange for a percent of the gross. And they could sell access to their distribution network. I'm sure that no media company would want to do this willingly though. It would mean giving up control over the ip rights, and they would have to find new distribution methods.
Hulu:http://www.hulu.com/watch/28327/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog...
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blo...
The entertainment industry already has a model very similar to what you just described, just instead of distributing it over the net, they do so to theaters and customers by way of DVD. See http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.ht... . It explains why you see two or three production credits before the opening sequence of each movie, those are basically their equivalent of VCs.
Isn't it like this already? Shows like 30 Rock and The Late Show are created by production companies owned by Tina Fey and David Letterman. The shows are jointly owned by the production companies and the star's production companies. Even smaller potatoes productions are owned by production companies, not the networks. I.e. all that crap like "Rob and Big" on MTV is joint owned by MTV and a production company owned by some random dudes.
The finance and ownership issues relating to TV and Film are probably more sophisticated than high-tech venture capital.
The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show.
I was ranting in #startups on freenode the other day about the cost of production being the thing that needs to change for the game to change. I've got a thought on how to do that, but it just requires a little time to see if its possible or still just a theory.
Would building an online service that allows people to mail in hd tapes, and then edit online via a flex app help? You could use AWS clusters to handle the rendering compute load.
1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand).
2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).
3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k
4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering
5. Post production: 40-60k
This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers.
Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).
The way I figure it, the minimum number of people you need in any traditional production is essentially the cast and base operators (which could also be cast members if multi-skilled)
However if you go into 3D animation, this number can actually go down - to the point where you have a content production team around the size of a small startup.
The model I'm looking at could be described as a digital aniation studio, a "mini pixar" if you will, that uses open source software (Blender, Cinelerra) and homebrew motion capture (both facial and performance) to get performance across in a quick manner and using a significantly smaller team. I'm also looking at leveraging EC2 for rendering instead of investing in purchasing multiple servers for a render farm.
The model isn't scalable across the entire film/tv industry of course, but I figure it could work for a couple studios and this is what I'm working on trying to prove right now.
If you could tag your contributions with CC-Attribution licenses and have your name appear in the credits, that might be enough incentive for a lot of people to bring down production prices even more.
And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.
To take over TV, you need to at least match the picture quality of made-for-TV movies, and probably match 1080i resolution.
Then again, if anyone has more experience in the industry please correct me.
Edit: Also, the reason for the poor quality is probably not due to the quality of the original film. I would think it's more of a compression/bandwidth issue.
I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.
I think that for content to be produced for online (not just as a novelty webisode but as an actual artform) people need to start thinking outside the 22 minute content 8 minute ad format for half hour blocks of television.
For example, a standard sitcom format goes like this.
Credits
Story (teaser / cold open)
Commercial
Story
Commercial
End of Story
Commercial
Tag
Credits
It would be interesting to see some A/B testing with recutting lengths of commercials for the exact same episodes with a randomised set of people and see if the net effect of how "funny" a show is is noticeable or negligible.
(sorry, just late night stream of conciousness rambling)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay
You're probably thinking of a deblocking filter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deblocking_filter_(video)
which is typically used in the decoder for the relevant video CODEC; recent video drivers do have hardware support for this, but it's not a fundamental connection. Moreover, deblocking only helps so much.
But I bet you can lower many of the technology costs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's an extraordinary amount of inefficiency there.
And/or talent would be payed with equity.
Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.
Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)
Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.
The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.
So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.
On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.
If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.
This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.
I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.
Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin
Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,
Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.
Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
I'm not saying it doesn't - it obviously does.. what I'm saying is that not all animation has to be film scale, nor does it have to have proper actors as draw cards for voice talent.
My argument was that WALL-E was a smash hit and the use of big name actors as voice talent to sell the film wasn't part of the equation.
You completely missed the point.
But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
No, I'm not saying that at all - Going up against a studio like Pixar/Disney or Dreamworks Animations thats entirely the case, but there are plenty of films out there that you don't even hear about that are plenty profitable - if you were to target the film industry that is.
You just don't need to scale it up (in terms of budget) for it to work, that's my whole argument
That means they have many, many models, sets, textures etc that go into the production of any film, which of course increase your cost of production considerably. That's just a matter of fact.
What I have been saying is that if you take a different view, don't start out by trying to swing for the fences (you can always scale up later), essentially limit some of these choices you could probably get away with a smaller team in the beginning.
For example, lets move away from films for a second and talk about sitcoms. One of my favourite is Frasier.
Frasier has (for the most part) a very limited series of sets and characters. You have your 5 main characters, your 6 occasional supporting characters and for the most part these back and forths take place in 4 locations...
That's about 6 seasons of entertainment there for a sitcom, or about < 1 minute of Pixar animation.
That's really the kind of difference we're talking about in terms of cost of production.
Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.
You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.
Everything has to start somewhere, but the kind of content you could put out with minimal costs might not attract many viewers, which would make it difficult to grow.
Not cost - number of artifacts within a that timeframe over several shots.
Then again, Let's run some numbers to talk about cost.
WALL-E cost $120 million for 98 minutes, Ratatouille cost $150 million for 111 minutes, so you could infer that Pixar animation costs about $1.3 million per minute (roughly) and each production takes around 3-4 years to make.
The Blender "peach" team produced 10 minutes of animation (Big Buck Bunny) in 3 months with 9 people from concept to delivery using all open source software. (There were only 6 people primarily involved in the production of the animation itself, 2 were actively developing Blender as software and 1 did the music)
Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537
Once all the meshes, sets etc are initially created, it all boils down to production of scripts, storyboarding and then animating more content based off artifacts you've already produced.
Remember, I'm talking a sitcom format, that is you artificially limit yourself with numbers of characters and locations (which includes lighting etc) which allows you to spend more time on animation instead of producing more sets/figures.
In fact, once everything is set up, animation is one of the shortest segments of any film animation project (dont believe me? check Dreamworks Animation's general timeline breakdown from their most recent annual report, page 21, link follows)
http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/export/system/modules/...
So while no, you might not get a full 6 seasons, you could probably do several seasons for the cost of 1 minute of Pixar production.
You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.
Thats exactly what I'm talking about.
The model I've been more or less discussing throughout this thread is for a startup I'll be working on soon, maybe even applying to YC with in the next round of funding.
PG says, make something people want - this year is turning out to be the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales, people spend more time in front of their TV's now than 5 years ago and now they also spend more time online (and TV/film piracy is on the rise)
Fact is - people want to be entertained...
I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff.
Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't.
What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries.
I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.
I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media:
* A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it.
* Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model.
* Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way!
* Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing.
* On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary:
People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that.
And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.
But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary.
IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/
The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
sketerpot' comment is all over this.
sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio.
However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
Allow podcasters to opt-in to a web interface to video podcasts–integrate mid/pre-roll ads and split the revenue with the content providers. Allow viewers to set their favorite channels and be notified when new episodes are available.
For the "friendly set of content providers", help them create a workflow that gets the content to you as easily as possible.
What are the best lawyers required if you're working directly with the content creators? (assuming they don't already have existing contracts)
Between net-neutrality, restrictive piracy laws and all sorts of anti-consumer tools we are far from seeing the notion of TV as it currently exists being effectively replaced.
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-...
Not that I agree with him, but it's nice to have discourse.
I've co-founded a research and development project to function as a think tank designing this future model.
For content creators there is a big focus around compensating the creation of culture. If society considers culture to be a valuable thing, then that culture will earn it's value back. In other words, we won't see inflated monetary compensation to content creators, but there will be compensation that supports them making more. That is if anyone cares about the things they make. And that's I suppose why we call this democracy.
We've received a steady stream of feedback regarding Stormpulse.com from people who are abandoning TV coverage of hurricanes (yes, even that of The Weather Channel) in favor of our site. We're also happy to be the owners of Stormpulse.tv.
For me, Boxee is the most disruptive offering I've seen and it's precisely a combination of the social and Internet-based elements that makes me try to convince everyone I know to use it. I don't see Boxee killing TV, but like XBMC before it, it's one hell of a disruptive concept.
I also agree that some sort of set top box combining telephony, TV, Radio and Internet will displace regular TV. Cable and telephony companies have already been moving towards this with 'triple play' offerings.
I on the other hand have had this kind of integration since 2003 with MythTV.
You can pass hours of time on YouTube, but the content, while passably stimulating, just doesn't bear repeating. You can't crack your friends up by making some sly reference to it a month from now. Unless, that is, you're watching something that is well-written, well-produced, and well-acted. And in that case, you'll probably call it "television" to distinguish it from random thirty-second clips of some guy farting at his cat (America's Funniest Home Videos notwithstanding.)
When music moved from live venues to vinyl, it was still called music. When it moved from vinyl to cassettes to CDs, it was still called music. Now it's on the internet, and it's called... music! Television programming has been called "television" or "TV" for over half a century. I bet people will still call it "television." We think about it as "television versus the computer," but the younger generation thinks, "Why is it so hard to find television on the internet? I want to watch TV on my computer, not on the TV." That isn't contradictory at all. That's just the way the words are used. If you pick the right meaning of "TV," then TV might die, but it isn't interesting unless you stand to make or lose money on it. The TV that most people care about has a long life ahead of it.
The power of point-to-point cannot be overestimated. Indeed it had great impact in getting people to sign up for Internet access and connect a computer to the Internet in the first place. I discovered online interaction in 1992, when I attended a conference about homeschooling in Washington state and saw a demonstration of the Prodigy online service there. I made sure to connect a modem to my computer (remember dial-up?) and soon entered into interesting conversations with people all over the country about a common topic of interest. None of the content I was reading was produced by professionals--it was all parents talking to other parents. My online interaction completely displaced TV from my life, and soon greatly reduced the number of postal letters I sent to friends, because I could reach most of my best friends online anyway.
Sometime a while later in the 1990s, I saw an analysis in an industry magazine about whether the main application of the Internet would be broadcasting of professionally produced content or point-to-point communication. That analysis pointed out that at that time the revenues of the Baby Bell companies were MANY times greater than the revenues of all the movie and TV production companies. Point-to-point is where the revenue streams are. Broadcasting doesn't draw in as much money, because it doesn't appeal to as many audience members in as many ways.
My use of television now consists just about entirely of watching the local TV news and one network news program broadcast to my home with my children. We don't watch any dramas, and only occasionally watch Saturday Night Live's opening segment. (We don't subscribe to cable and live in an area with an unwatchable digital signal, so we resort to just one analog broadcast signal at the moment.) TV is expendable in our house. Internet-connected computer use is indispensable.
Can someone explain that line to me? I don't see facebook mentioned anywhere else.
I generally consider myself pretty on top of ways to watch TV on my computer (I've been doing the RSS bit torrent thing pretty much since it's been possible), but I have never seen any common thread between facebook and tv. "Internet killed TV" I can agree with.
YouTube, Facebook, Myspace etc are among the most visited sites and are all about connecting with each other.
Among the younger crowd, people spend more time online than they do infront of their TV.
So, While Facebook itself didn't kill TV, the assertion that social activities online killed TV is becoming increasingly true, especially as more content producers start distributing their stuff online.
Paul just put it in a broad manner (although not 100% accurate, but close enough).
You didn't cancel your cable, but you likely spent more time in front of the computer after picking up AIM and FB than before. This signal indicates the front edge of a trend. This is visionary stuff, not hindsight.
I mean, I'm not a big YouTube fan: I normally get linked there to metalworking/machining videos but once there I stay for a long time. YouTube is really sticky. This kind of stuff is candy for me and linked with well targeted ads, the provider can make money. I know that if I'm watching some guy in a basement show how he built a CNC lathe, I wouldn't mind even really obvious product placement or a short 10-15 second commercial about machining before the video starts.
There are many, many talented people out there who could be making their own videos and profiting from it. Is the problem just lack of sponsorship or a good advertising model?
There has to be business opportunity here. Maybe a site that video artists can go to with samples of their work looking to be matched with suitable sponsors.
Ultimately it is about content that is relevant to the affinity group that supports it. The toolset or technology that supports it will become secondary over time.
Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I’m limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!
We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.
Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.
YouTube, we’re told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture — citizen use of the mediasphere — is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won’t permit fast uploads.
Don’t get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We’ll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it’s obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizen’s media production haven are numbered.
The full post is here: http://themoderatevoice.com/26956/the-days-of-the-internet-a...
1. In the HD flame wars (Blue ray Vs HD-DVD), Blue ray has emerged the winner, but may not actually so. It seems that people would rather stream/ download HD stuff over the internet. As of today, this is easier on the PC than the TV.
2. Growth of HTPC: If your only complaint on PG's article is about the monitor size/ quality this fixes it. You can now connect your TV to the computer, and the PC will fetch content from internet, record your shows automatically and also enable you manage your digital content. Networked home entertainment is the thing of the future.
Though, Paul has a point. Computers can serve the function of TVs.
I personally watch more TV than I ever have before, now that my Mac Mini is hooked up to my screen and I have a DVR. But that supports the article's point: the old synchronous TV network business model is losing.
I predict that internet enabled computers (of some form - I'll borrow pg's footnote #3) will also be the dominant delivery medium for radio and telephone service.
On one hand, commercials would be skippable. But then, increasingly, so are on TV. Would commercial-free torrents appear on pirate bay? I doubt it, no real incentive. Would people really skip them consistently? Some yes, some wouldn't. If the commercial is short and reasonably interesting, why bother to fast forward every time?
Just like people make custom, amateur soft-subs these days for both pirate and legit DVDs, a file-format for reprogrammable program time-lines would be invented pretty quickly basically editing out the ads runtime.
I'm not going to say I could make it in five minutes, but it should be pretty trivial to implement a plugin for this kind of thing. Heck, base it on Avisynth and on the Win32-platform you already have 99% of the groundwork done for you.
These custom time-lines would probably be indexed, by show, season and episode, with direct links to the legal torrent all at one place.
And I doubt anyone would be able to argue that files denoting time-lines could in any way be illegal.
People like sharing big-screen audio-visual entertainment in shared spaces. People like shows and movies and games and sharing. People will have a large-screen device called a TV in their living room for the conceivable future.
The broadcast model will soon be obselete, but the TV itself will not die any time soon.
Is that really true? Source?
(Uhh. I have no idea how to quote things correctly. :)
The reason why doing this isn't more common is because regular folk don't know where to get the content from. Bittorrent is far from mainstream.
We recently announced NthCode Player, an embedded Linux-based software product electronics companies can embed in their DVD players, TVs, etc. to connect them to home networks and the Internet.
It's a bit rough, but we're making fast progress. There's a Youtube video up, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHu_nEy6Ew
Check it out and drop us a line.
BTW - I'm 50 yrs old, and I worked in television, including production, from 1989-2003. Now I work online, at home, when I want...
They thought they'd be able to dictate they way shows reached audiences.
-->
They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences.
[3] Or a phone that is actually computer.
-->
[3] Or a phone that is actually a computer.
The general idea of the essay is false now (TV hours > internet's one).
IMing or twittering on iPhone is not the same as watching a TV program simultaneously with millions of other people.
There is something here with the simultaneous viewing concept, or maybe we can call it collective experience. There is something amazing about sharing in an experience with millions of people at the same time. For instance, election night, 9/11, the Super Bowl, or even finding out who shot JR. Granted we do this today through many mediums (e.g. Twitter during the inauguration), which only serve to augment to core TV experience.
Another contradictory point is there is IPTV. TV stations can deliver customized programmes with this.
I spent most of my youth working in network TV, then moved to talk radio and the last 15 years in internet, most recently running the online video output for a newspaper publisher. I moved to that job explicitly because I wanted to have a hand on the knife that killed broadcast TV. Always wanted to live in the future, to do what I could to bring it on, and I saw the power of the networks as retarding at best and toxic at worst. Couple of years down the track, I realize things ain’t that simple. I no longer see a simple dualism, TV vs the Internet. Audiences are not fleeing one monolithic platform for another, they are fragmenting. This is how Nielsen can find that TV consumption is at record highs (151hrs/wk in US, according to a Feb 09 survey) while internet usage is also rising. God only knows what crap is in that 151 hours, but the same can be said of internet video.
There’s a new ecology of media emerging, as a profusion of digitally networked screens fill our living rooms, pockets, desks, cars and hands. To my eternal joy it doesn’t look like it will settle to an ossified steady state any time soon, unlike TV and Radio which have been using the same model for 70 and 50 years respectively.
Now I think the internet will no more kill TV than TV killed radio or radio killed cinema. Despite DVDs and huge plasmas, cinema is doing just fine. There’ll be less money for the successors of broadcast networks, fewer ad dollars split more ways: so inevitably less money not just for the corporates but also for the production crews and creatives. Cheaper TV. We will have an ecology: a whole lot of fizzing and spitting new beasties have crawled out of the media swamp and the big old beasties (a) don’t like the look of it at all, they don’t play by the rules, and (b) don’t realize being eaten alive by ants is still being eaten alive. Many of the networks will collapse; certainly the corporate structures are unsustainable, but people will still want communal big-screen narrative experiences, and will want them well made. That costs money and takes, for better or worse, concentrations of expertise, machines and skills that cost money.
We make short feature material, quite profitably, subverting a;ll the TV [production models we can, but have discovered where the bottom limit for professional ad-supported shortform online video is.. and it’s higher than you think. Any fool can make a video and whack it up on YouTube as a hobby, and not make a living. To make hundreds of videos over a span of years, supporting several staff and turn a profit is not so easy. Fortunately the audience fragmentation means we can turn a buck from any number of iterations, including broadcast TV.
Network TV ain’t dead, you can’t kill it with a stick, it’s a zombie which has no brain to speak of yet hungers for yours. It’s going to be with us for a long time yet: but as one of the crowd, not the bully on the block.
The dinosaurs are only scared of their profit disappearing.
The TV industry is a complicated business, with a lot of buying and selling instruments that technologists outside of the industry generally don't understand. So, the industry is brushed off as a bunch of "laggers" as was describe to me by one VC group.
And because the new media channels (GOOG, etc) brush off the vagaries of the business (selling methodologies, the role that Nielsen plays, service and relationships), they're failing miserably at getting their hands on any significant portion of that 30b annually that TV ad revenue is putting on the books.
If GOOG is supposed to be setting the example for a new media channel penetrating the legacy media industry, so far they're doing a lousy job. TV booked 18b up front during 2008 buying season, while Youtube struggled to clear 200m by year-end. http://www.rbr.com/media-news/advertising/12912.html
And now GOOG flopped on radio: http://www.rbr.com/media-news/advertising/12895.html
The problem is that while the technology is there to change the face of media consumption, traditional media still produces the best content, and content is still king. If traditional media is not convinced that the new channels can protect spot value, there's no way they're going to give up prime content on a first run basis: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/02/goog...
Don't confuse prime re-runs that you might see on Hulu with real value content. The real value of that content was determined when it was running on TV, which is why we get to see it at all on Hulu.
GOOG recently did a deal with NBC for some inventory. Here's how I imagined the negotiation went down.
GOOG: Hey NBC, let us help you sell some of your inventory. Just imagine the reach your advertisers can achieve! NBC: Ok, how do you plan to sell the inventory. GOOG: By auction, using our online TV Ads application. NBC to assistant: Ok, hand 'em that bag of crap (remnant inventory) over there and let them try to sell it. GOOG: Come on, can't you give us anything better than that? NBC: Look, four things are sold by auction: 1) art, 2) heirlooms, 3) foreclosures, and 4) crap. There's no way we'd let you touch our gold inventory with that model.
It was easy for TV technology to take off originally 70 years ago, but it won't be nearly the same cakewalk this time around just because the technology is superior and people are using it. Like with the oil-based economy, there's a huge amount of infrastructure in place for creating and selling content that was built and refined around a legacy technology. So suggesting that TV is dead is every bit as wrong as suggesting that the oil industry is dead.
And approaching the problem from this point of view is I think a much better business move than as PG suggests, "Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks." This is equivalent to suggesting that somebody needs to come up with a Tesla for the TV industry.
I love what Tesla is doing, but we know they're not going to rake in the bucks for their effort. Their best chance for some bucks is a fat exit.
The solution is the hybrid engine, developed by a group who know the vagaries of the business from the inside, but can help realize the technology that the new media channels offer. Shameless Plug: This is exactly the project that my team is working on.