In The Future, Mankind Will Walk on the Moon...

James Bender — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:45:17 GMT

... among other things.

Visiting my parents at Christmas a couple of years ago, I made a bold prediction: The concept of a television network as we know it now will be gone in ten years. I saw something from the BBC at the PDC conference in Los Angles last week that makes me comfortable in that assertion.

The BBC exhibited a web site during the Tuesday keynote that combined the idea of media on the web with social networking. It was called iPlayer and I fell instantly in love.

By the way, to satisfy my technical content quota for this post, iPlayer was built with Microsoft new Live Framework.

This general idea of the site is that you could go watch any previous broadcast BBC show you want on demand. If that was it I would be very unimpressed; All major networks offer some kind of on-demand web presence. That's old-hat at this point.

iPlayer won me over by bringing a social networking aspect to the site. You can share clips and whole shows with your friends. You can see what shows your friends are enjoying and check them out yourself. It was all very seamless and the user experience really impressed me.

Another aspect that blew me away was the rating system. You can rate whole shows, again nothing earth shattering there. But on iPlayer you can rate individual scenes in shows.That's huge. As developers we have come to crave instant feedback. Now you can give it to the people who produce television shows. Don't like the time travel sub-plot in Heros? Mark it down and let the writers know.

I see this as another step towards my prediction. That's not to say I see Fox, NBC, ABC or CBS going away. What I envision is their role changing to that of content provider. Doing what they are doing now, but delivering it very differently.

Look around, we're already heading that way. Netflix and Microsoft working together to make streaming movies available on XBox live in the latest step forward, but we've been moving that way for awhile now. A lot of people eschew the idea of watching a television show or a movie on a computer. Ever watch a show on a DVR? Well guess what; you watched a show being played on a computer.

Most people I know subscribe to blogs through RSS readers of some kind. A lot of those readers are desktop applications like Outlook, Internet Explorer or Firefox. That's content being delivered to your desktop on a periodic basis. A lot of people have even started streaming video content via RSS. Is it a big stretch to envision subscribing to an RSS feed for you favorite shows, and having them delivered to a set-top box that will allow you to watch them on your television? Again, DVR's and Windows Media Center PC's are nothing but computers with a specialized operating systems tasked with catching this content and playing it back.

So I again reiterate my prediction: ~~Ten~~ Eight years from now the concept of a "television network" will no longer exist. And I for one would like to welcome our new streaming media overlords. I' ld like to remind them that as a trusted blogging personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves. :)