Just Notes To Myself On The End Of TV As We Know It

The one good thing about soaring energy prices is that it forces people to reexamine their budgets and trim a little of the fat that they've built up over the years. I know that's what I've been doing and it's been a little bit of a blessing in disguise discovering all the money I've been wasting on things that I hardly ever use.

Like Satellite TV.

I spend way too much money for Satellite TV and premium channels that I hardly ever watch, so it's nice to have an excuse to finally cut the cord and jettison all that excess baggage. Goodbye HBO, goodbye STARZ, goodbye Showtime...goodbye to the same ol' crap month after month. Which has got me to thinking about this "new media" thing again.

That's because ridding myself of all that "old media" content was, suprisingly, really pretty painless. To tell the truth, since cancelling I've been so busy listening to podcasts and reading ebooks and surfing the internet that I haven't hardly noticed that I don't have HBO or Showtime anymore. And now that Apple has announced that they're getting into the video content delivery business, I have to wonder if I really need TV at all. After all, if I can download the content I want off the internet and watch it on my schedule then why should I pay a satellite or cable company 'X' dollars a month to stream it to my home at a date and time that's convenient for them?

Hmmm....

Maybe we should backtrack a little. First of all, as any geek can tell you video content on the internet is nothing new, and the new IPod is hardly the first portable video device to come down the pike. Sheesh, we Pocket PC users have had portable video devices for years, and have been ripping and downloading and transcoding quite happily without any help from Apple, thank you very much. What we've always lacked, however, is an easy, one-stop source for video like the Itunes Music Store. Now Apple is going to change all that by making downloading and watching video pushbutton simple.

For a price, of course.

So what does it all mean? Am I going to pay $1.99 to download the latest episode of "Lost Housewives" (or whatever it's called)? Well, no, I'm not. First of all I'm not interested in watching "Lost Housewives" and second, even if I was interested, all I'd have to do is TIVO it. So why pay the 2 bucks? Now I admit I'm not the typical TV watcher and there are probably billions of people out there who would live idle, empty lives were it not for the "Lost Houswives" show, but are they going to pay 2 bucks a pop to download it or are they just going to watch it for free on TV? I don't have a clue, but my guess is that they'll go the cheaper route.

But there's another way of looking at this. What about video c0ntent that you can't get on TV? Would people be interested in original programming created only for the internet?

There's a show called "Digital Life TV" that I like and which is currently available only as an internet download. It's a pretty geeky show and probably not everyone's cup of tea - that is, unless they're fascinated by video card framerates and HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debates (like I said, I'm not the typical TV viewer), and to get it you have to go to the Digital Life TV website and pick through a list of episodes and video formats and choose the one you're interested in and a format that's compatible with your system and then either stream it or download it to watch on your computer or transfer to some kind of portable device. It's not as complicated as it sounds but the producers do assume that the viewer is going to know the difference between Windows Media, Quicktime H.264, Mpeg 4 and Xvid, and truth be told anyone who doesn't know the difference probably isn't going to be very interested in the show in the first place.

Anyways, I like the show and I think a lot of other people would like it too if only they could find it and watch it. But in order for that to happen there needs to be a central location, a store perhaps, where lots of different shows would be offered for download and where they all would be in the same format and guaranteed to run on store-branded playback devices. A place like, oh, the Itunes Music Store, where all the viewer has to do is click on a button and the computer takes care of the rest. And more importantly (from my point of view at least), a place where Digital Life TV could gain access to a much larger pool of potential viewers while, in turn, viewers could gain access to programming that they couldn't get anywhere else. To me, that's what the video portion of the "new media" is really all about, not day-old reruns of network TV.

But would I pay 2 bucks a pop for Digital Life TV? Yeah, come to think of it I probably would, although I'd still like to be able to watch it on my Pocket PC. I don't know how they could make that happen, but you know this portable video thing has some potential. And the best part is that we're still so early in the process. I don't if this is the future of TV, but I tell ya', if I was in the TV business I wouldn't be feeling too smug and complacent right now. Not when there are so many smart people out there figuring this whole thing out.