lauri@imke

Since TV was invented in the 30’s, it has been the revolutionary product, that every single home needed to have. TV was like the heart of the home - after a long workday all the family came together, had a dinner and ofcourse, watched the Larry King’s show or 8 o’clock news. Actually, a nice tradition. I have a clear image in my head, when our family got the first TV with a remote control, it was somewhere in the beginning of the 90’s and when finally the cable was connected, the show had jus started. It seemed like TV and all the foreign channels with hundreds of different cartoons are so interesting that you could even forget about playing football with your friends outside.

So, what’s the sitation today? Actually, I even can’t remember the last time I turned the TV on in order to watch a movie or another episode of Simpsons. Since I moved to Tallinn 5 years ago to start my studies at university, I haven’t had a TV at all. To be honest, I never had a need for it. Since everybody and everything is connected to the net, the classical TV is not so tremendously interesting anymore. Classical TV is static, internet isn’t. So, in order to stay popular and gain new watchers, the old and good TV has to change fundamentally.

Internet killed the television star

In general, TV needs to get interactive. Interactivity sells and it’s so old-fashioned to watch “Friends” only once a week on specific time. It would be more attractive to see the movies and serials on the times, that are most suitable for you. And if you feel like, the TV box should enable you to show all the “Friends” episodes in a row. That would be fun! This kind of features are not supperted by the classical TV, but engineers have been busy developing a lot of cool applications that bring TV to the next level.

A lot of Internet-based TV applications have shown up lately: the popular Joost, Babelgum and Zattoo etc (via Read/WriteWeb). Joost was one of the first successful pioneers to show up in the internet-based TV world. I’ve been Joost’s beta tester since January and have seen the amazing development of this application. At first, it had only some sample programs and now there’s a great variety of programs and 250 different channels all together. Joost is based on P2P technologies (the more user it has, the stronger the connection is) and is a typical video-on-demand example. You decide when you’re in a mood for another Happy Tree Friends cartoon or a political debate. That’s the most important feature IPTV application can deliver.

Besides the video-on-demant feature, Joost has a lot of useful widgets. Personalizing is the keyword at the moment and Joost has all the tools that are neccessary to configure the application in the way you want. The widgets let the users to chat with friends via Gmail Talk or Meebo. The Meebo add-on was introduced a week ago and gives a totally new perspective for the Joost’s functionality. In addition, all the users who are watching the same contect, can chat in a public chatroom and share their thougts about the show. The chatroom is another cool social-feature that makes Joost much more fun to use. Rating the programs and reading the news are also some possible actions you could do while watching the channels on Joost. I wonder when they add the social networking side to Joost - so every members could create a profile that contains the information of the programs they have seen, which are the highest rated shows, what are their friends watching and what they are waiting to see.

Babelgum is similar to Joost, but doesn’t contain so many channels as Joost has. Babelgum lets the users to great personal playlists and in general is a straight-competitor to Joost. Zattoo, which has been mentioned before, has only Swiss-content at the moment and differs from Joost and Babelgum in the way, that it’s streaming the live-shows. So, it’s not so flexible, but a great application to keep your eye on the content that’s being showed at the moment.

Grassroots journalism in TV

Publishing news has been the main feature the TV has always delievered. There are channels which have concentrated only on the news and the others publish news as short and informative programs. The changing TV and developing technologies have given new oppurtunities to publish news and give a new perspective to grassroots journalism - the journalism that can be created by everyone (and not only by professional journalists).

Al Gore founded an innovative TV program - Current TV, which lets users to contribute in creating the news. Interesting is the fact that the channel is preparing to make the break-through in the web. The web is more flexible in order to make Current TV more attractive and interactive. In the web the users could submit videos and video-comments arranged by their web-cams and rate the news so other users could see only the most relevant materials. It will have basicly the same principle as Digg has, but it will be in TV. Cool! MacManus introduces one of its feature called Viewpoints - all the users can submit 1-minute-long video-comments on certain topics and then other users can rate the comments or post their own 1 minute-long video-comments. The most relative video-comments are shown on Current TV channel. Indeed, a new and frash way to browse news.

Mobile TV

Mobile media will be the next big hype after the social revolution in the web. As I mentioned in my last article (Mobile Revolution), mobile services have started to develop fast and everyone wants to be mobile. Partly it’s because the new technologies enable to create quite complex services and nearly half of the world’s population is connected via mobile devices. So, what about watching your favourite movie from a mobile? Ofcourse it’s not the same as doing it in the cinema while eating pop-corn, but in some cases the mobile TV will certainly rock the market. For example, watching news and some short programmes would be quite well followed from mobile devices. Still, Mobile TV is making it’s first steps and not reachable for everyone.

Mobile TV could be successful if the companies could agree on the revenue model and common standards. At the moment you pay for mobile TV according to the megabytes you download, but it would be much more reasonable to pay for certain shows and programmes. It would make the pricing also more clear to customers.

Mobile TV requires much more resources to build a stable network as building a traditional TV network. One possibility would be to use DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld). It enables to build networks similar to classical TV - there will be one neutral operator that operates the mobile TV network. The network will be used by (mobile) companies who could publish their channels. In total, there can be up to 40 different channels in one network - some of them can be paid and some will be opened for everyone (like the national channels in TV).

Conclusion

TV is a huge business and everyone wants to take it’s share. Nowadays it’s not only the business of broadcasters, but also the software and mobile companies are keeping their hands busy creating new and interesting TV-applications.

In order to stay popular, TV has to change it’s structure and gain the features the all-powerful internet has. Nobody’s interested in the static TV anymore - while watching a movie that was directed by Steven Spielberg, I’d like to get all the information about the movie and the producer, other movies directed by him, ratings, reviews and user-comments of the movie. It all should be online and done in one interface.