The future of television

It has long been a contention of mine that the future of television is that there is no future in television. While I am sure the television companies will still be in the business of making programs as we know them the present system of broadcasting will sooner or later become obsolete. What I have seen in the last couple days does not in any way change my mind.

I was an early subscriber to Sky television mainly due to the small amount of broadcast TV I watched and the large amount of videos I was renting. Working shifts went some way to making the decision to move to Sky as I could not follow series based shows and I had zero interest in variety entertainment or game shows. Sky offered me movies and documentaries 24/7, which meant the box in the corner was of use to me although I still had to record a lot of the films I wanted to see to VHS tape to watch on my days off. My children loved it with cartoons all day there was always one or more of them watching something or other. Eventually I even subscribed to the sports channels when Sky was showing the Ryder Cup and I occasionally watch golf or motor sports, but have no interest in an other sport what so ever.

Things moved on and I obtained a top of the range satellite receiver with built in surround sound. I was therefore seriously annoyed when Sky moved from analogue to digital and I had to use the standard box and route the sound through my stereo system, which had previously been in another room and use the auxiliary connections used to connect another piece of equipment. Eventually I replaced the ageing and ailing VHS recorder with a DVD recorder, which worked well for a while but was fiddly to set up. After about 18 months I fell upon a DVD/hard drive combo at a silly price and started to make good use of that and I was able for the first time able to follow series with some form of reliability.

It was unfortunate that my TV set decided to detonate at around the time flat screens started to appear. Flat screens were still very expensive and so I replaced it with the largest CRT I could find. It is still not very old and probably has at least another ten years of service left in it. So when we made the decision to go for Sky Plus at the end of 2008 we did not go down the high resolution route. Sky Plus has been a revolution in my TV watching. The ease at which I can record series being the biggest advantage. The disadvantages are firstly I am wasting more time than ever watching TV and secondly the hard drive in the Sky Plus is no where near big enough for the requirements of a family of seven. It has though been a step change in the right direction and I for the first time think I am getting value for money for my subscription.

Sky player has been available on line for some time but I only just upgraded to a PC capable of using it. I must say I was sceptical as to how it would work. My Internet connection is poor at best and YouTube videos always seemed choppy before but my Window 7 machine seems to handle them much better. Even so I was amazed when I watched some Sky content in full screen high resolution without any choppiness at all. BBC iPlayer shows occasional choppiness but is almost always watchable and I have occasionally used it to catch up on something were I missed the first episode or something. The quality does not seem to live up to that of Sky Player however. The latest edition to the watching TV on line is See-Saw which has content from BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5. See-Saw has a slight advantage over the previous two I mentioned as the content is not just there for a week and then gone. One series I noticed has 39 episodes you can watch. There are of course other video on demand set ups on the net some of which are legitimate and others illegal. Hulla for example is not available in the UK (unless you sneak in via a US proxy) and is presently jumping through legal hoops to get Hulu UK up and running.

The future of television as I see it is video on demand. I suspect the first thing we will see is a set top box with built in Wi-Fi and eventually every TV will come with some form PC built in. This will in time change both the way we watch TV and the way we surf the net. I have felt that this was the way forward since I bought my first Commodore 64 computer and in some ways it surprises me that industry has take so long to catch on. The technology needed to create the infrastructure has perhaps been a stumbling block, but that is no longer the case. I am pleased to see that others have for sometime at least been thinking along similar lines. Project Canvas looks like it could be the first stumbling step towards turning off the broadcast transmitters and delivering us just the content we want. Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform. Initially content will be streamed to a set top box (similar to that used by digital Freeview viewers) via the Internet. More information on Project Canvas can be found here.

The biggest stumbling block to success is the UK's Internet infrastructure, which probably would not cope under the stress of millions of people downloading program content 24 hours a day. Even if they laid fibre optic cables to every home the Internet service providers servers would be under the sort of pressure that is only seen now during a DOS (denial of service) attack. The truth of the matter is that take up of such services will be slow and both terrestrial and satellite broadcasting will be with us for some time. What does remain to be seen is if Project Canvas gets off the ground how soon Sky and others get on board? Some people will suggest that Virgin is doing video on demand already and in areas with cable that is true, but even with Virgin the vast majority of content is 'broadcast' and in the future the only area I can see that true broadcast has a place is that of news.

I sincerely look forward to the day when I can turn on the TV and not see garbage like games shows or soaps even for a second as I change channels, just menus of what I might care to watch. No more tuning in to the third episode of a show and thinking that it seems interesting but does not quite make sense, and hoping they repeat it sometime. Just thinking about it, maybe some people like to be confused as to what their entertainment is all about or why did anyone watch Lost?

Australians Anonymous

How ludicrous is it that Australia should be introducing net filters? The country the brought us Ned Kelly and Crocodile Dundee has decided that its citizens are not capable of making their own minds up on moral issues such as whether it is right to watch old episodes of Neighbours on YouTube or if they should copy a dodgy copy of a Rolf Harris album on to their MP3 player or not. I would not be surprised if the UK government wanted to play Aunty in this way but those big tough beer swilling Aussies, no way! Just because they have a state named Victoria does not mean they need to act like Victorians.

The Australian government says the filters are being put in place to stop pornographic and criminal sites. They have promised an internet filter that would block a list of banned websites, including those containing child abuse material. As anyone who has been involved with web filters knows all they do is generate false positives and slow networks to a crawl. Google and Yahoo have joined Australian organisations calling for a "rethink" of the country's controversial internet filter plans. The Australian Library and Information Association's (ALIA) Executive Director Sue Hutley said that the current filter proposals would create a "false sense of security" for Australian web users. Dealing with sites such as YouTube would cause additional load on the filtering infrastructure cause massive performance bottlenecks.

On 10 and 11 February an activist group called Anonymous attacked several official Australian government websites in protest, taking them offline for short periods of time and there is evidence that the attacks will continue and grow more frequent. The method they are using is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). A man claiming to be a representative of the group said that around 500 people were involved in the attack. Support for the action appears to be growing from comments on social networking site such as Facebook and comments on Twitter.

Follow the White Rabbit

I have always loved Lewis Carroll's books and poems, but felt Disney's treatment of Alice in Wonderland, while being suitably wonderful at the time did not completely catch the surreal madness and magic that the books conjured up in my imagination. Hopefully Tim Burton's version due out on 5th March in the UK will go some way to capturing that feeling, although to be honest it looks more than a little scary to me. Many people these days suspect Mr Carroll was smoking something illegal when he wrote the books and from what I have seen of the trailer I have to ask if Tim Burton was also partaking of the same substance. Without firm evidence I will refrain from judging and just say that I think this is the film I have been waiting for someone to make since I played American McGee's Alice, a third person PC video game released in 2000.

Rumours abound that cinemas in the UK may boycott the film entirely due to Disney wanting to release the DVD version only twelve weeks after it is shown at the cinema Around 85% of Dutch cinemas have already refused to show it in the Netherlands. I sincerely hope that does not happen here as part of the experience, of what is already being called Tim Burton's Masterpiece, is that it is in 3D. Hopefully if it lives up to the hype it will be one of those films where after seeing it on the big screen you need to buy the DVD just to have a piece of it and maybe that is why Disney wants to get it in the shops so quickly.

Feed your head and get ready to follow the White Rabbit.