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?