The other day on the Darknet blog I commented about Steve Levy’s piece in Newsweek about the future of television, something I go into in great deal in Darknet. I call it Edge TV rather than IPTV (which refers to the distribution mechanism), on-demand TV (which refers to consumers’ behavior) or file-serve television (the techie name for it), because Edge TV refers to the true revolutionary change in our video diet: this is television being created at the edges.
From the book:
The idea behind Edge TV is disarmingly simple: hit a button on your remote and summon up almost any TV show or film [or freely shareable amateur video], past or present. …
Edge TV relies not on their machines but on ours. Instead of a modest number of central storage bins owned by cable companies, you’d have a massively dispersed system of hundreds of thousands or millions of devices in users’ homes. Such a widely distributed network offers not just the ability to store more data but also solves the storage limitations and network bandwidth choke point of centralized computers. Thus millions of hours of video could be stored and shared, with some of it arriving instantaneously and some of it drip-loaded over time. In such a decentralized system, high-demand material like just-aired prime-time dramas and new hit movies would move out onto many thousands of hard drives, while low-demand fare like My Mother the Car would presumably be found on only a few dozen hard drives. The marketplace would decide. Edge TV would differ from the model being devised by Hollywood and the cable companies in this important way: shows would not be streamed and then vanish. Instead, they would be stored permanently on our home devices.
Like the Internet itself, the greatest appeal of Edge TV is its democratic, freewheeling nature. Anyone, from a homeowner to a Hollywood studio, could store video on a digital disc and deliver it on demand. (This is why I think Edge TV is a better name. The term file-serve television refers only to the mode of distribution, while Edge TV suggests a change in the underlying nature of the programming itself—stuff we can access from the edges of the network.)
Incidentally, I didn’t notice this from Steve’s piece on the website, but in the print magazine it was far more glaring: That image of Chris Matthews? The idea that people will want to watch Hardball on their Nokia handhelds? Laughable.
Hard to tell if that image was an ironic, tongue-in-cheek selection (I’m guessing not). Edge TV will be the antithesis of Chris Matthews/big media’s top-down approach. We’ll see Letterman’s monologues and top 10 lists on there, and some other interesting fare from big media, but the vast majority of it will be our media.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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