Web TV / IPTV / DTV

It seems we are now a Terabyte household....more than 1,000 GB of storage on the various PC's, external storage disks etc on the home network plus the DVR.

So, what does that mean?

A Terabyte stores very approximately (for comparison purposes)

- 1 million novels (c 1 MB / book)

- 1 million fairly high resolution photos ( c 1 MB/photo) - so a picture is worth about a hundred thousand words.

- About 4-6 years of fairly high quality IP voice conversation (audio quality that is, not content) - so assuming you chatter for about 6 minutes every waking hour of your life on average that's nearly everything you have ever said, and the replies you got. Hours of fun for the whole family.....

- About 250,000 pop songs of c 4 MB each at fairly standard mp3 quality- thats over 4 years of continuous (24x7x365) pop music - without the DJ drivel (see above for that...)

- For the truly sad, 40,000 hours of Mobile size movies (thats about 27,000 movies), or about 3,000 movies for a Nintendo DS or PDA.

- About 1,000 hours of VHS quality video (c 600 movies), or 200 hours of good DVD quality video at c 5 GB/ hour (c 120 movies).

- At VHS quality thats 120,000 30 sec pre-roll Ads....why have prisons when you could sentence felons to hours of Ad watching?

- A mere one third to one fifth of that for HDTV video movie - so only about 30 movies for that supercinema the basement has been converted to - choices eh?

But at the price of Terabits these days, you will so do all the above and then more for a few thousand bucks ( less than 50p ($1) per Gb, ie about £500 / $ 1,000 all in per Terabit). Two years ago the price was double that.

However, sorting out the metadata and search for all that will be quite a challenge...maybe in a few years Googe's video search (article here) will be localised for every Teraformed home??

How long before the Ten Terabyte Household is common? The Hundred? What will we do with it?

Looking at a representative sample of One (me), we were a 10 MB Household 20 years ago, a 10GB household 10 years ago - and we are now only a 1 Terabyte Household, so clearly 10 Terabytes is imminent.

As to what to do with it....thats about the length of my life on low res CCTV footage, so maybe we will all have P2P 24x7 "this is your life" by then? Or all of Paris Hilton's life? Or maybe life itself will be one big Big Brother.

Oh Goody.....

First thing this morning(1) I see another "bog off to the back of the beta queue" email from TVP(2) / Joost (3), and the good news that it has a competitor in Babelgum ( good review of this on GigaOm). All my PR, VC, Analyst and Media friends have Joost invites - we just do this stuff for a living, so what would we know - or is that why we haven't seen an invite?

(Joost's DRM is unmentioned by nearly all of the media reviews for example - only the Register's review of Joost makes an aside to its use of its own DRM - now that could be very important in its take-up vs. clear-content plays, or in a DRM-draconia bake-off)

The thing is, putting Web TV on a Social Net based broadband service is fairly standard stuff now. Yes, you can tweak the user interface look and feel - (a good, fast user interface is critical, the trials we did at BT 10 years ago showed that) - but so can everyone else, and fairly quickly. And everyone is using targeted advertising as the way to make money - so much so that I wonder whether its time to go contrarian and look at ploughing the subscription furrow, as the Web-TV-TiVo is sure to emerge. But, at the end of the day its all about content. And that means things like DRM approaches start to become important, owning an end-to-end value chain like iTunes will be far harder in the Web TV world.

In an earlier post I referred to Porn driving adoption in previous new Media services...I wonder if Web TV will go that way...in which case I fancy an Italian outfit's chances, or maybe the dark horse here is actually a video Eroshare....(4)

As an aside to the content context, I don't know which is more intriguing in Web TV stuff right now - the object lessons in alpha PR beta-hyping or the technologies themselves.....can't be Edelman doing Joost's PR I assume ?

There are of course the inevitable doomsayers who believe that p2pTV won't work (contention, limited bandwidth, ISP limits to capacity etc) - there is a sanguine article by mega-uber blogger James Enck over here on this issue.

Haven't had the same beta issues with TIOTI et al by the way....oh, and could you also give an invite to these guys while you're at it.

Postscript - saw this article on Wired about Joost, most detail I've seen to date.

1. Been away for 2 days you see.....and OK, not quite first thing
2. The Venice Project
3. Joost is a Dutch / South African good ole boy's name...Joost van der Westhuizen, the Springbok rugby player for example. Seems kinda like calling your service Mike, or Bobby - or Robrt if its Web 2.0....(or Randy, if its a Porn TV service....). Maybe the BBC online WebTV service should change its name to Auntie after all?
4. The medium is the massage after all

There is a very good article over here on GigaOm outlining a lot of what is under the bonnet of the Venice Project.

My reservation about TVP is not what it is, but what it is doing. As Om notes in his interview with (CTO / CEO?) Fredrik de Wahl:

He points out that the system is built for content owners to not only expand online, but also retain their branding, and monetize that content as well.

He argues that ...since the company will be able to offer global-sized audiences to the professional content creators, TVP will attract more and more content. Of course everyone is trying to do exactly that, including a Google-gobbled YouTube8 and well-funded start-ups such as Brightcove9!

But de Wahl argues that the Venice Project platform can deliver content geo-targeting, and more-focused advertising. “Anyone, even a small professional producer of content can instantly go public,” he says, and just for effect says, “NBC can create 500 niche channels.”

Now these guys do have a history of skinning cats better than competitors (after all, p2p music and VoIP were hardly bleeding edge when they got into it, but they did it darned well) - but in this case, as Om notes, it is a very crowded space already.

The Venice Argument, as I understand it, is that its much better targeting and measurement capability will make it more desirable to advertisers than broadcast or other competing Web TV plays. This may be true - but, there is probably a "good enough" that broadcasters can hang on to for quite a while.

And, as opposed to Music and Telephony, a lot of TV content is already free to air, so will the consumer motivation to adopt be as strong?.

This week is CES, and a slew of electronic gizmos and gewgaws are being hawked to the general consumerati, including a whole lot of stuff around the Internet based TV media arena. Having read some of the breathless commentary over the last few days, it seemed that a timely bit of history would not go amiss. Those who do not recall the past.....

Firstly, Quality of Content vs Quality of Picture

Recall when satellite TV first came into the UK. The picture quality was a little better than you got out of a VHS recorder, compared to the much higher quality of PAL TV. (US based NTSC-watching readers may not have seen much of a difference However, the customers went for the new services like there was no tomorrow. The content was novel for the UK mass market, and consumers lapped it up. Picture quality was....well, "good enough" for the purposes of watching this content. A similar point can be made for MP3 vs higher fidelity digital music, as Clay Shirky does here.

Second - Quality of Content vs Quantity of Consumers

There is a corollary to the above point - no one could sensibly claim that the quality of the satellite TV content was better than what the UK already had on offer. In fact, much of it was poorer on every qualitative scale you can imagine except one - mass market appeal. Dumbed down and spiced up, it was the way forward and raced up the viewing figures - there was no going back, and Sky was the limit.

Third - Its not the Technology....

From VHS through to iTunes. it is seldom the best technology that wins - it is the best overall business system, the approach that makes it easiest to connect good (see above for what is meant by "good") content to customers easily and conveniently. I am amazed (and saddened) by this slew of point solution devices coming out that do (badly and with proprietary models) what one can do with a PC, a WiFi and a TV fairly easily and extremely flexibly. The only hope I see is that there is such profusion confusion that people will put off purchase and thus force a number of "de facto" standards to emerge, as has happened frequently in the past - mass customers like mass standards.

Anyway, thus armoured with the past, some thoughts on all the hoopla of the present Future:

(i) All those Web TV / IPTV plays emerging - the main thing about GooTube is not that its TV on a PC, its that it doesn't serve standard TV content. Business plays that serve the same old same old over the Internet are really in the "why?" category. No doubt there is some market for watching TV over PC, but can one really believe that Ad revenue will phase-shift just to serve the same basic content to a more fragmented audience? To succeed there will have to be significant differentiation over "good enoughs".

(ii) HDTV - what does it offer over todays' "Good Enoughs" technologies - and at what price? Given the same content base, the higher quality device does not necessarily win if the overall business system offers no significant benefits. Imho, for HDTV to really take off the overall experience has to be markedly better than is realistic today, especially at current prices. Mark Cuban disagrees, arguing that the networks aren't making the benefits of HDTV clear enough, but I think his comments prove my point

(iii) The plethora of devices serving old media onto new (mainly wi fi) channels - get a standard! So many of the solutions want to file / organise / encrypt / store / play / move your standard data in non standard, unshareable ways.

(iv) Software vs Tins - The big difference between the Broadband media and previous generations is that the software supply chain is inherently more efficient than tins. Expect quite an interesting battle between (free, downloadable and slightly harder to configure) software vs (more costly, proprietary yet easy to plug in) consumer devices over the next year or so.

At Broadsight we have been designing, building and running various interactive, online media rigs for 2 years now - it really is not hard to connect a broadband PC to a TV and configure it via fairly basic software to do all sorts of things in an integrated manner.