Apple did its thing today. I think the big news today is not what they’ve released, it’s that they’ve decided they’re going to move toward something that could be Big.
Any good science fiction knows that in the future we’ll be connected to a sleeker, speedier version of the internet where all content is available instantly. Three things are stopping that from being a reality right now. One, download speeds aren’t fast enough. You can watch a 3-minute movie trailer with only a few seconds’ delay in buffering time, but internet media isn’t ready for true channel-surfing. Two, wireless stuff. Eventually I want to be able to take any portable device (laptop, cell phone, PADD, etc.) anywhere and have the same instant fast access I would at home. City-wide wireless might be the way to do this, but all the better if it can be the same network that my cellphone uses. Three, there has to be a distribution channel.
The first two things, bandwidth and ease-of-access, will happen with time, because that’s the sort of thing that technology likes to do. The third, a good distribution channel, won’t happen until someone decides to build one. I’m pretty confident in saying that it won’t ever be a content provider, because they’re too worried about their own interests to play well with others, and no global entertainment network would be worth subscribing to if it only got one channel. With the iTunes Music Store, Apple showed that internet distribution works fine for music, and it seems like they’re extending this to video. Steve Jobs was able to use his Pixar-Disney connections to get ABC to sign on first, but there’s no real reason for other networks not to jump on board as well.
So assume that Apple succeeds and lots of networks jump onboard. Being able to grab one TV show at a time isn’t enough1. What I picture is a super TiVo, where every episode of every show and every movie ever made is available for near-instant viewing. You’d subscribe to a show, and whenever the network aired it you’d have it downloaded to your machine, ready to watch. If you wanted to watch and episode from last season, you could buy it for two bucks. Same for movies, at maybe $15/download, and of course you’d get to keep them and burn them to DVDs. If you wanted a nicer copy with special features you could buy the retail DVD, just like you can now.
I ramble, but the point is that very little of this is unattainable right now, except that no one’s bothered to do it because they either haven’t thought of it (which I doubt), they don’t have the money to do it (which I also doubt), or they can’t secure the rights to it. The reason they can’t get the rights is, of course, that the idiots who own the rights haven’t had the sense beaten into them that it’s in their best interest. Eighty percent of the iTunes Music Store catalogue sells at leasts once every month. There’s no chance whatsoever that many of those songs would have sold in a record store. Lost last month featured a Mama Cass song that I then bought from Apple. Would I have bought that CD in a store? Not a chance. But making it instantly available and fairly affordable meant that someone got some money for it.
Of course, the consequence of my utopian wishfullness will be some major business changes. People would be less likely to buy back-episodes of TV shows that are in current syndication (but then, the Seinfeld DVDs didn’t exactly rot on the shelves). Music and video stores would take a hit. Record and DVD makers would have to lower prices or offer more to get people to buy the hard copies. Video rentals would suffer some, but there are still lots of movies that I rent but wouldn’t buy, even if I could do so with one click.
Is Apple going to usher in a grand global entertainment network where the work of every artist is available instantaneously? That’s thinking a bit big, but who else is going to do it? Otherwise we’re stuck where we are because Fox won’t talk to Sony, even while both complain that their revenues are shrinking and can’t see why.
- Of course, the question is, who exactly wants to watch TV shows on their computers, or even on their iPods? I’ve long-argued that people only think they want to, because they look at a TV, look at a comptuer, notice that they both have screens on them, and think that they should be able to watch movies and TV on their computers. But there’s a big barrier there, and that’s furniture. When you’re typing at your computer, you want to be at a desk, sitting in a chair maybe a foot or two from your moniter (or in the case of a laptop, maybe lying in bed with it on your lap). When you’re watching TV, you want to be on a couch sitting 6-10 feet away. If you wanted a computer to do both, you’d have to set up couches opposite desks in living rooms. You’d have to force people to stop watching TV whenever you wanted to get some work done, play a game, or check your email. If you’re the only one home, you could keep working and watch TV in a window, but that doesn’t work if other people want to watch, too. So there’s a feng shui issue going on there, but if we step beyond that, I think there’s huge merit to having TV and movies available as downloadable content. Your TV could, for example, become just a moniter that has the ability to connect to your computer and display any content saved onto the hard drive, auto-detection like Bonjour doing all the configuration work for you. ↩ ↩