US TV walled garden timed to fade to black in 3 years
01/08/2008 11:45:00 - by Andrew Beutmueller & Ian Scales
If the traditional TV and film industries are fretting today over how to maintain their 20th century business models as the digital tide creeps up the beach, they're going to be even more challenged in about 3 years' time when it's in full spate.
By then Web-based video sources will be shunting content onto recording devices, directly onto web-enabled TVs and even, apparently, onto games machines. Trying to enforce copyright by using the courts to stamp out filesharing will be an even more King Canute-style enterprise than it is today (see - It's about the e-conomy, stupid)
The deals which will bang those final nails into the broadcast coffin are being done today. For instance, web to snail-mail movie service Netflix, this week signed up with another leading CE equipment maker, LG, in order to channel its newly-downloadable online content to the company’s Blu-ray disc player. The recently-unveiled, web-enabled LG player is capable of streaming movies from Netflix web rental library to the TV.
Though Blu-ray equipped, which makes for good video quality (not something so far associated with the net) the box does not offer a wireless facility like most of the other players including the diminutive and practical Roku box that Netflix already offers on its website for US$99.
Netflix has consistently been at the head of the pack, talking up its 2008 net-to-TV plans since before January’s trend-setting Consumer Electronics show held each January inLas Vegas.
Netflix Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Reed Hastings, said in a statement “LG Electronics was the first of our technology partners to publicly embrace our strategy for getting the Internet to the TV, and is the first to introduce a Blu-ray player that will instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the TV."
Mind you, this is not just another product announcement, but another brick knocked out of the US cable and broadcast TV wall by the webertainment wrecking ball. According to a recent report from Insight Research president, Robert Rosenberg, the industry might survive another 36 months in its current unyielding form “as more and more video entertainment becomes accessible to these Internet-enabled entertainment gateway devices,” says Rosenberg.
“We are projecting that revenue from Internet video content and advertising will grow at a compounded rate of nearly 50 percent over the next five years as this market takes off,” he added.
Netflix is on a roll. It recently announced a signpost partnership with Microsoft to deliver content to Xbox-ers, so is not only well on the way to the Internet-to-TV nexus, but in incorporating a gaming console has found a way to appeal to the voracious 18 to 25 year old new media consumer group that is the sector’s future herd of cash cows.
Michael Wolf, Research Director at ABI research remarked on his blog this week that “its a good step. Of all the stream-to-TV services, the video game-centric ones are likely going to be the first to be widely used, perhaps even more so than Apple TV, which still has a very small installed base (likely well below 2 million at this point
web20.telecomtv.com |
