How
The Television Will Be Revolutionized:
The Exciting Future of the iPad, Internet TV, and Web 3.0
©
2010 by John M. Smart,
President, Acceleration Studies
Foundation
(This article may be
excerpted or reproduced in its entirety for noncommercial purposes.)
[Permalink:
http://accelerating.org/articles/televisionwillberevolutionized.html]
Below
is a summary of my talk on Internet TV at TEDx
Del Mar, June 2, 2010.
For more, see my:
• 20 min video: The
Television Will Be Revolutionized, TEDx Del Mar, 2010.
• 4-page trade article,
Tomorrow's
Interactive Television, The Futurist,
Nov-Dec 2010
• 8-page
original article, How
The Television Will be Revolutionized, 2010.
• 40-page
supplement, How
The Television Will be Revolutionized, 2010.
Trends,
issues, opportunities, and challenges related to the emergence of
internet television, a truly amazing and
empowering global social development we can expect, in countries with
real broadband, within the next decade.
The internet is about to swallow the television, a development that will change the nature of global media. Soon hundreds of thousands, and eventually hundreds of millions of viewers around the world will be on a path back from being passive couch potatoes into actively engaged citizens again, the way we were before mass media radio and then television arrived in our homes in the 1920’s, nearly a century ago. Here in the early days of YouTube, BitTorrent, Boxee, Mac Mini media centers, Hulu, Google TV, and the iPad, we are on the edge of moving from Web 2.0, the Read/Write and Social Web, to Web 3.0, the Metaverse (MetaverseReoadmap.org), a web development layer that includes TV-quality video, 3D virtual and mirror worlds, augmented reality, and pervasive human-constructed semantic metadata, sensors, and 100Mbps+ wired and wireless broadband. Of all of these, the emergence of Web 3.0 may be defined most clearly by the mass diffusion of NTSC-or-better quality open video to our TVs, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, video that is based on open source and royalty free standards and technology, and is freely or cheaply sharable, mixable, and improvable, under simple licensing structures. Web 3.0 (true Internet TV) will eventually be followed by Web 4.0 (the Semantic Web), perhaps post 2020, where search, data models, and apps are reorganized around statistical, machine-constructed semantic tags and algorithms (think of Watson, IBM's machine learning aided search platform), driven by the broad collective use of conversational interfaces. But the open video web seems likely to be the star of the 2010’s, the next stage of web development and the big media story of this decade.
FCC Chairman Newton Minow called TV a “vast
wasteland” in 1961, and this comment is nearly as accurate today.
But very soon, open source and open standards internet media centers and
TVs, interfaced with wafer-thin handheld tablet remotes that look like
Apple’s iPad but that run the open Android
OS, will allow us to control and watch tens of thousands of web-based
video channels on our home TVs and mobile devices. Though some telcos,
digital media companies their major advertisers will try to delay this,
Web 3.0 will soon deliver a universe of specialty video content that we
can easily rate, share, group watch, edit, mash up, and pay for in disaggregated
ways, as we desire, giving quality a financial incentive to rise to the
top, and greatly expanding diversity for small audiences. We'll be able
to do not just broadcasting but narrowcasting, and create astounding
new competitive and cooperative opportunities for video production and
marketing.
Industry consortiums like the "Open" IPTV Forum, formed by big TV makers and telcos in March 2007, tell us they are hard at work developing standards for interactive, personalized internet television services. But all they've done in three years is create a web platform to deliver more highly DRM-protected content. They don't empower users or democratize content production, rating, sharing, or editing. Ignore this group and other equally misnamed ventures, like the set-top box maker "Open TV". In their vision of the future quality video is not increasingly ubiquitous, open, and free, but a scarce resource monetized by the few, and advertisements in our personal space remain out of our control. It's time for a change.
Look
instead to groups like the Open
Video Alliance, who are advancing open source, royalty free standards
and technology for web video. This movement is funded by companies whose
business models revolve around openness, like Google
and others, and is presently overseen by independent, user-centric nonprofit
foundations, like Mozilla
and Creative Commons. The
new WebM open video format
and free VP8 video compression
technology license released last month by Google, Mozilla, and Opera for
HTML5 video is
a great example of an open video advance. We will need many more such
advances in coming years to win this battle, and to gain control, for
the first time, of the television and advertising content that streams
into our homes, offices, and portable devices.
Once
the appropriate Open Video Markup Language (OVML) standards have been
developed by a range of civic-minded nonprofit standards organizations
and employed on these new open internet
television devices, we’ll be able to rate and filter all the
video we receive, and share, edit, and remix all the video that is creative
commons licensed. These standards must also aid in indexing and marketizing
copyrighted video content that has simple, reasonable, and user-centric
royalties, licenses, and DRM attached, in a way that helps democratize,
rather than monopolize content production. We’ll be able to directly
and automatically send micropayments
to channel aggregators and providers of content, and these providers will
make additional money from unobtrusive ads on their web pages, like Google's
Adsense. Every video
channel producer will have the option to pay small sharing fees, editing
fees and remix fees, a fraction of the video licensing fee,
at first to independent content producers, and eventually to Big Studios,
the way we can now pay a $0.30 sharing fee per song to download DRM-free
music on iTunes
from the Big Studios today. These standards will allow us to pay independent
editors and producers small fees to watch improved (and often
mercifully shorter) versions of movies with better, non-Hollywood beginnings,
middles, or endings, to support increasingly factual, community-edited
documentaries, and to see “the best” 20 minutes of all kinds
of video, with our favorite channel producer’s comments added. We
will also be able to watch our favorite NGO’s rating and commentary
on every political or business video program that we care about, in streaming
captions or sidebars, just as we can with our better sports programs today.
Advertising
on Web 3.0 won’t go away, it will just get much more personalized
and much less obtrusive. These two advertising trends, personalization
and unobtrusivenesss, are inevitable in all future media, and
the most foresighted advertisers are already embracing them, not fighting
them. Small, lean, Web 3.0 television channel producers will allow us
to mute, half mute, or caption all TV commercials during the breaks, and
we can like, dislike, or speak back to the companies behind each advertisement
by email, as the commercial is playing. We’ll never have to see
or hear a commercial from any company, product, or politician that we
don’t want to see or hear, ever again, and we can tell them why,
and read the anonymized feedback of others who talk back to their TVs
in this way. The advertising rates for these less obtrusive, fully personalized
commercials will be far less than those in monopolistic corporate media
today, at least at first, but more valuable, as the ads will now go only
to those who want them, in the way they want them. This ad revenue stream
will still support millions of new specialty video news, education,
and entertainment content providers. We’ll be able to watch
video with our friends, see what they are watching in realtime, and click
links within or on the side of our video to find other video, audio, or
text on related ideas, as or after we view. We will have our best
hour or two of the day's specialty video content waiting to watch
when we get home, and we will know which of our friends also agree with
our opinions on video content, and make new friends as we view.
Considering
these benefits, we can tentatively imagine that the Web 3.0 video universe
will be a great emancipator for all who choose to use it. Web 3.0 is our
Declaration of Independence from almost a century of intrusive, mind-numbing,
mass market TV programming and ads. We need a media that educates us,
enlightens us, empowers and motivates us to take action. We need a media
that doesn’t seek to endlessly addict or distract us as its core
business model, but rather that can be customized to our needs, not the
needs of the corporations. There will be many new forms of fun and new
potentials for addiction and insulation in Web 3.0, but if we control
the choices, on the whole this will make us more self-responsible
and actualized. We need a media that can perpetually remind us that we
are the ones who can fix our problems, that we ultimately control our
countries, that we deserve representation, transparency, accountability,
democracy, innovation, and sustainability.
We
can use this greatly improved media to help us address some of our more
difficult political and economic challenges as well. Over the last 60
years, America's rich-poor
divide has doubled more than twice. Today, the top 0.1% or
300,000 people, earn as much as the bottom 20%, or 60 million
people, and we've fallen from green to blue to purple in the U.N.'s GINI
coefficient map at right. As economic and political elites have risen
and the middle class has hollowed out, our public educational systems
have declined in standards and competitiveness, our manufacturing base
has been sold out from under us, and democracy and freedom are in decline.
The traditional American dream of middle class advancement and opportunity
has never been under greater threat. But the web is about to get a lot
more intelligent and personalized. As we increasingly use it to advise
our consumption, our voices, and our votes, I am convinced that will be
the critical difference that restores the balance.
Some big U.S. media companies and their shills will try to distract us from the early versions of these open source devices, and will keep trying to sell us their pretty but vacuous walled gardens, but we will soon have a choice. The more we choose to watch, rate, and share on open Web 3.0 media devices, the more we return to the old ways of learning, thinking and discussing our media with online friends, rather than being passively entertained, the cheaper, more personalized, and more user-centric Old Media must become. They can only delay our victory, they cannot win.
The
powerful few who control politics, economics, and media
in this country are about to lose control of one of these tools—the
corporate media cartel. Reforming the media will help us reform these
other pillars of society in turn. 21st century Americans will soon be
able to get their education not from our failed schools, but directly
from each other, over a video enabled and increasingly intelligent web.
This is nothing less than a revolution, and we can all play our part in it by asking “Where’s the Choice?,” by saying, like Howard Beale in Network, 1976, “We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,” by cancelling our cable programming until it plays by our rules, by choosing to use Web 3.0, and by opening our eyes.
For more, read my 48-page whitepaper, How The Television Will be Revolutionized: The Future of the iPad, Internet TV, and Web 3.0 (The Metaverse), John Smart, 2010. An overview of trends and issues related to the emergence of internet television and Web 3.0.
For excellent earlier work, read IPTV: The Open Fourth Platform, Alex Cameron, The Register, 5 May 2006
“We need to take the openness of the internet and merge it intelligently with the premium content world of pay TV in a way that respects the needs and vested interests of the big brands but is a new type of service that is open to all. The differentiator for IPTV needs to be that it is an open platform that anyone can innovate around. That’s a small statement in words, but it has enormous implications when you think it through. There has never been a TV network in existence that has been open, and if we left it to the corporate fat cats, ever would be. There is no TV platform on the market anywhere in the world that could ever offer the same, or would ever dare.”
Feedback? Edits/changes? Reach me at johnsmart{at}accelerating{dot}org.