Hi,

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion, domestic Internet connections are getting faster and faster and home theatre PCs (HTPCs) / Internet-enabled DVRs are probably only a year or two away from becoming mainstream. What does this tell us about the future of TV?

To come at this from a different angle:

The web is now 17 years old (dating from Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the WWW in 1989) and it's already had a huge impact on the written press. Yet, when the WWW was developed, people were generally happy with the content they found in the traditional written media. In other words, the web wasn’t really satisfying a great desire yet it still had a huge impact (because it's free, easy to publish and fast). So, the web had a huge impact on the written media even though there wasn't a huge demand for a "new written media" when the web was developed.

Compare that with the situation we have today. Stop someone in the street and ask them what they think about broadcast TV and most of them will probably say it's crap (yet most people still watch 4 hours a TV a day here in the UK). Advertisers don't particularly love TV because it's untargeted, hard to measure and it's impossible to stop people hitting mute during the ad breaks. There's a real demand for "better TV", both from the viewers and from the advertisers. Technology is just about getting to the state where I could conceivable produce a small "TV show" off my own bat, upload it and lots of other people could watch that on their TVs. For free. In a perfectly respectable quality.

Even IF the content of broadcast TV was satisfactory, the distribution mechanism sucks. I have to sit through ads I don't care about and I have to watch content when broadcasters decide to broadcast it, not when I want to watch it (ok, VCRs and DVRs change the rules a bit but not that drastically).

Chances are, Google paid $1.65 billion for You Tube because they have a hunch that the web's impact on TV could be even greater than the web's impact on the written media.

OF course, the argument that "the web will give us better TV" makes one big assumption: that individuals and small organisations can produce better content than the current broadcasters. There's no doubt that some dude with a camcorder could never hope to pull off a drama with the pull off something like "Lost". But I think there's a really good possibility that individuals can make better news & comment programs. Personally, I used to love Radio4 (the UK's biggest "talk radio" channel). But now I get 99% of my "spoken word" content from podcasts - they're far more interesting to me. I foresee the same thing happening to my TV habits.

(Another assumption is that viewers will be motivated to go and search out good content on the Web rather than just slouch in front of the TV and watch whatever's on)

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I've been thinking about writing this post for a few days now but what finally persuaded me to do it was when I read a few comments saying that "Apple SHOULDN'T integrate Final Touch with FCP - these apps should remain separate". Sure, if you're working on big-budget projects then it makes sense to have different products for different departments. But that ignores one massive trend: that production teams are getting smaller. It's quite conceivable that in 5 year's time a lot of TV content will have been written, produced, researched, shot, edited, graded and uploaded by teams consisting of just a handful of people. This has several implications for the Adobes / Apples / Avids of this world: 1) The market for video editing apps will grow rapidly, 2) real-time editing and grading will become more essential because people might be knocking out productions as a side-line and wont have much time (much like people make podcasts today) and 3) integration is essential - your "basement TV producer" isn't going to want to learn 5 different applications just to cut together their 10-minute weekly political comment show. So, yes, Apple SHOULD integrate FT with FCP (of course, there's a whole other conversation about whether or not they will do it).

Sorry, this has been a long rant, but I think we're living in a very exciting time. As folks involved in "content production", we should be concerned about these trends so we can figure out how best to not get left behind.

Jack Kelly