Perspective: TiVo and do-it-yourself television

The Lego School of Dramatic Arts is not too far away.

The proliferation of digital video recorders combined with the stunning popularity of online video has laid the basic foundation for the creation of a TV network that could, conceivably, compete with stations like MTV, Bravo or even CBS.

Here's how it will work. TiVo will cut deals with online video sites that will let those sites, for a fee or a chunk of ad dollars, deliver their videos to the TV screens of TiVo subscribers. Thus, consumers wouldn't have to hunch in front of their notebook to watch clips of baby wallabies or Afghani soldiers shooting grenades into lakes or teens wrestling in their backyard. They'd come straight to the TV.

Think of it. A whole network dedicated to classic films remade with Lego people, plastic dinosaurs and household appliances. You'd never leave home.

TiVo's like the Anna Nicole Smith of the tech world: always in the paper, but often for the wrong reason.

The momentum has already begun. This week, TiVo signed a deal with video software specialist Brightcove that essentially puts Web sites like Farmers' Almanac TV (motto: Live the Tradition) and Shipwreck Central on TV. CNET Networks (publisher of CNET News.com), has a similar deal with TiVo for video delivery. Kraft and Ford are delivering infomercials through TiVo.

Conversely, E! Networks has cut a deal to show YouTube clips on some shows. All that yammering from analysts about the future of IPTV, and it's already happening without much fanfare.

Perhaps the best part of what is going on is that it's being led by TiVo, a company lots of people seem to want to see fail. It's like the Anna Nicole Smith of the tech world: always in the paper, but often for the wrong reason. For years, news articles have predicted the impending demise of the company because of the rise of PCs that could record TV shows.

Similarly, satellite and cable companies threatened to put TiVo out of business with their own DVR and on-demand services. Stock analysts regularly predict they will be bought.

Then there's the fact that the company regularly loses money: TiVo lost $34.5 million in fiscal 2006. The one place the company has been successful financially recently is in court: It won a $73.9 million verdict against EchoStar in a patent infringement suit. Winning a patent suit, however, isn't a sure path to popularity: Instead, it brings out catcalls for reforming the judicial system.

Yet the company continues to plug along, gaining customers and establishing itself as a verb.

A network built on obscure and random clips would also allow America to reassert itself in a market it once dominated: pop culture. Things like bell bottoms and Rambo movies once set the global standard. Now, our lead has been eroded by India's Bollywood and Japan's anime industry. TiVo might encourage kids to get out of those after-school math and reading sessions at the Score center and start filming their friends having gladiator contests with shopping carts and other career-building activities.

Granted, creating a full-fledged TV network from Web clips will require clearing a few hurdles. First, cameras will have to improve. Luckily, companies such as Ambarella and Panasonic are going to help bring down the price of high-definition video cameras.

The economics of the entertainment and advertising industries will have to adjust, too. Big-name advertisers are going to be reluctant initially to plunk down money on My Dodge Charger or skateboarding shows. But ad spots and creating programming will be cheap: With 50 bucks, you can film a lot of shows for the BMX channel.

But ultimately the model will succeed because the public has discovered something that many suspected for years: With a little bit of enthusiasm and a few props, almost anyone can be a TV programmer.

Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.

More Perspectives

[Joe Blow]

And How Does Joe Six-Pack Find What He Wants to Watch from the Net ...

unless someone can figure out how to put a Google-ish interface on a TiVo box that can be easily and quickly operated via TiVo's standard remote control? No one is going to use the TiVo alphabet grid to create Wishlists that search the Internet for video clips, especially once they completely fill up even a several hundred GB hard drive in a day, or so (or new IPTV recordings are overwritten, almost as soon as they're completed, by the next Net clips). Remember, you can record many IPTV streams at once, to the limit of your broadband-width, but they're generally not "live", like traditional terrestrial/cable/satellite broadcasts, so you effectively have an almost unlimited number of IPTV "tuners". If the means of creating such searches is going to be via an intermediate home computer on the local network, it had better work a lot better than the sorry piece of junk code that allegedly moves recordings between computers and TiVos now (and that has to be bought, downloaded and installed, to add insult to injury). Just the necessity of such an intermediary application also significantly increases the friction in acquiring desireable video content from the Net, at least for anyone beyond the Early Adopters and Bleeding-Edgers (i.e., the general public, such as my brother-in-law, Joe Six-Pack).

Even if/when they become readily feasible from a user interface perspective, such searches would rely on the metadata text that describes IPTV video clips, which could be another big stumbling block. If whomever is generating these descriptions doesn't happen to use the same keywords and tricky phrases as users do, then those clips where there is a mismatch won't be found (although a Google-ish search engine might do better, due to phonetic recognition that works around misspellings to some degree, and synonym searching that can result in some better matching).

Until such problems are overcome, vacuum-cleaning the Net to fill the video diet of the general public is going to result in a lot of junk food that doesn't even taste very good.

All the Best,
Joe Blow

[Joe Blow]

And How Does Joe Six-Pack Find What He Wants to Watch from the Net ...

unless someone can figure out how to put a Google-ish interface on a TiVo box that can be easily and quickly operated via TiVo's standard remote control? No one is going to use the TiVo alphabet grid to create Wishlists that search the Internet for video clips, especially once they completely fill up even a several hundred GB hard drive in a day, or so (or new IPTV recordings are overwritten, almost as soon as they're completed, by the next Net clips). Remember, you can record many IPTV streams at once, to the limit of your broadband-width, but they're generally not "live", like traditional terrestrial/cable/satellite broadcasts, so you effectively have an almost unlimited number of IPTV "tuners". If the means of creating such searches is going to be via an intermediate home computer on the local network, it had better work a lot better than the sorry piece of junk code that allegedly moves recordings between computers and TiVos now (and that has to be bought, downloaded and installed, to add insult to injury). Just the necessity of such an intermediary application also significantly increases the friction in acquiring desireable video content from the Net, at least for anyone beyond the Early Adopters and Bleeding-Edgers (i.e., the general public, such as my brother-in-law, Joe Six-Pack).

Even if/when they become readily feasible from a user interface perspective, such searches would rely on the metadata text that describes IPTV video clips, which could be another big stumbling block. If whomever is generating these descriptions doesn't happen to use the same keywords and tricky phrases as users do, then those clips where there is a mismatch won't be found (although a Google-ish search engine might do better, due to phonetic recognition that works around misspellings to some degree, and synonym searching that can result in some better matching).

Until such problems are overcome, vacuum-cleaning the Net to fill the video diet of the general public is going to result in a lot of junk food that doesn't even taste very good.

All the Best,
Joe Blow