Don't offer me advice, give me money - Spanish proverb
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No one wants Internet telly
NOBODY WANTS interactive Internet telly if consumer behaviour research is anything to go by, despite the home entertainment hardware industry pushing ever more features.
According to figures from the UK's Broadcasters Audience Research Board, despite 94 per cent of households having digital telly and 44 per cent having a clever set-top box from the likes of Murdoch's Sky and Branson's Virgin Media, only seven per cent of all television viewing involves on-demand or time-shifting.
Worse still, online viewing of TV programmes today only increases from one per cent of all viewing to a whopping two per cent when the habits of the Internet generation, 15 to 35 year olds, are included. There was no data on how much of that two per cent was viewing illegally downloaded programmes.
The sobering figures were given by worldwide ad agency WPP Corporation CEO Sir Martin Sorrell at Intel's 30 June future of TV event. At the event the chip manufacturer described a telly-utopia of huge flat-screens providing 3D programme menus, gesture recognition for time-shifting control and even spoken commands such as, "find me a comedy", or probably more likely, "for God's sake is there anything worth watching on?"
Project Canvas is the great white hope of the e-telly evangelists and it is expected to appear in the first half of 2011. Canvas, likely to be called something else when it is launched commercially, will have better search capabilities and more channels than the BBC's Iplayer, including ITV and Channel 4.
Canvas will be used through a set-top box, not a desk or laptop computer, unlike Iplayer. Talk Talk has already announced that it will provide a 'free' Project Canvas set-top box with every broadband deal offer.
However the consumer research data shows a population that prefers to veg out on the couch and watch whatever the broadcasters dish out rather than find entertainment for themselves. And can the intelligent e-tellies of the future cope with the sort of loud verbalisation and violent gestures normally associated with watching the likes of the BBC's Question Time or an England football match? µ
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It's a classic case of paradigm shift. The old paradigm involves sitting on (in?) your sofa or easy chair, imbibing the beverages of your choices while shovelling junk food into your face, while watching more or less "whatever's on". True, the viewer has a degree of liberty, thanks to the remote: if ITV or BBC gets too sickening you can channel-hop to an Friends repeat on some obscure channel no one can remember. But the old paradigm is essentially passive, and many people like it for precisely that reason.
The new paradigm makes watching TV programs more like reading a book or listening to a CD: you pick the one you want, decide when to watch it, and stop whenever you like (whereas in the old paradigm viewing is typically ended by unconsciousness, optionally preceded by going to bed).
It's an appealing prospect: out of the dozens of channels and hundreds of programs ever day, you choose only the ones you really like and watch them as and when it suits you (taking a break for a meal or whatever if you like). Trouble is, it's not really like that. No one has yet devised a convenient automated means of being informed of only those programs you will find interesting, and as long as TV is paid for by advertising the providers will have a huge financial interest in viewers watching as much of their slop as possible.
Besides, with our present pathetically inadequate broadband provision, enough people watching the World Cup or a concert (streaming without using multicast) will reliably bring the network to its knees - frustrating those who rely on it to do work and other useful activities.
My 5 and 8 yr olds happily watch iplayer on the PS3 if they can't find anything on the TiVo. Give them a TV that can't time shift and they start asking for a DVD.
Perhaps the 15yr olds they asked were too busy texting to care what was on telly.
I want it. If you live in a rural area where you cannot receive cable or broadcast and only DSL (like much of the US), internet telly kicks ass. If you are cityfolk, you're probably too stupid to realize that there exists a world outside your own. As your title suggests.
When most broadband in the country can't even stream Youtube effectively why are they bothering.
That said, I threw my telly out around 5 years ago. Don't miss it.
Is it pretty? Sure. The hype, however, clearly exceeds the product. I own exactly 1 HD tv out of 6, and that TV is a Tube HD (yes, they made them, dates back to 2004). I have no urgency to move to a flat screen because most of the content I watch is not HD, and the content that I do see in HD is almost as heavily pixelized as Internet video. Try watching a football game (take your pick, international or American variety). Any time the camera moves, pixels galore. It's manageable on my tube TV since the Cathode Rays bleed ever so slightly the pixels together, but on my parents 55" LED LCD, it's horrible. That's on a multi-megabit data stream. Anything compressed further over the internet is not enjoyable.
As long as they refuse to have ordinary TV Channels in HiDef. it would be great to just 'download it'/'stream it' from the web.. as long as its not becoming choppy/laggy when streaming as it usually does :/
If avalibility to just click the web and get the fotball game in HD it would have been very nice.
was looking at a game at a friends place with a 46" LCD/LED TV and low def. is not a pretty picture anymore.