I was surprised to read on today’s Silicon Alley Insider that Hulu is already offering next week’s season premiere of 30 Rock. This is a huge step for a major TV network after struggling for years — along with all the others — to figure out how to use the web to distribute their content without succumbing to pirates and P2P networks.
Back in September, Wired magazine wrote a great piece covering Hulu and how, against all odds, the online service has won the war against critics. Just two months later after its launch, Hulu had edged ahead of ESPN.com to become one of comScore’s top 10 US video sites.
iTunes is following a similar path, topping two hundred million TV downloads, and now offering HD versions of the shows as well.
But although the technology to consume Television via the web continues to evolve, there’s still a major hurdle to overcome. How do we consume that content on a regular TV?
Don’t get me wrong, it’d be great to watch that episode of “30 Rock” right now, in the office cubicle, or later at night by myself in my iMac, but –and this could be only me– I enjoy consuming TV in my bed with my wife and my dog, while eating a giant slice of Pizza (well, right now I’m on a diet, but you get the point).
Let me tell you a story. About four months ago I started reading wonderful reviews about this show “Mad Men“, but season one was already over, and season two was about to start. I figured I could maybe find it in iTunes, and see the whole season in a few days, to then consume season two in their regular schedule. I was pleased to find out iTunes had all season one episodes.
But then the issue became how to watch the shows with my wife. Until now we haven’t had a compelling reason to buy an AppleTV. We have two DVR’s at home (one of them is HD) and they work great. I decided to download the episodes on my old iBook, connect it to my TV and consume the whole season in the comfort of my bed (take that, Blockbuster!)
Unfortunately my iBook only has 256MB of RAM and the Mad Men episodes were in HD, so the video was buffering every 5 seconds and stuttered more than Porky Pig.
So our best solution was to sync the episodes to our iPod and, thus, we finally watched “Mad Men” in the tiniest screen known to man.
My friend Slade had a similar experience watching “Cloverfield” using his Playstation3. Jittery video with lots of buffering. He and her wife were fast asleep by the end of Act I.
Why, in this day and age, aren’t TV’s talking IP yet? I cancelled my Netflix subscription because I wanted to see the new releases as soon as they came out, but they were always back ordered in my queue. Walking to Blockbuster sucks. And the US Postal service shouldn’t be competition to Internet packets.
During last night’s earnings call, Steve Jobs admitted that “no one has succeeded yet at bridging your living room TV with the Internet — including Apple”. He calls the whole thing of connecting the web to your TV “a hobby in 2008 and it will still be a hobby in 2009″.
Obsessable talks about the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and how “it defines a standard for moving movies, photos, music and other media from device to device”. But although it sounds like a step in the right direction, I think people want simplicity, not acronyms. The moment you have to connect an XBOX 360 to a Windows Media Server, the whole thing gets too complicated for the majority of users.
Andrew Finkle wrote a great article of what a marriage of the web and TV could look like if Verizon proves what they said in an executive gathering back in September. Supposedly an update on their FIOS DVR’s could potentially transform them in digital media nodes:
The updated boxes will also automatically discover all connected devices (wired and wireless) and, as long as folder and file sharing is enabled on each PC, let users view photos and videos and listen to music
Which brings me to a confirmation of what I’m sure many people out there have been thinking for a long while. The marriage of Internet and TV will be paved by the Telcos (Time Warner, Verizon) and not by hardware or software companies like Apple.
Then we will be able to watch Hulu and eat pizza at the same time.
{ 1 comment }
