Anyone in Reading

Here is the first step.

The BBC using p2p technology to distribute content some period of time after the broadcasts.

This has to lead to an online database of content, music, movies and TV, by someone like Google, with the correct agreements with the content providers. I can see myself sitting on the sofa browsing through it in my TV with the remote control, chosing something, and having it broadcasted in real-time to my specific TV.

Media on demand, with only a subscription charge.

IPTV is already changing the market. Cable and satellite are the prey.

Imagine a TV set plugged directly to the internet. As I said in my latest post, you can tune into internet radio and internet TV channels. Even more, you can chose what exactly you want to watch from online databases, and the content is broadcasted to you in real time. All the films ever made, all the music, all the TV programs.

This means that TV channels will refocus. They can no longer compite with online content databases, but they focus on TV series and live content. The TV channels have merged with the game industry. Real time personalized TV means that interactive games now are actually broadcasts, it’s like playing inside a movie. New forms of TV have emerged. Local TV, were your neighbours are producing and broadcasting their own TV channels from their internet stations. Local businesses target local people, and marketing is personalized so that only the correct profile of audience is targeted.

The BBC has taken a first step into this utopia. iIM is a peer to peer application to distribute content. They will use some type of Digital Rights System to protect it, and the content will be available some time after it has been broadcasted.

This is obviously a first step. The content needs to be downloaded to your computer or TV or set top box before watching it, but you can see that real time broadcasting can’t be far away.

Of course we will listen to the same people mutter the same old constraints as with VoIP. Bandwidth, saturation, the network is not ready. The cable companies won’t let it happen. Nobody wants the content to be distributed in that way.

But then something like Skype will arrive and they will follow the path as if they had a map. And everything will be clear.

Huge forces are moving pro and against file sharing. Independently of the moral arguments, this fight has already brought us things like the increasing MP3 player market, including the rebirth of Apple riding on its iPod and iTunes, and has moved the music industry to bring prices down as well as forced them to distribute content over the Internet.

Peer to peer networks have shown an incredibly resistance and ability to survive. They have moved from Napster all the way to FastTrack, donkey and they will eventually settle down on privacy protecting software as Mute.

This topic has always been overcomplicated. We live in a boring and gruesome world. Music, cinema, books and TV, in other words, legal evasion mechanisms, are always going to be in great demand, and not everybody will be able to afford them.

In one side, the music industry wants to keep its monopoly, set the prices and decide who can access the content, when and how. On the other, normal people want that content. They have always had access to it. From storytelling to reading all the way to playing an instrument or playing a CD. We all had collections of tape recordings. We all browse our friend’s music libraries. But then, nobody shared it with everybody, right?

Everybody can understand both worlds, and the solution is obvious. A fair music industry that protects its content only when it needs to. File sharing music that you don’t own is socially considered stealing. And some people’s morality can cope with that pretty well. On the other hand, if somebody who can hardly afford to feed their family downloads some music to play to their kids, and then gets sued for stealing, then my morality also changes sides. Or if I can no longer borrow my music to my brother, or my friends. Music is a treasure of humanity, not a possession of a few rich businessmen. But it’s this businesses that keep a flourishing music industry, so they should get some reward out of it.

The problem for the music industry is that they are viewed as the oppressing and cruel landowner. They make thousands of times more money with music that the actual money they spent producing it. Most people, and this is proven, don’t mind stealing from the music industry. In comparison, they are the unfortunate ones who work 10 hours a day and just want to be able to afford some music.

Marketing is an added problem. The music industry spends millions marketing their new releases. They brainwash their potential customers continuously. On the radio, on the movies, on the ads, with celebrities. They induce a state of dependency on this new releases and then surprise themselves of the low morality of people that steal their product. Some psychologist should research into the addiction caused by unwanted marketing.

The point is, music prices have to plummet. And the time that passes until they are considered completely public should be much shorter. I consider The Beatles a treasure of humanity already.

And music must start to be distributed electronically, maybe only electronically. Why waste the resources and energy of manufacturing a CD? Don’t destroy our planet without need, be reasonable. I compare this transition with the photography industry. No more chemicals and photo paper. Most photos are never good enough to be printed nevertheless.

Ideally, I am sitting at my TV with a remote control. I am searching a huge music database (obviously hosted by Google) and choosing what album I want to play. The music is then broadcasted in realtime to my hi-fi, probably through my Internet TV which acts as a tuner, and my account is charged. I don’t own the music, I just listen to it. I pay a subscription service to the database, but I can listen to anything I want. Maybe this year’s music is more expensive.

I can also chose to listen to Internet radio stations if I want to. Or to tune into Internet TV channels.

I also have a movies database, and a TV programmes database. And the Internet is flourishing with amateur Internet radio and TV stations. Young musicians are broadcasting their content directly, as well as young film directors.

The humanity blossoms in a climate of creativity and arts.

Everybody is still making money. Subscription services are offered cheaper when they come with some (personalised) marketing.

This is the future I see. Or I hope.

The first time I encountered voice over IP it was 1999. I started working for a startup trying to develop a gateway product that would ease the transition between legacy telephony and the next generation of voice over IP services.

I remember we used to brainstorm the issues ahead. The eternal comparison with legacy services: Quality of service, other line services as call transfer, call forward and the rest, the need for VoIP to interoperate with legacy private branch exchanges that most companies would maintain for at least 10 or 15 years. Hence we developed all flavours of ISDN and even analog gateways. Then it was supposed to be part of a system, so it should be based on open standards like SIP or H.323.

The product ought to be reliable, scalable and needed to implement some kind of redundancy. And conferencing. We needed a conferencing solution.

Then the problems with emergency numbers and different national telecommunication regulations.

And finally, encryption. Nobody would want to broadcast their conversations for anyone to listen.

By the time I left the company we had only achieved part of this. By then the industry had matured and settled and it was already 2005. We offered better services than traditional telephony, better prices, similar quality and encryption.

And during all that time I had that feeling inside me that all of these was too complicated. I don’t like transitions, they are a waste of time. By the time you have finished with the details everything has moved on.

And that is exactly what happened with VoIP.

In the meantime, the Internet had exploded. The increase of ADSL usage was meant to push the VoIP market, but what really flourished were point to point networks. People using file sharing programs. People using instant messaging. The technology interested me immensely, there were huge possibilities.

Developers were working on peer to peer cached searches, even the distribution of audio over p2p networks.

My colleagues didn’t believe on it. We had a business model and the market was growing.

And then Skype erupted into scene. A peer to peer VoIP application. A well thought business model based on mature technology. And as always happens, everything was clear then.

Forget interoperability and standards. Forget competing with legacy telephony. Forget quality of service, let the network deal with it. Forget bandwidth requirements, the network will also deal with that. Don’t bother with regulations as emergency numbers. Don’t aim to substitute existing services. Just offer what you have and let the people decide how to best use it. And don’t rely on central servers, go with the flow and built up peer to peer networks.

I have to admit I don’t use it personally, but it didn’t feel completely right to see their success when they didn’t solve any of the problems. That’s the market way.

VoIP as I saw it was a clash between two worlds. The Internet as represented by IETF and SIP, and the telecommunications arena, with the ITU-T and H.323. In that war it seemed that the Internet would win. But then, the magic of the Internet is its flexibility. It doesn’t have to wait for regulations and standards for things to work. They can always be standardise later. So Skype came along with all that p2p experience and in just a couple of developing years had a product to swamp the market.

And still “serious” companies don’t like peer to peer. Investors and share holders don’t like the word. It’s controversial (Isn’t that like stealing?). Too many noise by the likes of the RIAA. In the same way as Open Source is not welcomed everywhere (what, you’re giving away my/your work for free?).

It is sometimes difficult to separate the technology from its uses. Both peer to peer and open source technologies have wonderful advantages, and in my opinion they have the future in their hands.

The Internet has revolutionised the telecommunications world. Skype is just an example. I think ultimately people will just plug a VoIP phone to their telephone line and forget about Skype, but the companies offering the service are still too tightly regulated. Skype’s advantage is their direct relation with the users.

Now, it’s time for the Internet to revolutionise the broadcasting industry.

Last year I changed jobs. Guess what, I joined a startup and we are developing an IPTV product.

burujabe, Basque for free, independent, autonomous, owner of oneself.

This space is where I write, primarily because I tend to forget my own thoughts and ideas and to lose notebooks. This leads to a continuous state of thought starvation. Each time I retake a topic I have already forgotten all I had already elucubrated and concluded, so the time spent on it never adds up, I always just arrive to the same set of basic, usually messy and mostly erroneous conclusions.

And this state of mind makes it impossible to have healthy and interesting discussions.

See if this finds a remedy, or at least attenuates the symptoms. It also helps to improve my English, which by the way is not my mother language.