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.