Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Future is Here
Spotify is here, and we're finally entering the future of music, film, television. Spotify finally does, successfully, what online music has been threatening for so long. You can almost instantly hear any track they have on the system. The interface is small and fast. You can choose to pay or have it ad funded.
We're getting similar services for Film and TV. iPlayer, 4od, SkyPlayer and the like already offer us a selection of TV to watch online at our leisure at reasonable quality. The only problem at the moment is that HD quality video is huge and our broadband pipes aren't fat enough.
Even ancient (in the virtual world) luddites like me who like owning CDs and DVDs are going to be getting virtually all our media online. And I think we'll be getting it all streamed rather than downloading. Because it means we can watch/listen anywhere on any device. Owning Phyical media like CDs, DVDS even blu-ray is well on the way to becomming a specialist retro thing for geeks, like owning vinyl is now. Because who'd want to lose the flexibility of being able to log into their account and watch/listen to stuff they've paid for wherever they are? And why bother storing all your stuff on your iPod, computer etc and having all that faffing about synching devices when you can get them all broadband connections and just stream stuff? 3G broadband for all kinds of devices is cheap these days.
It's quite exciting really. I'd like to see a few different payment models adopted. So each user can choose from Pay Per View, Ad Funded, Unlimited Subscription or to 'buy' a song/movie and be allowed unlimited views of that item. 100Mb broadband is already being rolled out in some bits of london. I don't know what speed we need for HD video on demand, but it's on the way.
How are TV, Film and Record companies going to take advantage of all the possibilities?
We're getting similar services for Film and TV. iPlayer, 4od, SkyPlayer and the like already offer us a selection of TV to watch online at our leisure at reasonable quality. The only problem at the moment is that HD quality video is huge and our broadband pipes aren't fat enough.
Even ancient (in the virtual world) luddites like me who like owning CDs and DVDs are going to be getting virtually all our media online. And I think we'll be getting it all streamed rather than downloading. Because it means we can watch/listen anywhere on any device. Owning Phyical media like CDs, DVDS even blu-ray is well on the way to becomming a specialist retro thing for geeks, like owning vinyl is now. Because who'd want to lose the flexibility of being able to log into their account and watch/listen to stuff they've paid for wherever they are? And why bother storing all your stuff on your iPod, computer etc and having all that faffing about synching devices when you can get them all broadband connections and just stream stuff? 3G broadband for all kinds of devices is cheap these days.
It's quite exciting really. I'd like to see a few different payment models adopted. So each user can choose from Pay Per View, Ad Funded, Unlimited Subscription or to 'buy' a song/movie and be allowed unlimited views of that item. 100Mb broadband is already being rolled out in some bits of london. I don't know what speed we need for HD video on demand, but it's on the way.
How are TV, Film and Record companies going to take advantage of all the possibilities?
Labels: 4od, iPlayer, SkyPlayer, Spotify, The Future
