It's Not Your Father's TV, Part 2

And driving much of this interest is the recent sea change in public opinion among studios about the possibilities of working with many partners for delivering movies online. "From the studio perspective, they’re like, ‘Yeah, how many more people want to license our content? Step right up.’ Certainly they’re protective, but with the marketplace opening up it’s only better for the content owners and consumers alike," says Ramo.

The thing to remember throughout this evolutionary transition is that the path to success likely leads through the well-worn trails of already established usage scenarios. "I don’t believe that a business such as ours can change behaviors," says Cantwell. "What we’re trying to do here is reflect increased demand for control over content and portability."

New Opportunities for New Media Publishers
With TV still at the center of our society’s media attention, it seems natural to assume that all new media properties are desperately vying to get all of their content onto that screen. That isn’t necessarily the case. "I hold the heretical position that not all video belongs on TV in the first place," says Mike Hudack, CEO of blip.tv.

The reasoning behind Hudack’s opinion is largely based on the nature of finding content through the TV versus the PC. "I know there’s a breaking point between the number of programs on TV and the number of programs online where the TV is no longer a viable discovery platform for that content," says Hudack.

"There’s so much content on blip.tv today, [to say nothing of] a year from now, that I think it would be completely overwhelming for me as a viewer to sit on a couch with a thumb and remote control," Hudack continues.

And as the amount of content available online grows, so too does the challenge of navigation and content discovery expand. This dilemma is exemplified by the growth of ExpoTV, a site that hosts video product reviews. "Where we used to have seventy product videos supplied mostly by advertisers, we’ve since opened things up to the public and now we have more than 40,000 product testimonials," says Daphne Kwon, CEO of ExpoTV.

Yet Kwon actually sees navigation as a strength of IP-to-TV platforms relative to the on-demand platforms offered by cable providers, an area that ExpoTV initially focused its entire business on. "What we’ve found is that video-on-demand on cable has a very limited ability to search. But places like Akimbo and other IPTV companies, what they’re going to enable us to do through search is offer our much broader content through whatever device you’re looking at," says Kwon. [For a more in-depth comparison of these IP-to-TV platforms relative to cable’s on demand system, see the sidebar, "IP to TV vs. Cable VOD," p. 68.]

But while there’s little doubt that navigating the vast troves of internet content is easier with a keyboard and mouse, these issues are not near enough to overcome the many benefits of getting onto the TV set.

For one, watching TV is generally a quality user experience with which most people are already familiar. "TV provides a much better lean-back experience, where I can sit on the couch with a beer and watch my favorite shows. I think that is an incredibly compelling value proposition to the consumer," says Hudack.

"The other piece is that I’m constantly struggling to find ways to bring content to my Aunt Jenny, and I think it’s going to take having that content available through a remote control on the couch," he continues.