In this issue

Internet TV

There have been a number of stories recently about internet TV.  It is predicted that the TV will become part of the home network with film downloads and videos on demand as well as broadcast TV. Your set-top box will evolve into a full-blown PC connected to the Internet. Or maybe your PC will just connect to your TV and replace your set top box.  Depending of course on the quality of your broadband, videos on the internet are approaching broadcast quality.  In fact it won't take much further progress on the bandwidth front before you will be able to watch HD TV on your PC.

The new technology is being taken up. 

• BBC are trialling vodcasts - repeats of recent shows on the Internet,
• ITV have an exciting new project called ITV Local using the internet, 
• A new startup Joost is making the headlines.  
• Another new startup is Jalipo - see the news story below.

One piece of news you should look out for is www.frontier.tv - an internet TV channel focused on ethical business.  Not only are they assembling some terrific content, we are organising their web site.  The channel only really works on a PC though - and thereby hangs a tale or two.

So what is stopping the BBC or Channel 4 just broadcasting their main channels on the Internet?

What are the issues?

Technical

The technology is pretty much there.  It is subject to further development but you can watch passable quality TV on your PC now.  There are different technical standards - primarily

• Windows Media Player - on every PC and a great product.  Available for Macs but has to be downloaded
• Real Player - less popular but on most PCs
• Quicktime - available on PCs but essentially for Macs

However in many ways the most popular player for playing individual clips is probably our old friend Flash.

Business

Internet broadcasting is cheap.  If you want a digital terrestrial channel it will cost  millions, a cable or satellite channel will cost hundreds of thousands. But the technology for an internet channel will cost you thousands.  TV Channels could broadcast their content on the Internet worldwide and not notice the cost.

Legal.

The technology is there, and the cost is low.  The regulatory framework is also light so experimentation is easier.  So why are there no mainstream broadcasters on the Internet?  The reason is legal.

All that content that broadcasters put on the air was produced by someone, and that someone gave them rights to broadcast in a single region.  The broadcast rights issue stops them broadcasting worldwide stone dead. 

This wouldn't be an issue if stations owned all their content like the BBC used to, but the cost of production has made this no longer feasible for a lot of content.  Are there solutions to this problem? We will look at this in a future issue.

The shape of the market

Given the low cost and the legal issues where does that leave the market?  It leaves it with stations that own their own content which generally means:

• They have a niche minority market.  Content about tiddlywinks is cheap but the same level of content about football is expensive.
• They have some way of producing cheap content

 There are many Internet TV channels around and they break down into:

• Religious channels (lots of those)
• Minority interests
• Local interest channels

Most of the local interest channels are small scale affairs broadcasting from someone's front room.  But check out ITV Local - a very interesting development. www.itvlocal.com.   

I am talking here about something you would recognise as broadcast TV.  There are of course many ways of watching video on your PC.  We will talk about those next month, but you will find:

• Business  videos (essentially commercials)
• User generated videos (YouTube)
• and of course Porn.

IPTV - same technology different issues

Wait a minute though I hear that IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) is big business - what is all that about? 

The same technology that allows you to broadcast over the internet can also be used to route TV programmes over broadband straight from the telephone company facility to the home.  It doesn't touch the world-wide internet, so quality is high.  This technology is being used by telephone companies to provide a cable service, with a set-top box at the home end of the line - not a PC. 

The technology is the same but the issues are totally different.  From our point of view this is just something to confuse.  I suggest we use the term Internet Television to refer to Television over the Internet and IPTV to refer to the cable systems being introduced by telephone companies all over the workd.

Business intelligence

Where have all the menus gone?

The Graphical User interface that we all know and love was not an Apple invention, but was pioneered by Xerox back in the 70's.  Ever since then a common feature of the user experience has been a horizontal menu at the top of the screen with drop-down sub-menus. 

Internet Explorer 7 has lost the menu - although you can ask for it back, but with Office 2007, it  has basically gone.   What was on the menu has been sort of 'spread about'  with a button which brings up some options like printing and saving, a quick menu with little icons on it and a strip of options across the top of the page with tabs. 

So after 30 years the menu is no more.  I shall mourn its passing because it is always reassuring to know that whatever you want to do there is a single place to look.  I guess we will get used to it.

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News from the web

Paypal is introducing a non-hosted payments system to offer to small businesses. We shall be taking a look at it.  They are doing a deal with Yahoo to offer it to advertisers.  Paypal have also been granted a banking licence in Luxembourg    which allows them to operate as a bank throughout Europe. 

We will also be looking at Google's checkout system, now available in the UK.

More Google news... Google has agreed to buy online advertising giant Doubleclick for $3.1 billion.  Google is adding a Powerpoint-like application to its online application suite.  And we can reveal that Froogle is no more.  It is renamed Google Product Search.   Shame!

It seems that men are more likely to watch online videos than women.  "Men are more visual than women" it says in the story - Uh! Says who.    I put it down to what is in those online videos - women.

A very interesting new web site is Jalipo. It is a video distribution site and the news story compares it (wrongly) to YouTube.  It is nothing like YouTube but is distributing clips and live TV from mainstream channels like Al Jazeera and the BBC.  You pay by the minute (you get some credits free to start up) but you are limited from seeing some channels because of your location.  At present it is only five channels plus some clips, but they seem to have cracked some of the legal issues with rights.  The quality is not so great for Bloomberg, but pretty good on Al Jazeera. 

Here is the headline:  "Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo Tout Web 2.0 Hybrid Apps" which basically means that Adobe and Microsoft were plugging their products by trying to attach a Web 2.0 label to them.  Not of itself newsworthy as far as I can see.  But I have to give a breakfast presentation on Web 2.0 in July so don't appreciate the already muddy Web 2.0 waters being muddied any further.