I’ve been reading in some blogs about the death of TV. It’s happening in our house. Amazingly, my daughter never asks to use our tv sets. How could that be, a teenager who doesn’t watch tv? Ah, but she does watch all of her favorite shows – on her laptop in the comfort of her room. Once she grows up, she admits she’ll never pay for cable. All her friends are the same way. This is not good for the tv channels – the lucrative teen market is going on the internet.
But some of you will say, oh but internet tv is low quality, what if I want to watch HDTV on my big screen tv? Surely the web won’t replace that! Well, think again. One of my favorite groups, the Allman Brothers Band, is doing their annual run of shows at the Beacon Theater in New York, celebrating their fortieth anniversary. They decided to broadcast the concerts on the internet, using Moogis (www. moogis.com). This is truly amazing. The broadcast is in HDTV, with high quality stereo sound. I hooked up my laptop to my plasma, and then connected the audio out to my receiver, and voila, I am watching the Allman Brothers in beautiful quality on my tv, with amazing sound. And it’s all over the internet, with Comcast only supplying the bandwidth. The implications of this are amazing. It means as Fios and U-verse spread, we can all replace all those tape- and disk- appendages on our stereos, and simply have a pc, an amp, speakers, and a big screen, and we’re done! Some disks for storage, and we’re done. No piles of media to save. No cable charges. It will be a different world.
Besides killing off the middlemen (read the networks and the like) the resulting disintermediation will also benefit performers and producers. When the Allman Brothers sell me a subscription to their concerts, they get the bulk of the money, not the network, or the cable company. Given how the record companies have struggled with the analogous problem, it will be fun to watch the networks struggle with this.
