Taking in Television: A Video Business Model Ready to Move Beyond Beta

Looks like the long-awaited, long-promised age of media convergence is at last upon us.

Two decades ago I was standing in the living room of my apartment, directly in front of my television set, stereo system components, cable TV jack, and and Sony Beta videotape deck.

I was not watching them, though. I was staring at a blank white wall just to the right of them. I remember thinking that media could be digitized and stored electronically, and everything was moving toward solid state - no moving parts.

Miniaturization was inevitable, inexorable, and inescapable.

What I sort of saw in my daytime reverie was a device or a rack, if you wish. It was affixed to the wall about chest high for an adult and about chest-sized. It was black and very low-key.

Into it you could put little rectangles. About the size of the compact flash chips. Bigger, actually, than the tiny slivers of black practically paper-thin wafers that are used in cameras and media players today - those xD and SD cards that are so common now.

The rectangles were incredibly inexpensive. You could reuse them, if you wanted. You could keep them parked in your wall-mounted multimedia entertainment library/hub unit. Nobody cared. The thing you paid for was the programming - the shows and songs - and you could keep them for a lifetime.

There were no more proprietary formats. No more cornering of the market based on incompatibilities. Everyone had moved past that and settled on compatibility. The reward for everyone was that all this stuff you watch and listen to was more consumable. More collectable. More retainable. More organizable. More usable.

It made more sense. It was like all the rough corners had been removed from what which we consume that we cannot touch.

Now, video has become the hot thing. We still have multiple competing file formats and physical media - more than just the Beta-and-VHS and vinyl-vs-CD-vs-magtape that were duking it out back then, in fact.

So, how on track are we?

Pretty on track, I think.

Right now, 2006 seems like the year that video technology just rolled out the door and landed all over the place, covering everything.

I believe that 2007 will be the year that video and media entertainment has got it all covered - everything.

The products will all be out and a lot of groups of very bright individuals will be quietly moving on how to get a whole lot more onto the landing strips all that hardware and softwares provide.

Humans can take in a lot more information than we do, share it a lot faster with others than we dare, and cull it for things of interest than we bother.

I think in 2007, we will do, dare, and bother to do more than we ever have done before.

A Video Business Model Ready to Move Beyond Beta - New York Times:

VIDEO mania is in full swing. Amazon is finally doing movie downloads. Apple is touting a new wireless gizmo to beam movies from laptops to TV screens. NBC is introducing a video syndication service that might pit it against Google and Yahoo, and it's joining the other big networks in putting its shows online for free with advertising. MTV is working with Google to populate its video content all over the Web.