OK, so this is how it’s going to be.
People got used to having TV’s throughout the house, so any member of the family could watch what they wanted without argument. But this doesn’t work any more. With digital TV through satellite and cable providers the number of channels available is huge (Freeview excepted). There is more to watch, and each member of a nuclear family is often going to want to watch something different. Plus, there are so many channels that keeping up with the stuff you’re interested in is becoming more difficult (how many times have you sat down in front of a 100+ channel cable box and found absolutely nothing worth watching, and yet complain that you missed the latest episode of such and such?) Plus, the incoming signal has to be decoded, and companies love charging extra subscription costs for extra decoder boxes, making it extortionately expensive to have a TV in the living room, a TV in the bedroom, a TV in the kid’s room, and a TV in the kitchen, even though the cost of TVs themselves is at an all-time low.
This is how it’s going to be: a central TV input to a central decoder in the house will decode programmes people actually want to watch (and ask for) and store them to hard disk, as Tivo or Sky+. Sky are going to take the lead in this in the UK, but they’re going to have to massively increase storage capacity (something already underway with the Sky+ 160GB boxes). Other TVs in the house will connect to this central decoder, and will just stream the video and audio from it wirelessly (Tivo in the US can already be incorporated into a home network for such a purpose with PCs). In fact, streaming to a PC or Mac instead of a TV will in some cases be cheaper and save space (think “kid’s room”). You’ll also be able to plug your portable video device into the central decoder and pull out the programmes you want to watch when commuting to work or sitting on the bog (Sky are expected to release their own personal video player which is intended to connect to new Sky+ boxes by USB2).
So the huge amount of content available is now filtered to what we want and we won’t ever miss the latest episode of The Sopranos. I really think PVR providers should follow Tivo’s lead on this with regard to predictive recording. By the viewer telling the box what programmes they do or do not like, the box can guess other programmes that the viewer may want to watch but hasn’t heard of, and record them pre-emptively.
The distribution system is solved, with no extra decoder subscriptions. Existing TVs would need an extra piece of hardware, re-usable when you upgrade the TV, and PCs could likely grab the video in software. With wireless networking component costs dropping all the time, how expensive need it be? Most people would find this preferable to either paying a monthly service charge or buying a video sender device (which means the main TV and the remote TV have to watch the same channel).
I don’t think any of these ideas are particularly from my mind, more just a group of technologies that could come together to end one of my pet hates. Fingers crossed, eh?
