Thanks to the signing of the DTV Delay Act, television broadcasters continue to send out their sweet, sweet analog signals a full week after the original cutoff date. And those broadcasters will continue to broadcast both analog and digital signals until June 12.
Note that 641 of the 1800 licensed television broadcast stations across the country have already switched off their analog broadcast facilities.
While many television viewers in the US subscribe to cable or satellite service, there is a significant public interest in ensuring that anyone who wishes to obtain broadcast television should be able to. After all, these are public airwaves, which the broadcasters are allowed to use by authority of Congress. Broadcast TV is not merely soap operas, infomercials and bad sitcoms. It is local news, major public events and news.
New York Times, Digital TV Beckons, but Many Miss the Call, “That so many viewers here and around the country risk losing something as basic as a free television signal is a function, at least in part, of the government’s failure to anticipate that those most affected would be among the nation’s most frail and vulnerable.”
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired.com, How We Bungled the Digital Television Transition: “America’s transition to over-the-air digital television signals, which netted the government $19 billion in a wireless spectrum auction, was doomed from the start, thanks to a flawed voucher program and a time frame that left the country stranded between administrations.”
At the same time, studios and networks are connecting with audiences outside of broadcast, cable and satellite, thanks to the internet.
But don’t plan on using the internet to replace current TV service just yet.
Boxee makes a media center software application that runs on computers as well as the Apple TV media extender. Boxee’s best feature is that it connects TV style viewing with internet video streaming. This provided a way to watch programs from the deep library of the NBC and Fox joint venture, Hulu.
That was until Hulu’s “content partners” (the studios who own the copyrights on the various programs) discovered Boxee and realized that they hadn’t contemplated viewers watching Hulu on real televisions and asked Boxee to discontinue streaming Hulu programming. Interestingly, Hulu never had an agreement with Boxee.
Boxee, The Hulu Situation, “our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet. we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.”
Hulu, Doing Hard Things, ” While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.”
Does internet streaming generate revenues comparable to selling advertising on first-run broadcast, rights to second-run syndication and DVDs? (Obviously not). How can copyright owners contemplate future uses of licensed content when entering into licensing deals?
Marc Hedlund, Hulu’s Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight “To your TV is something completely different, and from the “content providers'” point of view, completely wrong. Aren’t Apple and Tivo and YouTube bad enough as it is?”
Dan Wallach, Freedom to Tinker, Hulu abandons Boxee—now what?: “Also interesting to note is the acknowledgment that there was no formal relationship between Hulu and Boxee. That’s the power of open standards. Hulu was publishing bits. Boxee was consuming those bits. The result? An integrated system, good enough to seriously consider dropping your cable TV subscription.”
Janko Roettgers, NewTeeVee, Is Hulu Driving People Back to Piracy? “Applications like the Torrent Episode Downloader (TED) make it easy to subscribe to whole seasons of your favorite TV show via BitTorrent, and established TV torrent sites like EZTV even offer P2P streaming for immediate access.”
Fred Wilson, A VC (and investor in Boxee), Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee: “There’s a consistency to the comments and it is confusion first and foremost. Hulu users don’t understand the distinction between watching Hulu through Firefox or Safari and wathicng Hulu through Boxee. And many of them are coming back to watching TV because they can watch over the internet, when they want, and how they want. They feel liberated by Hulu and Boxee and see them as a match made in heaven. Which they are. And I sure hope that Hulu and its content partners come to that realization quickly.”
It is possible to use the internet to watch most television programming. And The Wall Street Journal, reports that cable operators are looking to secure internet rights to have a role as content aggregators in the post-TV internet video world Cable Firms Look to Offer TV Programs Online: “Top cable-television providers and TV networks are exploring a sweeping solution to the threat of online video: putting large numbers of cable shows online, but accessible only to cable subscribers.”
But we’re not in the post-TV world quite yet.
Streaming Hulu content through Boxee (at least on an Apple TV) is a second rate experience to watching the same programs on broadcast or cable. Shows look far better on the digital broadcast or cablecast than on internet streaming. (Even ABC’s very nice HD streams of Lost aren’t as smooth as their HD broadcast.)
But as music listeners have shown, there’s a threshold where portability and convenience outweighs quality. For most people MP3 quality is good enough for music. Higher fidelity digital standards (Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio) never managed to compete with the convenience of MP3. For video, online streaming is obviously coming close enough to that point where convenience trumps quality.
