From slashdot.org, an interesting article on P2P Television, or at least the slashdot poster points out that that’s what the article should be about, but Alsop doesn’t seem to get it.
“So if you believe that people do want to watch whatever they want whenever they want, you need a massively distributed system. Which brings us to “file-served television” and that TiVo board meeting. Having a PVR’s really big hard disk in many living rooms creates a massively distributed system: Instead of relatively few hard disks owned by the cable operators, you have hundreds of thousands of hard disks owned by everybody. And thus the space to store a million hours of video content. “
Just a fantastic idea, and I hadn’t even thought of it, even if I do jump on the KaZaA network to download an episode of Enterprise when I miss it on TV.
However, Alsop continues.
“Essentially, file-served television describes an Internet for video content. Anyone–from movie company to homeowner–could store video on his own hard disk and make it available for a price. Movie and television companies would have tons of hard disks with huge capacities, since they can afford to store everything they produce. Cable operators and satellite companies might have some hard disks to store the most popular content, since they can charge a premium for such stuff. And homeowners might have hard disks (possibly in the form of PVRs) that can be used as temporary storage for content that takes time to get or that they only want to rent–or permanent storage for what they’ve bought. “
What he doesn’t get, is why would people PAY a price for the content. At this point I would like to reflect on my previous post that focuses on the “pool model” of payment to the recording industry, as suggested by Jim Griffin. A network tax that is paid by the infrastructure companies or ISPs that deliver the content to the home.
“Griffin says, that works for radio, restaurateurs, and television. “We don’t know what music is played in a restaurant at any given time. We don’t know if consumers are videotaping television shows. The restaurant owners pay a flat fee to play whatever they want.” Why is it, Griffin wonders, that restaurants are able to do that, but a similar model isn’t available in which ISPs are charged a flat fee through a compulsory license to offer their users music downloads.”. From A Proposal for the Recording Industry: Embrace MP3! By Eric Hellweg.
Thats forward thinking, and I admire Griffin for being the visionary that he is. He has been suggesting such a model well before this media hype began.
Filed under: P2P, Recording Industry
