Does Television have a future?

Wasn't there talk of an ITV and Channel 4 collaboration called Kangeroo?

There is, the BBC are also part of the project.

[Arthur C. Clarke mode]

I think the old, synchronous (scheduled) television channel still has a future. People still like to be able just to collapse on the sofa and turn on the TV, in the hope something good will be on.

The comments about it being nice to watch something full-screen on a big TV are going to be invalidated; looking at the proliferation of Media Center PCs, MythTV boxes, the Apple TV, etc. it seems that we'll see more and more on-demand viewing. Virgin Media is due to launch its iPlayer client soon, and Sky+ has made asynchronous viewing far more popular.

What I think we can expect, as artificial intelligence improves, is software that selects content from a centralised library, and sequences them in a way that's convenient for each individual viewer, creating a "Joe Bloggs TV" channel, as it were. It would put the news on at the time they get home from work, and closedown would happen at around the time they go to bed. If they didn't like reality shows or soaps, Emmerdale Farm and Big Brother would simply be excluded from the roster.

That's what I think we can expect as computers advance. It's already possible to filter news and search records (albeit primitively) based on the user's habits and via tagging, and as computers become more sentient and itelligent we can certainly expect to see them as our own personal schedulers. That's my perspective on it, at least.

Yep - the BBC's Head of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, who was credited with the iPlayer launch (though of course it was more than just him he was the leader who championed it), has announced he is leaving the BBC to lead Kangaroo - the joint venture between the BBC (BBC Worldwide I think?), ITV and C4 (not sure about five).

I believe this is a commercial operation - though C4 have less to offer in some ways as, unlike the BBC and ITV, C4 have no in-house production and commission entirely from independents, who retain many of their rights (particularly after 2 years)

The BBC Trust have yet to approve the BBC involvement though.

Linear, scheduled television will never die out completely. If you make a programme, there will always be a time when you have to broadcast it for the first time - so you'll still get big event programmes that people tune in at a regular time to see like X Factor, or episodes of a series that people tune in weekly to see the latest episode as soon as it airs, or live programmes like sports.

Yep - and there will always be a lot of people who don't want to schedule their own viewing, and want someone to do it for them. How this scheduled viewing is then generated for the viewer may change (rather than a live linear stream it may be links to downloads or something like Anytime which records various streams and presents them in a certain order) but the requirement for a Saturday night viewing schedule will still exist for many.

Well I don't doubt the On Demand services will prove popular in time.
I would prefer to view news, docos or drama when I choose.
However all theses channels and services need the content made in the first place. Perhaps that is where the TV industry is headed.
Production factories/publishing houses whatever you want to call them with Digital Transmission.

The problem that on-demand has is that often you don't know you want to watch something until you see it. I can think of loads of shows I wouldn't have chosen to watch on demand that I've stumbled across and ended up really enjoying. That is part of the art of scheduling - carrying audiences between shows.

I agree that much of broadcasting will be moving even more towards a publishing metaphor - with the same content published in lots of different ways. However one of those publication models is likely to remain a scheduled experience - though whether this is implemented by linear broadcast, or "intelligent download" is another matter.

And of course the infrastructure involved in running VoD over the internet is unsustainable. ISPs want nothing to do with it unless they are paid their cut.

Services like iPlayer and 4oD will fall by the wayside -- being replaced by tied-in services that will charge for each download. Can't be done for free if the whole country gets in on the act -- not for a long time to come.

This will ultimately push people back towards the broadcast system -- especially as everyone starts to demand HD quality for everything.

Talk of the death of mainstream TV is greatly, greatly exaggerated.

Many thanks Jason, and to everyone who has commented.

I hope you're right, but don't you think that one day surely everything will be made available through online, or at least some type of computer/TV combo? Where are broadcasters going to find the audience that is increasingly spending a lot of their time on the web, namely the youth? This will just get worse as the teenagers of today grow older and consider spending hours on the internet the norm. I hope telly doesn't fade out because of this.

I love mainstream TV where everyone can just sit down and chill out, and you know millions of others are doing exactly the same thing. I don't know, there's just a nice sense about watching the same things at the same time then ringing up or MSN afterwards to have a good chat about it, especially live stuff.

Just caught this post and felt compelled to comment. Interesting views from everyone, so here's mine...

Yes Television does have a future. There is a *grain* of truth in the fact that the web is making inroads into TV's traditional dominance but only a grain. There are allot of issues involved and these are only partly related to the internet. We have to consider these facts:
- The days of television shows getting audiences of 20 million are over, but those days were over long before the internet (On the other hand, a big national event such as the Olympics still gets respectable ratings, so what does that tell us? Something lacking in the content, perhaps?)

- Many young people are using the internet at the expense of TV but that doesn't mean they will carry on doing so throughout their entire life. People's views, opinions and interests change. If you were to interview a 15 year old about their media habits they would probably tell you they never watch TV (though they quite possibly do - they just don’t find it trendy to admit at that point in their life) and spend their time on the web. Interview them at 21 and they would probably joke about how much time they wasted on internet and now prefer going out (or now watch more TV perhaps).

- There is a tendency to use the views of young people and children as a way of predicting the future of adult behavior. 'They are not watching television, so they will never watch television later in life either' seems to be the subtext. This is nonsense: there isn't the tiniest fragment of evidence for any of this. Again, people's views and habits change throughout their life.

- 'On demand' is important, but you have to know what it is you are 'demanding' first. You only find this out by watching programmers on the off chance that you wouldn’t otherwise know. There are of course people that pretty much only watch what they have seen before and stick to the tried and tested, but by and large the food chain is (i) try it on the off chance (ii) record it and watch it again (iii) go out and buy it and (iv) its popularity means it gets sold and the money invested in new content. I don't see this radically changing. I see on demand as a more convenient alternative to DVDs, but that doesn’t mean that DVD will disappear either.

- There are two ways of consuming entertainment: You either want a play list of material compiled for you so you don’t have to think about it too much or you pick it yourself. Obviously radio is based on the play list of material idea: You listen hoping you'll get a mix of things you know and things you don’t. It is important to remember that despite iTunes, Limewire, BitTorrent and everything else on the internet, Radio is as strong as it has ever been. Television also has a play list idea - the TV schedule. One could argue this isn't as important in the modern age, but just as you don’t (by and large anyway) download tracks randomly from iTunes, I don’t see much evidence people picking TV programmes and downloading them randomly (on iPlayer maybe Certainly not if they have to pay for them). Again, it comes back to the 'knowing what you are demanding' idea, and you need a play list of schedule to seed people's interest first.

- The internet isn’t going to give people a television network through the back door. The capacity simply isn't there, and even it was, charges would start going up to very levels that would make the novelty very quickly ware off. We are a long way away from 'the internet killing off television' world - much further than allot of people think actually. The Tiscali debacle recently is interesting for this reason.

- With the exception, obviously, of Kangaroo and other services like it, the internet isn’t resulting in new content being funded. It is clearly attracting advertisers from other broadcasters, but that advertising revenue isn’t going into programming. Ironically, YouTube's popularity is largely built on copyright violations and the ability for people to watch clips of programmers they like.

So, in essence, television does have a future. There will be many other alternatives too, but that has always been the case. We are certainly don't live in quite the world of Arthur C Clarke some would lead us to believe.

Rant over!!!

Assuming we get round some of the bandwidth constrants we have with broadband I see a much bigger market for linear and on-demand televison delivered via broadband. Not to PCs, but to set top boxes like Homechoice and (the now closed) KIT were able to provide. That way the environment and user experience is no different to using the familier PVR type services rather than watching TV on a computer.

For those that are not tied to the internet, the price of disk space is falling and the capacity is increasing so we probably are not that far away from a Freeview PVR set top box being available with multi-terabyte storage that can just record constantly everything broadcast. This way you would not need to have to tell the box to record anything because the last few days of the whole of freeview would be there to watch. If you are clever about it and capture the whole transport streams you can then play back the interactive content linked to a programme as well. This would give many of the benefits of the one week catch up services online, but without the associated internet bandwidth problems - and again it will all run from your TV rather than having to watch TV on your computer.