We recently covered The effect of digital content and new technology on the entertainment and media industries is:
a) a devastating body blow;
b) a profit-spewing bonanza or
c) the creation of a promising market in its infancy.
The answer is all three, depending on whether you are talking about the beleaguered music industry, the fortunate movie industry or the cable business's hopes for digital cable. The implications of cheap storage and cheap bandwidth shall make timeshifting as a well pronounced mechanism in the digital lifestyle world. TV-watching habits are poised to change in a big way. Advances in technology providing reliable and economical data storage accelarate the transformation - cheap and ditributed data centers getting into peta- and exabyte levels of storage isn't farfetched. As kantor writes, Inexpensive storage also means more-secure storage, as data can be mirrored in several locations; if one site is "lost," the others take up the slack.
Kantor adds, "Many broadband providers (typically cable companies) are offering 4 and 5 Mbps connections as their low-tier products. Backbones are being upgraded in response to the greater bandwidth to homes and businesses. Fiber-optic lines are being laid, WiMAX towers are being built, and other broadband data paths are being contemplated. And that has extraordinary implications for Blockbuster, for DVD players, and for television networks and advertisers. Cable TV companies like Time Warner, Cox, and Comcast have a lot of data on their hands, and it's not on reels of celluloid in a basement - a lot of it is on hard drives. That means it's in a form that's easy to deliver to users over those nice, big data pipes".
Pay-per-view movies and the limited video on demand we see now are just the tip of the looming iceberg. The shift is already underway from a television that shows what they want to one that shows what you want.In future, more and more movies will make it to video-on-demand libraries as cable and media companies start storing every movie and television show ever made on those massive, distributed hard drives. Television, too, will change,as the cable company shall act as the library. The idea of a network's schedule will fade away as people access their favorite shows when they want to via TiVo or more commonly, their cable or satellite provider's database. Looking way far ahead, it can be imagined that the decline of the television network in favor of the studios that actually create the shows. looking way far ahead. The digitalization of content is giving us a lot more flexibility than could have been dreamt.
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