JamieG Analysis

Watching TV from Internet based sources has grown drastically in the last year, still, amazingly there has been little more then lip service and toe in the water reactions from the larger encumbent players.

The bandwidth issues has been touted as the main reason.  For example, until the internet is upgraded giving higher bandwidth access to the consumers it is not really a viable concern… yet.  If the incumbent players did start advertising and promoting access to TV shows, the internet would arguably collapse under the weight of the strain of trying to support the bandwidth requirements.

This, to me, is a smoke screen as those who largely want this type of TV experience are getting it now with the current internet using shared infrastructure.  TORRENTS.

What the industry really is working on is new advertising models which can hopefully be successful in an ira where the consumer has complete control.  With a flick of the finger, anything the consumer don;t want to watch is gone.  Commercials, poor content. Everything.

So looking forward, one would consider a similar model in which the consumer is already in this dominant position, but at the same time the industry is commercialized and growing…  WEB SITES.

This leads me to the dominant player in commercializing this area. Google.

Strangely enough, media and blogosphere has had little to say about Googles roles in this.  But here are a few I did find..
Google enters the PC to TV arena
Google wants to do for TV what it did for the Web

And most importantly
Advertising on TV just got easier with Google TV Ads

It is also on Techcrunch
The Google Set-Top Box (Think Android For TV)

Looking at the general commercialization of the Internet one very important issues is apparent.

“Standardization in advertising, production, distribution and display”

Standards have always been the key to a healthy advertising medium and in some ways is a indicator to the health and likelihood of a robust industry.  An example of this is the banner ad self imposed standards, resolutions and file sizes, that came out many years back.  After which, we started to see banner ads everywhere.  Google introducing its on standard of simply text based ads that have also proven to be very successful and popular.

What I am trying to point out here is that, for example, YouTube, the king of online video has been trying all forms of advertising around video content.  Post/pre rolls.  Interstitials etc.  None have worked very well.

If Google plan to move forward and dominate video on the web, they have to base it around a set of known standards.

For example,  recently I heard some one say Google was very successful as they had the eye balls.  I could not disagree more.  Google is successful as hey can get advertising out to websites owners that own the eye balls. The key here if that Google has studied and formulated a way to do this as automated as possible with the best results as possible.

The challenge here for google and everyone else in this area, is how do we do this for video?

This then breaks down to.  UNTIL we can do this for video on the web, we want to slow down moving to this new medium as much as possible.  We have a 100’s of billions of dollar industry looking for future relevance.

From comments I have gotten from my Blog, in which I seem to have attracted a number of inside people, unfortunately, its not looking like the incumbents are close to any real solution.

The rosy picture painted by some is that in the future, “THEY” will track everything.  They will know exactly what commercials we watch, if we skip them and more. From this data, a new form of cost for advertising will be born. A new form of AD will be born.  Entertaining Ads we are less likely to switch off. Shorter ads we don;t have time to skip. Product placement.  Ads built into the content like the old radio days.

All this is possible, but is it likely in a future were only ZONE free DVD players are for sale in my local electronics store?

I personally do think some type of compromise is possible in terms of what the consumer wants and how much money the incumbents can make out of us.  But like any compromise, neither sire will be completely happy.