The Future of Televsion
I just got back from the "IPTV End to End" conference held jointly by the SMPTE and VidTrans. I was fortunate to be invited as a speaker, and I got to speak about my point of view with respect to the future of Television.
While the crowd was very much old world TV, they were very curious and surprisingly thirsty for this kind of a discussion. Obviously the organizers of this event were not as open to this subject since I was the only one talking about the impact of the Internet on TV in the next five years.
When I got back I tried catching up with news from the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos (Check out davosconversation.org - kudos to Jeff Jarvis from the Buzz Machine for the excellent coverage), and I realized that both Bill Gates and Niklas Zennstrom spoke about the same exact topic. Interestingly we all agree that the Internet will revolutionize TV and within 5 to 10 years, broadcast TV will become a niche, and yet the three companies (Microsoft, Joost and TVersity) are going at it very differently. Same market analysis and yet a very different vision.
Note: Looks like Cisco's John Chambers and YouTube's Chad Hurley also spoke about the same topic.
