Analysis: Is IPTV finally the key to convergence?

Will bigger choices lead to better television?

Setting aside for the duration the whole valid counter-argument about life being a little something more than an experience: Before media technologies can truly converge the way highly paid people have been predicting for well over three decades, the content production industry that sustains them must evolve -- and frankly, it's not keeping pace. The type of business model erosion that we've already seen impacting the music industry is taking more time to affect video, but it's happening. The mass media business model is based upon the principle of controlling the schedule and flow of programming, so that consumers watch shows and movies in the selected venues in which they're available, during the predetermined windows in which they're made available. What we used to call reruns, the industry perceives as repurposing.

Pure choice, by contrast, presumes that the consumer is more in control not only of scheduling and of availability, but of quality. In the end, why watch ordinary television if good television is available? And if all good television that was ever produced can be made available through a single menu selection at any time, producers could no longer afford to make bad television -- or rather, the diluted content that gets passed off as good television, but whose principal purpose is to provide a substructure upon which to plant commercials.

Every milestone in the evolution of consumer media, from the VCR to TiVo, has proven that if consumers can bypass the way mass media is spoon-fed to them, they will. Consumers not only prefer choice, but on their own terms, not with artificial prerequisites imposed upon them. And conceivably, if the incoming administration and the likely change of leadership in the FCC chooses to leave the current state of government regulation as it is now, consumers and CE manufacturers could make their own way to enable true choice, in an ironic reunion of the state of affairs of the early 1950s, when RCA/NBC, DuMont, and Columbia/CBS produced their own TV sets that highlighted their own respective networks.

"It's only a matter of time," stated Carmi Levy, "before this open ecosystem -- whose business model has more to do with standards-compliant PCs on an open Internet than anything else -- comes to televised content. The cable and satellite companies know that we're in this transitional period, and they're doing everything in their power to hold onto their hegemony for a little while longer. While they can force -- and indeed are forcing -- consumers to plug in redundant STBs, they know the clock is ticking on this closed model. Ultimately, they'll fail as open standards wash over their landscape and force them to either evolve or die."