nonlinear

quickly: if you work in TV, read this. if not, save money to pay for tv downloads. they take over soon.

So for the first time Friday night, I decided to watch my favorite TV show “Battlestar Galactica” live.

I’ve seen every episode of the show, now in its third season, but had yet to watch it when SciFi shows new episodes at 10 p.m. Fridays.

With 10 p.m. rolling around, I hit pause on “Rocky” recorded on our ReplayTV and switched to live TV. I then glanced at my laptop and opened it up, too.

Checking on my favorite RSS feeds, I saw many blogs talking about new IBM research “The end of television as we know it.”

I quickly opened up the research paper as “Battlestar” began, hoping to glean some info about the study before the show began in earnest.

The study is a winner and is yet another “must read” for those in the TV business.

Figure 13 made me laugh out loud – in 2008 it’s believed that storing 10,000 hours of TV will cost $236. For standard definition TV, I assume they mean a 10 terabyte hard drive will cost $236. Crazy. Even better – they believe the cost to stream one hour of encoded video will be 9 cents. Again, I assume they mean it will cost 9 cents to move 1 gigabyte of streamed video to an end user – a giant fall from current rates for Windows Media and a gigantic fall from rates for Flash video.

Figure 6 is another winner – showing the many emerging revenue models for video creators and aggregators. Not sure which model works for broadcast news, though.

The threat for those in broadcasting is here — “Networks will be extinct in fifteen years” — yet the opportunities will be amazing, if embraced.

In any case, I yet again missed watching “Battlestar” “live.”

Categorized as reviews, television