| Call it Napster for your tube.
Peer-to-Peer Television is set to revolutionize how all of us watch television – TV downloaded from the Internet to a device that will then be streamed to other people on a network has implications for everyone from couch potatoes to television executives.
One of the best known of the peer-to-peer (P2P) television innovators, in this field of still relatively unknown technology, is Guido Ciburski, a technology engineer from Germany. He partnered with a TV technology company in his homeland to create the first software to use peer-to-peer technology for the streaming of real-time TV over the Internet.
Ciburski claims that his service, Cybersky TV (a pun on his name) allows millions of viewers to share television programming in a fashion similar to swapping music files.
Users of Cybersky TV simply download the software, couple their television to a computer using a DSL connection and enjoy an infinite amount of free programming.
Of course the hitch is all that content is produced by people that want to be paid. An issue that shut down Napster, but so far does not seem to trouble Ciburski, who told the German publication Deutsche Welle, "What, are we going to say ‘We’re scared of how people will react’ and put it back in our drawer so that someone else can come along and do it?"
Although Ciburski’s software had been banned for more than 12 months in Germany after a legal fight with Premiere (Germany’s leading pay TV operator) Cybersky-TV is now up and running after a court ruling in August, 2006.
"At the moment we are collecting new investors nearly every week," said Ciburski following the ruling. "There has been a big response. Internet Protocol Television is the next big thing on the Internet."
Closely following the developments of Internet television is Forrester Research, a respected independent research company based in the U.S. It recently released a report stating that by 2011 TV programming delivered over the Internet will represent a "viable alternative to cable."
But the Forrester report also details problem areas for television over the Internet which it describes as "over-the-top TV" (OTT-TV).
OTT-TV "faces four obstacles: lack of Internet connections to TV sets, bandwidth-limited video quality, lack of business models and the challenge of navigating through thousands of video programs," states the report.
Ready to solve at least one of the major barriers slowing widespread acceptance of Internet television is the recently renamed Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computers), which released Apple TV earlier this month.
A box with a 40-gigabyte hard drive that can store up to 50 hours of video, Apple TV allows television shows and movies to be downloaded to a computer to play on a TV set in another room eliminating the need for cables and thus simplifying the Internet television experience.
"It’s really, really easy to use," Steve Jobs told the crowd at San Francisco’s Moscone Center before demonstrating the device. "It’s got the processing horsepower to do the kinds of things we like to do."
Sensing that technology is set to dramatically change viewing habits, television executives will gather at a conference in New York City later this month where they will discuss the future of their industry.
The conference, titled Future TV Show North America, has on its website this warning to prospective delegates: "The battle is on for the viewer of the future." |
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