Problem Finding, Department of

Ken Rutkowski sparked an interesting discussion in his connected group with this query:
>”With the release last week of Media Center 2005 from Microsoft, the now old discussion re-emerges of whether consumers really want to watch TV on their PCs. I can understand using your PC as a storage device but do you for see people sitting behind they PC to watch TV?

>”A recent Jupiter Research survey reports that only 34 percent of online users want to record TV on their PCs to watch on their PCs’ monitors. That, however, isn’t the real question to ask. When asked about the ability to record TV on their PCs and then watch this content on their TV, the number of consumers interested changes dramatically to 51 percent.”

Here is my summary.
One issue is the meaning of PC. We must be talking about the big box PCs, because Road Warriors have been watching movies on their notebooks for years. They probably will keep doing that as long as the airlines don't all go out of business. They have been doing it with DVDs, but they may be switching now to Movielink, CinemaNow, Starz and other sources that will put content files on the hard drive.

Box PCs have three conceptual parts in this context:: Display; Management and storage of content; Acquisition.

Display: The trend is marked by the D-Link DSM-320 Wireless Media Player. The DSM-320 connects your Wi-Fi network with your home entertainment center. I hear it doesn’t work with all streaming media, but the standard practice at the cutting edge is to let the early adapters do your quality control for you.

Display is a dying issue. People will use whatever displays they want to use. Probably use several displays, depending on location and user. Someday the media will even stop doing surveys on this.

Acquisition: The trend is to VOD. “Tired of making appointment with your TV set? Tired of sitting through fifteen minutes of drivel to catch that interesting item they teased on the opening? Tired of watching the same commercial twenty times?” You are ready for Tivo.

Or maybe for VOD: The Next Generation. With Tivo you still have to plan ahead. You are limited to the current content you capture. Maybe you don’t normally record Crossfire. (Who does?) So you missed John Stewart’s visit and did not catch his penetrating intellectual plea: “You are hurting us. Stop it.”

VOD to the rescue. Webtalk Guys told me that the clip was available on Ifilm. I watched it. You can watch it. You can even watch it over and over again to plumb the depth of meaning. (Just Google on Ifilm John Stewart.)

With true VOD, you don’t plan. What you want is available on demand. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.

Charter and Comcast have recently staked out new territory in VOD. They offer VOD-cable to some of their subscribers. With VOD-cable, you can go back and watch recent shows. They do the recording for you. That’s more than you get from Tivo. And more than you get from your PC by itself. To my mind, VOD-cable sounds like a Tivo-killer. Probably sounds like that to the cable companies, too. Maybe even to Tivo. But what about Dish satellite?

I'll speculate. Cable gets to feel smug for a while. VOD-cable is hard to match with a satellite feed. But notice that SBC is selling Dish service. And SBC is only one degree of separation from SBCYahoo!, which is selling DSL and various multimedia services. Starz has already recognized that it can treat VODIP as just another way to deliver its content. Dish may follow the same plan. Subscribe to Dish and you could get its content also by VODIP. You don't even have to put up a dish if you don't want to. Or if you don't have good line-of-sight. All you need is SBCYahoo DSL.

Well, you also need a com—Oops. Sorry. I’m not going to use the C-word for something to serve non-Geeks. You need something to connect to the internet, download and store things, organize your content so you can easily find what you want, and direct it to the display you want to use. (There goes management and storage.)

Call it something like “Web TV.” Make the box look like a VCR. Give us a remote to lose. (No matter to the Geeks. We can control things with the Wi-Fi/PDA phone or the OQO. But we will try to be subtle.)