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A Brief Comment Note From Ruel:
DVD on My Cousin's Big Screen TV:
Interactive TV's future is in VOD
Originally appeared in the Ruel.Net Interactive TV Newsletter
April 22, 2000 -- I've been staying at my relatives' home over in San Jose, California, up in internet-frantic Silicon Valley. I should be back in good old laid-back San Diego in about a week or so, although I should be checking out the iMIX tools and technology seminar in West Hollywood before returning to good old home and my dog. Anyways, while up here in San Jose, I've been playing with my cousin's big screen TV system and his huge DVD collection. And I've been watching my relatives interact with their TV. My relatives get to watch a new movie every day of the year. Staying with my relatives gives me a chance to see how regular TV watchers will possibly handle Video-On-Demand (VOD). With the huge collection of several hundred DVD movies and music videos, my relatives have the equivalent of a VOD subscription service that is already paid for. What they have been doing is "demanding" a movie every night by sorting through a big box of DVDs, putting the movie in a DVD player, playing the movie, and then interacting with the extra menu features of the DVD after the movie is over. In a sense, DVD is an interim off-line step for the next few years on the way towards online VOD. What you see now with DVD, you will see with VOD in a few years when by the middle of this decade some are saying VOD will really begin to take off.
If you follow this industry with any degree of attention, you would probably bet that the real future of interactive television will be in VOD. Surfing plain internet webpages and performing minor computer-type functions will play less major roles on interactive television. Right now, the term "Internet TV" can be thought of as browsing simple text webpages with a dial-up set-top box. In the very near future, "Internet TV" connected to broadband will probably be thought of as a new "channel" for accessing full-motion TV-quality video. Cable TV will continue to have first-run movies on movie channels, pay-per-view, and cable's own new interactive VOD service. But the internet will give content owners and producers the ability to bypass cable to more directly deliver content to the consumer. You will probably be hearing about "direct-to-internet" movies in the future. The technology for serving video on the web is rapidly developing for distributing TV-quality video via the internet.
Existing DVD and videotape watching behavior, where you drive to the local Blockbuster-type videotape rental store, or sort through a big box of videotapes and DVDs, to "demand" a movie to watch at home, will be transferred to the interactive TV environment. In the interactive TV environment, the consumer would click on the remote control to go to a TV online version of a Blockbuster store (either a cable or internet video service) and select a movie to watch that night. The consumer may click and pay for a single movie to watch or the consumer may click on a movie as part of a monthly subscription service. The brick-and-mortar videotape rental store may possibly go the way of the dinosaur in about five to ten years time when VOD takes over the TV set.
[...]
Happy TV Watching!
Ruel
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