TV IMAGE

Television, according to Vint Ceft, is rapidly approaching its iPod moment. That's when people would no longer be time-chianed to scheduled broadcast programmes but could download and watch them at leisure, just like music is downloaded to hand-hel media players for later listening. Cerf should know something about the future; he's considered to be the godfather of the Internet, the technology he helped create over 3 years ago. He was talking recently at the Edinburgh International Television Festival where ha laid out his vision of the online world to come, particularly in terms of the television-computer interface. While direct-to-home, satellite and streaming Internet protocol TV is undoubtedly state of the art right now, it's not going to remain so for long. That's because real-time viewing will rapidly be replaced by faster than real-time recording. In Japan, for instance, where Net connectivity is of the order of one gigabit, it's possible to download two hours of video in 32 seconds.


Of course, live television would still be around and would be needed for things like breaking news, ongoing sports programmes and emergency broadcasts, but, in the main, the small screen's whichn has probably realised the potential of video on the web, has already launched iPlayer which allows people to download television content to Internet computers for use up to 30 days after broadcast. So does this mean the end of television as we know it? Yes, but not the end of the medium, that is, if its executives don't think of the Internet's influence as a threat instance, here's a great chance for it to become increasingly interactive. Imagine if people could pause a programme and use their mouse to click on different items on the screen to find out more about them. Television could also explore new business models for an emerging iTV economy by syndicating content to multiple devices and, indeed, by that process help in the monetisation of all Internet TV.