Gilberte Houbart	Set top boxes, interactive TV, HDTV, WebTV... The landscape is getting rather confusing. One approach to better define a frame of reference is to deconstruct and examine separately what Television has covered as a medium: content, culture, technology and politics. Online TV is defined here as the result of the redefinition of these four components. [more on the definition].

What to Do? I propose a system derived from my work at the Media Lab and my on-going investigation in technology design and market analysis. It is only a subset of what can be done, as we can hope that imagination is our only limit... The key concepts are as follow:   The "Smart VCR" Interface The "smart VCR" is an intelligent video browsing software that knows about the user and the content. It can not only select programs more relevant to a viewer's profile but it can also construct shows and personal TV Guides. "Evolving Stories" The beauty of such system is that the database can be extended at will, resulting in a content piece that can evolve over time as elements are added, changed or removed from the database (by the content provider or by visitors). The "Me Channel" Tailoring video content implies that not only you can construct videos on demand but you can also request only certain categories and styles of content. Ideally you'd want only one channel that "automagically" serves you only what you want and only that. Communities in Context of Content Email was the killer app of the Internet. When the Web came along, chat rooms made AOL a large successful company. Clearly people want to meet other people online. Content associated to social activities and community, or even produced collaboratively, will have more impact. Yes, But Will They Come? This proposition extends principles that have proven to be successful: community, user contributed content, customization. As long as users feel like they are special, yet part of a community, there is a greater incentive to come back. Infrastructure for Online TV The main components are: 1- the indexing station to condition video content in such way that the viewer can browse the resulting signal augmented with "meta" information. 2- the video server to store and distribute the video. The signal may be distributed through standard ground connection or through digital broadcasting. The entire system constitutes a kind of database backed Web site. Once the video is tagged, indexed, it is then stored in a database. 3- the Smart VCR itself represents the front end through which the end user accesses the content.   Why Now is the Right Time? When Internet start-ups are tanking left and right, it becomes harder to hold an argument in favor of online TV with all the technical obstacles inherent to the medium: bandwidths, cost of distribution, cost of archiving, lack of common standards. Bandwidth is becoming less of an issue with the upcoming broadband technologies (x2, 56K, cable modems, digital broadcasting). The cost of archiving and distribution can be reduced by developing products that allow economies of scale. Such systems can be designed to adapt to multiple standards. Technology, as usual, is not the major problem: it can be bent and used in efficient ways. The two real issues are audience behavior and content. Understanding them is what will make a site popular or not. Audience behavior is culture driven. Today's Web audience is the equivalent of the Rock'n Roll generation, except that this is not a community around music, but around virtual worlds and communities creating a new form of fantasy. Online TV holds promises that the Web as it is cannot: with audio, video, animation combined, online TV is dramatic, dynamic... in other words it's engaging and much more likely to attract traffic. Today's Web is page based, using a space based design in 2D rather than thetime based design video, audio and animation bring to the screen. Now of course, it's not just a matter of playing video on a screen. Television has done that very well for decades and Nicholas Negroponte is fond of saying that if you ask someone in the street "What's the problem with TV?", he probably won't say it's technology or a bad image but programming. Content needs to reflect the transformation of technology and culture. If content is "recycled" over the Web, then it has to somehow go through a transformation. Beyond that, the future is in content developed for a digital medium (see "ViewPoints on Demand" for an attempt in that direction).   Home | Online TV | Content | Media Lab | Startups | Design | ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1994 - Gilberte Houbart - MIT