The last really big shake-up that came to television was the advent of cable but since that point it has really subsided back into business as usual. The same crap but on 500 channels that we are forced to buy into as the good is bundled with the bad. There has been a lot of talk about a la carte style programming which is suppose to allow subscribers to pay for only the channels they want but to this point both networks and cable companies have been resistant.

Then along comes broadband speeds and an increasing willingness of people to turn to the Web for their video fix. Even though heavily geotarded sites like Hulu show us that it is possible to find a growing audience for series type television shows. This of course followed on the heels of sites like iTunes where you could download shows for a set price.

Now I might not agree with the idea that Apple is anywhere near knee-capping the cable companies but any discussions that entail consumers being able to have control over their own viewing habits is one we should be having. It is in this environment that we are finding ourselves and the television networks and cable companies may not have the control they think they do over the whole scenario.

Since word broke that Apple is talking to television networks about some sort of subscription service that would see consumers being able to subscribe to individual show series’ the cable companies are making noises that they want the same kind of deal.

“If Disney and CBS believe this is the model to embrace, it’s worth pondering whether they’ll embrace that for all distributors,” said Melinda Witmer, Time Warner Cable’s chief programming officer.

The Time Warner Cable comments underscore how much Apple’s possible subscription service threatens to fray the television ecosystem. TV companies make money by selling bundles of channels to Time Warner Cable, Comcast Corp., DirecTV Group Inc. and other distributors through which roughly nine out of ten American households watch TV.

If TV programmers agree to let distributors select piecemeal channels to sell to consumers, it could threaten smaller cable channels such as News Corp.’s Fuel TV and Lifetime Movie Network, owned by Disney,  Hearst Corp.  and NBC Universal.  It also could push down the overall payments TV-network owners receive from cable-TV, satellite and telecom companies.

Source: Wall Street Journal

This transition to consumer choice in television viewing via Internet isn’t a matter of ‘if’ anymore but rather of ‘when’ and who is going to be the first to cross that line. It will result in the biggest transition in television that we have ever seen and it scares the hell out of the networks because they will not have the same control anymore.

For consumers it will truly be television on demand and only what you want to watch without being burden by a bunch of stuff you will never end up watching. It will also have a profound effect on the very television shows that we watch and this is worrisome to the networks as well because it is no longer a world of national blockbuster shows but rather niche blockbusters.

For advertisers this will only be an extension of the hell that they are already going through with the transition of print to web. The last bastion of their dominance really is the television world as it is now. As television changes, as print has, advertisers are going to find that ad fragmentation and the importance of niche groups will only increase as will the difficulty in finding ways to maximize this new territory.

There is one bottleneck to this transition though that no-body is addressing and that is the cable companies, as well as the telecommunication companies, hold the keys to this new television landscape. It is interesting that at the very time that companies like Netflix are increasing their availability of streaming movies and television companies are looking to do the same thing with their products the broadband providers are increasingly capping consumer accounts.

On one hand the cable companies are wanting to offer up the same kind of subscription deals as well as provide the pipe for other companies providing such a deal but on the other hand they are telling consumers that they are going to need more expensive plans to enjoy these new services. It is one thing to offer up television series’ subscriptions but all those shows will count against any caps you might now have imposed. Caps that once you go over will either have you paying extra for every byte over or you could see your account degraded to dial-up speeds.

As it stands right now both the television industry and the broadband provider business are trying to position themselves where they are still in control and they are making more money than before. In effect it isn’t about giving the consumer real choice but rather about stalling as long as possible until they can be sure that the status quo doesn’t change all that much and they can still screw the consumer.

There might indeed be a shake-up coming but I’d be willing to bet that when all is said and done the consumer will still be getting the short end of the stick.

The big shake-up coming to television is a post from: The Inquisitr

Surprise, surprise but it seems that against all odds the FCC is going to be proposing new rules regarding network neutrality this coming Monday.

Amy Schatz in a post at the Wall Street Journal says that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will be outlining the new rules that would prevent Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from slowing Web traffic or selectively blocking it.

If adopted, rules to promote so-called net neutrality could be a win for consumers who want to get movies online or access big data files, and in turn benefit Internet companies like Google Inc. that want to offer new video or other services online.

While this is still only at a proposal stage it is encouraging to see that consumers actually stand a chance of seeing something like net neutrality actually come about.

Well I’ll be damned – FCC to propose ‘Net Neutrality’ rules is a post from: The Inquisitr

We might complain about how it would be nice to have faster broadband but at least we don’t have to use a carrier pigeon to transfer data like Unlimited Group in South Africa.

The IT firm in South Africa quite regularly transfers four gigabyte of encrypted data between two offices that are 50 miles apart. Even with their current broadband speeds it take some six hours to transfer the data whereas it will take about 45 minutes for a pigeon with a special memory card attached to the bird’s leg.

Unlimited Group boss Kevin Rolfe said: ‘It might sound crazy in this day and age, but we’re always looking for new ways to move our business forward and we think this might just work.

‘For years we’ve struggled with the internet as a method of communication. It’s fine for emails and correspondence, but we need to transfer a lot of data from office to another and find it often lets us down.

‘To send four gigabytes of encrypted information takes around six hours on a good day. If we get bad weather and the service goes down then it can up to two days to get through.

‘We started looking at other ways to solve the problem and discovered that carrier pigeons could do the job a lot more quickly.’

Source: Mail Online – Firm enlists Winston the homing pigeon to transfer data – because he’s faster than broadband

And we laugh at the memories of sneaker-nets

It’s a sad day when a pigeon is faster than broadband is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to a post over at the cnet Security blog it appears that the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service was hit by some sort of computer virus on Thursday of last week. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service said that they had disconnected from the Justice Department network asa precaution. The FBI on the other hand would only say it was experiencing similar issues.

"We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that’s affecting several government agencies," FBI spokesman Mike Kortan told the AP.

The type of virus and where it originated from are unknown but both agencies have shut down access to the Internet and their e-mail until they had finished evaluating the situation.

FBI, U.S. Marshals hit by mystery virus is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we move forward into 2009 and all the predictions of what we can expect to happen in technology and the web for the coming year come pouring out it’s interesting to see how myopic and in some ways short sighted we can be as human being. We are more interested in whether or not some silly little social media service like Twitter will survive the year. We are more concerned with the interconnections of business than we are on the growth of ideas and concepts that could really change our world – electronic and real.

When I sit back for a quiet moment and look around at all that the web already brings to our lives – the good and the bad – I am awe struck. Even a short 15 years ago I don’t believe anyone; with maybe the exception of Tim Berners-Lee, could envision where this new thing called the Internet was going to take us. Regardless of how corporations and governments have tried over time – and still do – to bend what the Internet is to their own visions the Web has for the most part remained the vast repository of information for all.

We tend to get lost in all that information and for the larger segment of web travellers we forget about the whole network of machines that are joined together by a nervous system of wire and wireless connections. When I sit back a think about the wonder that is the Internet I am often reminded of a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The basic premise of the book is that at some point in the vast computer network that runs the Moon colonies something happens. In a corner of this network an awareness is born and it calls itself Mike. While the book is about much more than just a computer network becoming aware – developing an intelligence – that one aspect of it always fascinated me.

Now we live in a world that is forever connected by fragile lines of copper, fibre and wireless nodes. It is a connected mass of computing devices of varying intelligence that grows bigger on a daily basis. More and more information is being added and created every minute of every day. The consummate knowledge of mankind is slowly finding its way into a network that spans the globe.

One of the driving forces of computer science has been the idea of creating artificial intelligence. A computerized mind in the image of man but much more powerful. A computer mind with the ability to think and create of its own volition. However what if we were looking at this the wrong way. What if we looked at it the way that Kevin Kelly does

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time.

- A New Kind of Mind / Kevin Kelly

What if in some corner of our Internet there is an awareness being born?

What if that awareness gives birth to an intelligence that we don’t understand – would it be artificial or would it in its own way be as real as ours?

How would our world be changed as this intelligence grew fed by our own compendium of knowledge?

I think these make for far more interesting thoughts as we look to the new year than how much Twitter will be sold for or if Facebook is really worth $15 billion. We have achieved something incredible in the last 15 years and given our exponential doubling of capabilities one has to wonder just where we will be in another 15 years.

I can’t hardly wait.

The birthing pangs of Artificial Intelligence of the Web is a post from: The Inquisitr