Television although the internet has easily overshadowed it in terms of media consumption is the last 10 years is a hot topic amongst tech blogs, journalists and speculation. First it was talk of Apple wanting to revolutionise TV and now apparently Google might be moving into the TV space as well with its push for high-fibre connections and its internet TV offering for a competitively priced $120 per month in the states.
Does TV really have a place in this highly connected day and age? Average monitor sizes are getting bigger, eventually it’ll be the norm to have a 30″ desktop monitor just like it was once the norm to have a 17″ monitor and currently it’s around the 24″ mark. Most of my media consumption is done via torrents and Youtube, sometimes I’ll watch a torrent on my TV but usually I’ll watch it on my laptop or desktop computer.
The issue is unless licencing models are changed, you can revolutionise television and content delivery all you like but if Billy and his family in the United States can access the content but Steve and his family in Australia can’t access the same content via the same service then what is the point?
To me that is all TV will ever be: television. There’s nothing to revolutionise because it’s worked so well for the last 70 years, nothing needs to change. I don’t want my TV to have a web browser, my computer does the job quite fine and my TV doesn’t need to take its place. It’s sort of like how they started implementing touch screens into fridges, do people really want a fridge to play music, watch movies and surf the Internet?
I think this world has become somewhat distorted, not everything has to change.
