Does anybody know why a TV station — I’m talking to you, KGO — would run a crawl line alerting viewers about the impending switch to digital TV on their digital channel?
As worked up TV stations and Congress are over the upcoming switch , they’re mostly ignoring the real switch that is already underway for some extra-early adopters like the types of people who would read a post like this one.
If you haven’t tried Boxee, try it. Especially if you’re a marketer. Boxee is an open Alpha test with all the expected bugs and UI issues that brings, but it’s a brilliant vision of a file-based entertainment future. Boxee runs on your Mac, PC, or AppleTV with some minor hacking. It can play video and audio content from your home network and from some Internet sources including Hulu, Comedy Central, and CNN. More interestingly, it lets you share what you’re watching with friends in your Boxee network, and it lets you see what others are watching too. (Subject to some privacy controls.) In other words, it’s a social media network.
Most of the TV shows available from the Internet via Boxee include ads that cannot be fast forwarded. This type of ad placement is still very experimental, and the ads are often annoyingly repetitive. (The same McDonalds spot appeared four times during a single South Park episode from Comedy Central.) This will change with time. Ads will become more relevant and less repetitive. Netflix’s new Watch Instantly streaming service is another example of this file-based trend. For the moment the service is free with a Netflix account, and sign-up is extremely easy. There are no ads to deal with, and watching movies from a vast online library is a revelation. It works on a computer and through media devices including Tivo boxes and Blu-ray players.
I’ve noticed two changes in my own behavior while using Boxee. First, I’m tearing through episodes of shows that I never got around to watching. Second, I’m fascinated by what other people are watching and it’s influencing my own viewing behavior to an unexpected degree. The social network part of Boxee is still a work-in-progress, but it’s fascinating and I think it’s going to create a new type of marketing based on passive sharing, not dissimilar to Facebook’s much-maligned Beacon initiative. With a few key exceptions — for me, my shameful Paula Deen addiction — I think we secretly want our friends to know what we’re watching as long as the sharing process is easy. For Boxee, it’s passive. Doesn’t get easier than that.
Boxee will have some challenges building a ratings system for content — partners won’t like it — but it needs to do it now. (Netflix has a great ratings system, but it’s sidelined by its status as a closed system limited to subscribers.) If Boxee executes, it could become a sherpa for this new world of decentralized media, a great position to be in if there ever was one.
Internet providers, especially cable companies, could deliver a buzz kill to this new world in the form of higher fees and data download restrictions. It’s certainly not in their best interests to become a dumb pipe and they’ll fight it just as hard as cell phone providers have in the US, but that seems to be their inevitable fate.
For me, Boxee and Netflix’s streaming service have been “ah ha” experiences akin to what I felt when I first used an iPhone in person. The future is file-based, on demand content over the Internet, delivered to any platform I have. Most content will be ad-supported, but some will be pay-per-view. I have no idea if the entertainment industry’s business models can manage this transition, but I think it’s unlikely they’ll have the stomach for it. New content providers will emerge with lower fixed costs and fewer revenue lines to protect, but this too will take time.
This is going to take a long time to shake out, but a very long time isn’t as long as it used to be. File-based entertainment is too good of a user experience to ignore. Ignore that crawl line across the top of your TV, and turn on Boxee. The switch already happened.
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