Media More and More Television

Media

More and more television programming is being made available on mobile devices following its initial exhibition on television, raising a number of regulatory,

Technical, and financial issues that must be addressed in order to develop multi-platform opportunities for the future. For decades, television programming has been offered over-the-air (and later by cable) to be viewed when it is shown on television sets across the country and around the world. Programming generally had only two levels of airing for most of that time, first on a network (or as original programming shown on non-network stations) and second in syndication, to be rerun at different times and on different stations according to sales. These secondary showings were also to be viewed at the time the program was shown. With the advent of home video, however, another platform was added, one formal and one informal. The formal platform would be commercial home video, fist video tape and later video disks, sold by the company controlling the rights to people who could watch the program whenever they want. There was also an informal platform with the widespread use of recording devices, first VCRs and later DVRs, with which the individual could time-shift any program an watch it when he or she deemed desirable. Certainly, these shifts in viewing time accustomed much of the public to having this sort of choice. Now, owners of copyrighted material see the opportunity to show their material on a number of different platforms and to increase revenue with each showing, today including original showings, syndication, DVD sales, showings on the Internet, and even showings on hand-held devices such as cell phones, PDAs, video i-Pods, and so on.

The developing system provides new opportunities for content producers to make money from their product, but there are also pitfalls in having this material disseminated in so many ways. The producers have lost control of their own material to a great degree, and putting it on the Internet generally means that it could be copied and disseminated by others more easily than in the past. This problem is recognized by everyone with digital content, for a digital copy is a perfect copy and one that can be transferred over the Internet with no degradation in quality. If the computers are fast enough, such a transfer can be very fast if not instantaneous, and the only reason such transfers are not now instantaneous is because the technology is not yet honed enough to perform this task, notably because of the bandwidth needed to transfer large files over the Internet. As larger and larger bandwidth becomes more available, however, the process will speed up. Indeed, producers are counting on higher bandwidth so they can transmit movies and television shows to be viewed on the Internet in real time if not faster than real time. Every time the technology improves to create new possibilities for content producers, the producers also see a new threat from the public as well.

The changes are affecting companies that create and sell the hardware used as well, along with companies serving one or more of the platforms. As one businesss media company notes,

Increasing numbers of consumers trolling through an ever-expanding volume of content using a growing multiplicity of devices complicates navigation, but at the same time, providers have to make navigation simpler. Consumers want to make the fewest possible clicks to locate and play content, and cable MSOs - along with competing telcos and satellite companies - are getting the message: there must be improvement in navigating the sea of content (Kuhl, 2007, para. 4).

Companies creating search engines will need to develop the means to find and identify not only text but also visual images and sound files and to search these various types of file for specific content. The technological challenges are considerable, but there are many companies working on solving these issues as consumers using a number of different devise want to search the hundreds of channels available to find th content they want. One analyst not that this has not been a high priority in the past but that it will have to be in the future, and he says that "several providers realize they not only have to package content, but turn guides and navigational tools into revenue generators. We're nearing the point of an overwhelming amount of content, and guides and navigational tools are the central pieces" (Kuhl, 2007, para. 5).

These developments are being addressed even as the market is changing, with different needs for different types of content. Mark Hess, senior vice president of business and production development for digital TV at Comcast, notes,

On the video side, people want to watch TV, not play with a guide. So, we want to highlight content and make it easier and more comfortable for them to find content, particularly as on Demand grows. We can't just come up with a brand new navigation scheme, but we are working value into the menu bar (Kuhl, 2007, para. 5).

Certainly, there are many technical problems to be overcome in creating a system more conducive to ease of navigation through small hand-held devices as well as home television and computers. A recent survey shows how people are getting content today and noted that 70% of Internet users have viewed 123 billion videos online, with an average length of 2.6 minutes. Higher bandwidth will make it more possible to view longer videos and even movies, and another boost to this sort of transfer will come when it becomes easier to connect the computer to a television set so a movie can be downloaded and viewed on a television screen at the same time.

Th regulatory environment is also changing as these new devices become more commonly used for this sort of viewing. Copyright issues have been raised with reference to the downloading of copyrighted material. This issue was raised when the VCR became a consumer device and people started using it for time-shifting. The issue was decided in the Betamax case, more formally known as Sony v. Universal Studios, a Supreme Court case that provided a landmark copyright precedent protecting a wide array of technology innovators from lawsuits at the hands of the entertainment industries:

In 1984, the Court held that a company -- in this instance, a VCR manufacturer -- was not liable for creating a technology that some customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the technology is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. In other words, where a technology has many uses, the public cannot be denied the lawful uses just because some (or many or most) may use the product to infringe copyrights (the Betamax Case, 2007, para. 1).

Content producers have tried to limit the uses to which customers may put even material they have paid for, and recent efforts directed at controlling music downloading and copying shows that content providers are still concerned about any unauthorized use. The Betamax issue does not apply unless the device on which the content is being downloaded and viewed ca n also record the content for playback later, and some of these devices do just that. Indeed, most of them at least cache the files before showing them, and users might collect these files and distribute them separately. Just as the use of the VCR was not addressed in the law until the case reached the Supreme Court, and just as the parameters of music downloading and sharing was not clear until court decisions clarified the matter and outlawed certain file-sharing sites, so is it likely that problems that might develop with providing content across multiple platforms may not be fully decided until litigation forces the issue. It might be preferable if the various companies involved could agree on these issues as they introduce new services, though even then, it is likely that how such agreements should be worded will depend ultimately on the way people use the devices and services in the future.

From the point-of-view of the consumer, the ability to download films and television shows to mobile devices will be freeing to a degree, allowing the consumer to see what he or she wants virtually anywhere at any time. This will change the way people consumer media to a great degree and also how they pay for it. Broadcast television was sustained by the advertising model, while cable shifted to a partial pay-per-view model, or at least to the willingness of the consumer to pay for the service as a whole. Both models extended their income by later sales to other media platforms and to consumers in the form of video tapes and video disks.

How willing consumers are to watch television or movies on hand-held devices depends on the technology and the size and vividness of the screens. In truth, such devices are likely to remain secondary to other types of viewing indefinitely. Viewers may watch certain types of program more readily on a hand-held device, such as news broadcasts where immediacy is the most important element, while they will continue to watch movies and entertainment programs on a home television system. This is perhaps even more likely as the home system becomes larger and more realistic, as is seen in High Definition television, with larger screens to emulate the experience of watching a film in a theater. There will probably be competition between the two, with smaller films and films with certain types of content being more commonly accessed by hand-held devices, while the large-scale spectacle film will be more readily viewed on the larger screen system. As noted, delivery by computer is more a method than a defining feature, and delivery by this means will one day tie directly to the television set, allowing for greater flexibility as the consumer can order what he or she wants online and watch it immediately. This can be done today with most cable systems, but the system of the future will not be tied to a given system for such services.