TV over the Internet

One of the reasons I am so concerned about our woeful broadband speeds, data caps and uptake is my belief that TV shows are going to more and more often delivered over the Internet.

I think the whole concept of TV channels may be gone in a decade or so. People will not pick a channel, but a show. Over the Internet you will be able to choose to view any episode of any show – on demand. Watch the 6 pm news at 8 pm. Watch the news from a week ago. Watch the pilot of MASH or watch The West Wing the same time as it is released in the US. This is the future.

And it is a future which is not decades away. Yesterday Disney announced that it will make TV programmes such as Desperate Houswives and Lost available for free over the internet. They will have ads you can not fast foward as part of them. Fine – if they are free they need ad revenue.

So this is not happening in ten years, or even five years. It is happening in the next few months.

And to really be able to make use of this, NZers will need speeds of 100 Mb/sec. And if there are data caps they should be counted as TBs not GBs.

You see a real high quality one hour TV show can be around 2 GB. If you want to watch TV for five hours a day then that is 10GB a day. Over a month that is 300 GB or so.

And in terms of speed to have a 2 GB file downloaded in say five minutes is 16 Gb in five minutes which is around 50 Mb/sec.

It’s great to see a major TV studio trying to make the free to watch, ad based model, work on the Internet. It is the way of the future.