A World Where Anything Will Play Anywhere....

The times, they are a changing,,,,
The times,they are a changing....


The media is a changing...
The media is a changing....

Apple and NBC recently had a falling out,
NBC has pulled all its shows from Apples I-Tunes....
Not that it makes any deference to me....
But.....


Theres a bigger story here..

If you read on you find the NBC is opening their own site to stream their own shows for free. As I investigated further I found that CBS, and ABC are also following suit.

Now it begs to question , will theses new models survive?
If you read closely you find at least with NBC, the commercials followed them to the new site.
Will people want to have the options of streaming a show with commercials and being tied to their computer for the privilege.
On the other hand with Apple I-tunes, you pay 1.99 or something to that effect and you get to download it to your machine and you own it. you can then play it on you computer, ipod, or stream it from your computer to your tv, using Apples I-Tv.

And that's not even counting burning your material to DVD, theres some rather heated discussions going on about that in some circles.

In a perfect world.. One could get any show, movie song or other media whenever one wanted, and watch it on whatever was convenient at the time. To be be able to watch a movies or or show on everything from a Ipod to a 50" plasma tv. with 7.1 surround sound.

What we need is a format and hardware both set-top, and portable the will recognize and automatically format and play the media in whatever form is available to the hardware, weather its a Ipod like hand held that can see any wireless network and pull any media off any shared folder, along with whatever is on the actual hardware, be it a hard drive,sd card.

All of this is not factoring in digital rights management(DRM). Hardware must be able to recognize what a file is and what allowed. There will always be a camp will fight and/or otherwise circumvent any DRM scheme that anyone come up. While I am in principle agree with the idea of protecting one own intellectual property . There is STILL such a thing as fair use. The problem is, over the last few years people have taken advantage of the concept of fair use to the point that the record company's having a heart attack and trying to recover a perceived loss. I not saying that haven't lost money over the last few years. However their methods of "recovering their losses" are only serving to strengthen opposition to DRM in general and the RIAA in particular.


The end result is a world with both media hardware and media software coming with DRM in the firmware. In the end the dream of a universal plug and play world, where any media will play on any media without its having to call home and see if its allowed is probably dead.

Back to the lead-in, When I have a computer that I can send a signal to my big tv and watch streaming media off the computer/internet and pipe the audio through the sound system, I'll be more interested in watching streaming media. One other possibility that comes to mind would be a satellite receiver that connects to the internet and gets its programing guide and other software over the internet and lets you surf the web on your tv through the sat receiver, of course you wouldn't have all the printer and other capabilities you have on your computer.
Unless of course you have one of the new media center pc, withe the turner and other niceties that Microsoft offers. Having never had the "pleasure" of using one I can't say how well they work. Xp or worst Vista running my digital media center is not my idea of the optimum media software. However,choices are limited in this respect, When a Tivio can brows web sites and stream media off the net and possibility even store it even temporary on its hard drive, then we're heading in the right direction..
So for now let the major network stream their shows on line for free,,,,,

I don't watch any of them anyways....



Ps; Heres the link to the original story;

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/10/nbc_itunes