TV in 2020 Predictions (June 16, 2009)

Internet-enabled TV sets will be the norm as converter boxes, DVRs, VCRs, TiVos, and finally analog TVs are filling the recycling centers. People will just use their high speed Internet connection to watch TV shows in either real time or on a on-demand basis (you cannot skip through the ads though).

Imagine this. Today, you have to subscribe to a multitude of services you don't want, pay for equipment you don't like, and deal with a cable company monopoly you don't like in order to get a channel you're willing to pay for.

For example, to get a few digital cable channels you want, such as NFL Network, Disney XL, or even the dreaded MTV reality show rerun channel or whatever, you have to get limited basic, expanded basic, a converter box rental, and buy at least two digital tier packages to get what you want. If one network is on four different tiers, you have to pay for four of them.

With VCRs, you cannot tape digital signals without a converter box. With a TiVo, you have to pay a monthly charge of some $18 a month. With a cable DVR, you have to rent it, but you're limited to taping the channels you're already paying for on the TV set.

With today's TV, you're either watching it live, or not watching it at all. If you can't tape it for later viewing, you missed it, and it probably may never be repeated ever again.

Enter the Internet-enabled TV set. You just subscribe to any high speed cable service, Connect a cable modem between the TV set and cable feed, go to a specialty TV network search engine that links to all of the TV networks and broadcast stations, search for a station, network, or TV show, and it will search them out for you.

The broadcast TV stations and networks can make all of their shows available on demand a few hours after its initial airing (or release day and time). They can be made available for a week or longer as agreed with the producer of the program. Already, you can go to some websites to watch a few TV shows you missed, but not all of the TV shows are available for on demand viewing.

The Internet already has many websites like hulu, youtube, fancast, NBC, CBS, Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, etc, offering recent episodes of some new shows you missed. Someday, you could hook up a high speed modem to a TV and watch it on your 60-inch HDTV screen of your TV set instead of a computer.

Cable networks that never could get on certain cable systems can bypass the cable company and offer their shows on the Internet either on-demand or live. You won't need to subscribe to channels you never watch just to get the one channel you really want to watch. No more subscribing to tiers full of reality shows and shopping channels you never watch. No more confusing cable converter boxes that suck up electricity costs.

Some channels can offer commercial-fee on demand episodes for an additional fee so they can make some money to offset the costs of producing the shows and keeping the website services open. Fox Sports West Prime Ticket could be on everywhere live or on demand even though several staunch cable companies won't carry it on their systems.

Radio shows are already offering their talk show episodes on podcast and streaming live. Can't get a local station to air your favorite syndicated show? Go to the show's website and stream it on demand.

The best thing about the Internet-enabled TV sets of the future. No more confusing differences between analog, digital, SDTV, HDTV, EDTV, 480i, 1080p, and other terms few people heard about in 1999. Who cares? People just want a show, and they'll get it when they want, in high definition digital (or standard definition if they're older shows) and with the greatest of ease. Want to watch a channel, whether or not your cable company wants to carry it? Find it on the search engine, and tune in live or on demand. Miss a new episode of Two and a Half Men or just discovered it and watch all of the shows to catch up? Use the search engine to find the complete episode guide on the show page or show website.

Cable internet providers would have to become mostly cable highways that people rent instead of trying to carry thousands of channels in a confusing array of tiers and equipment rentals. In essence, cable TV as it is today would become a thing of the past, as it simply becomes a defacto distributor of TV shows between the Internet and the viewer.

No more channel lineups numbering into the thousands. No more hunting for a channel with a channel number to tune into. No more cable's practice of forcing you to pay for an HDTV version of a channel you're already paying for as a SDTV version. You'll automatically get an HDTV version of the network when you tune into the channel like HBO, ESPN, Nick, etc., instead of the SDTV version, unless the SDTV version is the only one offered until the cable network upgrades into an HDTV channel.

All of the local TV stations, including major stations and smaller low powered stations, can be tuned in no matter where you live. You'll also get some distant TV stations that can be offered more easily with the help of cable deregulation that won't restrict the territorial contours of the TV stations. In fact, independent fare would be the norm of the local broadcast stations as the syndicated fare would then be offered directly to the viewers from the TV show websites. Watch Seinfeld on demand anytime, or Saved By The Bell too, any time you want. Syndicated fare would be phased out because everybody would have seen the shows on the net anyway.

All of the broadcast networks would migrate to cable and say goodbye to the affillite system. CBS, ABC, and Fox (I'm not sure about CW, NBC, and others) would offer all of their shows directly to their viewers through the Internet TV sets. Local stations could purchase some of the shows offered by the networks for airing in their areas to benefit those who don't have an Internet TV. There would be no more network affilliations as any TV station would be free to buy shows from the networks as well as from the syndicators. They could carry whatever their viewers would want to see live.

The networks could literally go 24 hours a day live instead of part-time like they do today. They could offer on demand shows that they produce as new, such as game shows or kids fare, even if they don't make it on their live 24 hour feed, so a network could air far more hours of programs a day and air them live for the 24 hour feed, and on demand the rest.

Are soap operas dying? Illegal youtube postings of some TV shows are not only contributing to their demise by lowering the ratings of their initial network airings, they're also being viewed by thousands of people who watch it on the youtube for one reason or another such as not being able to get the digital TV signal at their house. This cheats the network out of the Nielsen ratings for the shows, which is why I'm seeing ratings below 2.0 for six out of eight shows.

With TV shows being streamed legitimately through the TV show's site or network, they will be accurately tracked by Nielsen and people won't skip through the commercials as they already can't with hulu and other legal websites. Networks and TV show production companies can share in the ad revenue between them. Certain past episodes of some shows can be offered for a limited time to get people to visit the sites more often.

Going on demand could even save and even revive some dying and dead TV shows that were never given a chance because they were on opposite a popular show. Just about any TV show could be given a new lease on life by being offered on demand. Nielsen could track each on demand stream as long as each show has commercials, and that is an accurate way of measuring how many viewers are watching the show. Show streams sans commercials would be paid for by the viewers and not tracked by Nielsen.

Sports broadcasts can be live or on demand, but the sports organizations such as the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, and others can place territorial restrictions on the free streamcasts and podcasts of their live sport events. This is in order to protect all of their local franchises from competetion from their out of town same league franchises. Already pay MLB streamcasts are being offered on the Internet for computers. NFL Game Day offers pay packages of games for a certain satellite dish network. The government would change it so that NFL Game Day can be offered through a cable modem and no satellite TV service would be needed.

Which leads me to satellite TV services. They too would be rendered irrelevant unless they redesign their service into a Internet TV service for rural viewers that can't get high speed cable. They would simply be an rented Internet connection in the sky that would let Internet TVs on rural areas to watch any channel they want.

By the time Internet TV becomes a reality, expect download speeds of a few gigabits a second to become a reality so it can deliver all those HDTV signals without compression that sucks the life out of those Sunday Night Football telecasts. 19.8 mbps might be okay for non sports events in 720p (1280x720) or 1080i, but 1080p (1920x1080) needs a faster bitrate than 19.2 mbps that is offered on broadcast TV; 38.4 is what is needed for 1080p. In the future, we might see even more resoultion such as maybe 1800p (3200x1800), and that would require even faster bit rates to keep up with all of the action!

No more compressing video streams as some cable companies are doing so they can pack more channels in smaller space. I've seen pixelation on even the slow motion shows like One Life to Live on Soapnet, and Cox overcompressed a lot of the networks offered on the digital tiers so they could fit more cable networks onto the limited bandwidth spectrum. This is proof that cable is using some kind of compression scheme on the extreme. Are they packing some 60 SDTV channels onto the space of one 6MHz channel? With Internet TVs, watch any TV show on demand on the Internet without the ugly compression.

TV in 2020. Can't hardly wait to say goodbye to cable TV providers as they are today, and they'll be nothing more than an Internet connection between the world and you.