Television may well be on its way out. Google has announced that it will offer video downloads, not unlike Apple's hugely popular iTunes online store, which offers paid music and video downloads to users. Video downloads are very popular on the Net, although most of the traffic is allegedly illegal using peer to peer file transfer software like the Gnutella and Kazaa networks.
Convergence advocates have known it all along. With broadband becoming increasingly popular around the world, the role of television will be taken over by the PC, even when the mobile handsets get smarter everyday. Google will offer content from hits like "Survivor","I love Lucy" and "The Brady Bunch". The service will be known as Google Video Store.
The move comes in the wake of Yahoo announcing its own video offering, Yahoo! Go TV. The new service allows users to take content from their personal computer or from the web and extend it onto the biggest screen in their home, according to businesswire.com.
2 comments:
The thing I find a little odd is that two sort of divergent things are happening with video:
- online video like the new Google offering, which even with compression cannot be supported with the current bandwidth of the world's broadband systems
- and the rising popularity of HDTV, which is hugely higher bandwidth and won't be on the internet for the forseeable future.
Mark: Yes, I agree with you on that. But the networks of tomorrow will be definitely supporting high bandwidth transmission, and the chances that your PC transforming to something of a cross between a computer and a tv (and almost everything else) is pretty high, considering the developments like Internet 2 and so on.
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