My friend Kevin Maney, over at Portfolio.com, finally got my company right (Herb Scannel must have been so surprised!). But that’s not why I’m posting.
In his latest blog post, he predicts a bifurcated future of video, where traditional TV video keeps getting better, while internet delivered video on the PC stays standard definition or worse.
But I think he’s wrong. Kevin is making the mistake of equating internet delivered video with the PC. The PC is just one of many devices that will be used to view video delivered via FTP, HTTP, RTTP or other internet protocols. The audience for Revision3′s episodic, personality-driven shows, along with others in our space, watch on everything from an iPhone to home-theater PCs, portable media players, AppleTV and other web-connected devices.
And even if you do restrict yourself to the PC, the history of that device has been a constant flight to quality.
There was a time – back when I was running PC Week’s Lab - when I thought it folly for a notebook to have a color screen. In fact, monochrome monitors looked far better than the first CGA models. But EGA, VGA, SVGA, etc kept on advancing the state of display quality — and what we looked at got progressively better too.
That’s only going to continue. Today’s HDTVs are no different from the computer monitor sitting on your desk or in your laptop. Some are connected to locally deployed computers (TiVo, Motorola DCTs, etc), and others get their bits from computers a bit futher afield, either at a cable head-end or at the other side of an ATSC transmittion signal.
Quality matters. And the story of the PC and computing devices is an inexorable march towards higher-fidelity (with a short detour as the internet become the dominant transmission medium). And unless we all end up going back to dialup, that’s not going to change. Even if you’re just watching dry how-to videos, or yet another LOLCAT, the better it looks, the better the payoff. And better payoffs translate into more traffic, more ad support and more sharing. The alternative, from where I sit, is dial-up AOL. And not even Time Warner believes in that anymore.
– Jim Louderback, CEO
