Jeff Jarvis writes:
All the old definitions of TV are in shambles. Television need not be broadcast. It needn’t be produced by studios and networks. It no longer depends on big numbers and blockbusters. It doesn’t have to fit 30- and 60-minute moulds. It isn’t scheduled. It isn’t mass. The limits of television - of distribution, of tools, of economics, of scarcity - are gone. So now, at last, we can ask not what TV is, but what it can be.
I envision TV that is interactive when it wants to be. I imagine TV that is live, with news from the scene thanks to a hundred video camera-phones. I look forward to the day when I can watch not what Hollywood recommends, but what my friends endorse.
What is TV now? We don’t know yet, for every time I think I’ve spotted all the sticks of dynamite set to explode under old, linear television, I discover new fuses sizzling.
- Apple has just announced iTV, a box that will wirelessly transport internet video on to our televisions. Thus, the line between broadcast and online - like the line between terrestrial and cable or satellite - is erased.
- At a conference in Boston last month, I saw software that streams high-definition TV over the web and a company that promises to deliver live video to unlimited viewers.
- On MediaGuardian.co.uk, the BBC chairman, Michael Grade, fretted that British standards of broadcast news impartiality become difficult to enforce when the very definition of broadcast becomes meaningless.
- My teen son and his friends are getting hooked on new series not via TV but through the web and iTunes. Me too - I discovered the show Weeds on my iPod. My son’s favourite internet show, Diggnation - in which two guys with beers gab about geek news - has turned profitable and just got $1m in venture investment to start a network’s worth of new shows. My new mobile phone streams live TV news.