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I was in downtown Brisbane on Saturday spending some time at Borders before heading to dinner with some friends. I was in the magazine section and a frontpage feature caught my eye - “the future of television”. I started reading at 3:30pm and by 5pm I had finished all the articles in the feature and was thoroughly excited about the prospects for digital entertainment and media convergence in the not to distant future. In fact the future is starting today.

Digital convergence is something I have been very excited about for a long time. The prospect of TV and the web, basically any digital media/entertainment, all becoming seamlessly integrated, personalised, and readily available on the move at highspeed is damn cool. I like the idea of simply searching a database for any movie or television episode ever created and then instantly downloading and watching it. Even better you won’t be confined to your home television or computer, you can use your cell phone to watch the latest episode of your favourite television show while sitting on the train to work.

Some interesting points I took away from reading the magazine -

• The concept of prime time television will no longer exist the way it does now. Users will simply download the latest episode and watch it whenever they want to. Only time sensitive events like elections, olympics and (gasp!) reality shows like Big Brother or American Idol will be watched “live”.
• The film industry has taken note of how badly the music industry dealt with piracy issues and has learnt from their mistakes and the subsequent success of legal music services like iTunes. They seem to “get it”, unlike the music industry in the early days of online music. The way to compete with pirates and illegal file sharing is to offer a legitimate service that is comparably better at a price that makes it worth spending the money to avoid the pain and risks involved when hunting for illegal copies.
• One of the major challanges for the future of digital entertainment is how to monetise the entertainment. With near-infinite channel options and digital delivery users can very easily screen out or delete commercials. Current thoughts are that the personalisation of distribution will be so well matched that users will want to view commercials or the commercials themselves will not be perceived as commercials. Imagine the implications if a user watching Sex and the City could simply click on Carrie’s shoes and a pop up will spring to life allowing the user to instantly purchase them. Now that’s product placement.
• The long tail effect will be very prominent in tomorrow’s entertainment world. Television will be tightly niched to millions of little markets as the ability to customise and personalise entertainment will be unparralled. Every industry, hobby or topic that can sustain a market will have a place in the digital entertainment network. Social networking will allow individuals to very accurately find what other people with the same interests are viewing. Poker fans can view what other poker fans enjoyed by simply viewing the top 10 most watched shows by poker players.

Want a taste of the future?

South Korea and Japan are already enjoying digital TV on the go using tiny monitors on the latest cell phones and in cars with content broadcast via sattelite. The technology called DMB - digital multimedia broadcasting - has started catching on especially with the youth market.

Mobile television services, dubbed by Korean officials as digital multimedia broadcasting, are designed to beam digital television, audio and data to handheld devices via satellite or land-based television airwaves.

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Blinkx the first search engine for TV uses unique search technology and voice recognition to extract keywords from the audio content. It’s a search engine that watches the video as part of it’s indexing process.