The advent of web 2.0 has supposedly been a boon on both the internet and its users. Personally I’m still standing on the fence. Yes it has some very definite and enjoyable benefits, hell I’m using one of them right now by blogging this, but it’s also brought about a whole host of painful things, most notably in my opinion a giant free for all of user created content with no benchmark or quality control whatsoever, meaning we’re not only flooded with information, but we’re also flooded with a shit lot more crap information and data than before. Oh and it’s now never been easier for everyone and their dog to voice opinions on anything and everything. Maybe I’m getting old or maybe it’s democracy, I’m not sure.

A web 2.0 moan isn’t my purpose this time round though. Rather I’ve got thinking about one of the many promises the advent of the internet has made since its prominent rise in the late 90s. And that’s the promise of online, on-demand TV. Having been in Japan for over 9 months I must say I’m starting to suffer from slight withdrawal symptoms, not because I don’t watch TV anymore (that ticks a good box in my book) but because I don’t watch anything in English anymore. Japanese TV has its uses, but so far they’re pretty limited. As my mate put it, Japanese TV is the equivalent of having Channel 5 on every channel :lol: . Which ain’t that great is it? Ask the Italians if you don’t believe me, Berlusconi has ruined Italian TV forever with the same, cheap tactics.

So the other day I decided I wanted to start watching some TV programs again - partly because I’d been given some bits to watch by my friend (the first series of Heroes amongst other things) and partly because Ella had been hinting that TV links is a good way to watch some TV online. The downside of being given things to watch, is that once you’re hooked you want more, and yes TV Links is quite good, but it suffers from some problems like many other streaming sites out there. Links are often broken, copyrighted content is hunted down and withdrawn and streaming quality varies greatly, all of which don’t make for great pleasure. Unless you’re a technology freak.

Which got me thinking about this good old promise of on-demand TV. It’s been thrown about for a few years now, and some decent services do exist, mainly in the US. But there isn’t one yet that has managed to really tick all, or most, of the right boxes. A lot of the decent services are country specific, which in this day and age strikes me as a very stupid move (especially coming from global media conglomerates), a lot of the non-country specific services are bordely legal (TV Links, Stage 6, Joost) in that they do provide some legal content but are also rife with not so legal content which is generally the content most people want to see (ie. latest episodes of the latest popular series, reruns of classics etc…) and which is why it’s being uploaded to those services. The other thing the non-country specific services suffer from is the general up and down quality of content and the fact that they primarily supply it for streaming not downloading. Streaming is all good and well, but I’d like to be able to watch something when I want, not when my connection is plugged in.

All this thinking came about after I discovered Veoh, which I guess shows how not in touch I am sometimes (or more likely how much I didn’t really care about TV and movies anymore for most of the year). Veoh is one of those web 2.0 upload/stream sites, with a growing community and fancy design. It beats the likes of youtube and googlevideo by offering no upload limit, and up until recently also allowing you to download the original file you were streaming. Damn someone actually got onto the good ideas :shock: . Not for long it seems unfortunately, the day after I realised this I went to check the site only to find out Veoh had changed their service and removed the ability to download files directly and changed all their streams to five minute previews (along with cutting down severely on copyrighted materials). The reason? They’d just started pushing their new product, Veoh TV, a program you need to download and install in order to stream or grab the videos hosted on the site. Which at first struck me as a really good idea. The thought that came right after this was ‘hold on where’s the catch?’.

Turns out there didn’t seem to be a catch as such. You download and install their application, run it and off you go. You’ve got access to a library of legal, copyrighted content from some major US broadcasters (including NBC, who have licensed the entire first season of Heroes on their channel), as well as a bunch of other content from the public and smaller, private sources. You can stream files or download them to watch later, and the inbuilt player in the application is a lot better than streaming, and comes with a whole host of web 2.0 gadgets, that you probably don’t need. Thing is there actually was a catch, or two.

The application, while well thought out suffers from what is quite possibly the most stupid search engine I’ve seen for a while. You can find things on the Veoh site which you can’t find via the application’s search, which is pretty stupid in my book. The navigation does leave quite a bit to be desired, it’s not so intuitive and quite limited compared to what is promised. After an hour pissing about on it, you realise that the site offers better navigation and better search, which is the key thing here. Lastly while there is some good content available legally, it’s also very American centric (I guess it’s primary audience is America, but still this isn’t a country centric application as implied by its online presence) and the legal content is peppered with adverts and non-downloadable. That also doesn’t make much sense in my books. Oh yeah and for some reason the application also allows you to download torrents, another thing I fail to see the use for is they’re going for the whole legal angle. I used it for two days and in that time saw all the copyrighted content I was most interested in, but available illegaly, being taken down. Thanks but watching crappy home made videos and re-runs of shows I’ve already seen and not so interested in isn’t my cup of tea.

There was I back to square one. I wanted to start watching TV again, ideally new shows and movies as well as some old things, but I couldn’t. Options were drawn back to intermittent streaming sites, desperate google searches for ftp hosts, or a trip to the local DVD shop. Bahh… I did find another option though, bittorrent. Sounds dodgy? Well it partially is. Bittorrent is the P2P application which took off where Napster and co left off. It gained a lot of popularity in little time primarily because it is a lot better than any P2P programs that came before it. I’ll spare you the technical details, though you can read them here if you’re interested and not too clued up. Bittorrent does what P2P networks always did best, that is allow for the sharing of large files quickly, across multiple online users. And yes today the majority of torrent search engines and sites are rife with illegal copyrighed materials. But the original developers, the ones who started the craze, have gone legit and their site offers a shit load of legal content, available sometimes for free and mostly for a fee, which you can just download straight to your computer and keep. Which as far as I’m concerned comes closest so far to the whole on-demand thing. A lot of majors seem to have signed up with them and are offering recent movies and TV series as well as other media, for a fee. Which to me seems fair - I’d pay for a DVD, but now I don’t have to wait for the DVD to be out, and most importantly if I’m not in an English country I don’t have to import it or search for it. I can just grab it and burn it myself.

I’m not advocating piracy. It’s too tricky a subjet, and too deep, to get into now. And I’d rather discuss it in real life with my friends, rather than on an internet page. But to me the whole torrent thing and on-demand TV strikes me as a pretty stupid repeat of what happened when the first P2P networks appeared and the music industry started running around crying wolf. The now enormous, and mostly monolithic, media conglomerates are always seemingly last to catch on to a good thing, opting to first cry wolf about much it’s hurting them and their people (that’s always a good one) and then to try and minimise their losses by partaking in it slowly. With music this has meant that it took the major music companies around 5 years or so before they realised and understood the potential of online music downloads and all the things they could bring. Online downloads are not the magical answer to the music industry’s problems (what with being part of the problems in the first place), but they sure as hell could have been much less of an issue and much more of a boon, especially for smaller independent labels and artists, had they been handled properly rather than shunned in favour of outdated systems of distribution (like CDs). And today while some things have got better, there’s still a lot of bad, and as far as I’m concerned that bad does not stem from users and pirates any more than it stems from the majors’ inability to deal with change, especially in the visceral capitalist system established since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism.

And the whole bittorrent thing is just a repeat of that. Bittorrent as a system of delivery is totally suited to the idea and purpose of tv and movies on demand. It allows for fast and efficient sharing of big files across the internet. It’s clean, well thought out and like most similar programs allows for the development of communities around its various uses. And it’s not just limited to visual media either. The perfect example of this is the legal uses it’s had since its inceptions. If you’re an artist, and want your material out there for free, than using bittorrent makes sense. You create your own torrents, upload them and then people share them, word of mouth spreads it etc… and the cost to you is minimal - the preparation, packaging and uploading of files. That’s it. Why major networks and companies are once more refusing to see that is beyond me. With legal torrents you can offer people anything they want, anywhere and at anytime. You can still make money by various means - be they online ads (Google Ads for example), ads in the programs being offered (it would be a minimal set back to include adverts in the files, much like is done today with DVDs, you make them unskippable and it’s a small price to pay for having legal, quality content), or a small download fee. What’s more the possibilities for additional marketing and sales is there too - free downloads, monthly programmes, user incentives etc…

The reality is quite different and I realise that part of my wishes/rant is slightly idealistic in the rough, capitalist world we live in. That doesn’t change the facts though. Whilst people are being sued for serious amounts by major companies claiming damage, what these people and other piracy users want isn’t being offered to them, when it could be. And it’s not complicated either really. The channels and audience are there. The legal content isn’t yet. And what there is of it, is limited.

There is another element this kind of change would require - one that is too often overlooked I think. And that is a certain element of education (or in many cases re-education) for the consumers and users. Today there are thousands and thousands of young people, who have no understanding and idea of what piracy really entails, the impacts it has. And because of that, because they’re so used to getting what they want when they want, and bitching when they don’t (thanks to the internet), they don’t understand and appreciate the value of the art they’re downloading, consuming and throwing away without any second thoughts. It’s the same no matter what media format you talk about - people need to educated as to the real worth of things, which I believe would make the whole process of switching a huge amount of the pirate market to a legal one much easier and beneficial for all involved.

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written by Laurent \\ tags: internet, Television, web 2.0