As I have mentioned before, I’m pretty intrigued by the Tivo+Rocketboom deal. I think going forward this is going to be a huge change in the media landscape. Independently produced content delivered over the Internet either directly from the producer or perhaps through yet to emerge distributors. And I don’t think it will all be two man teams producing low budget entertainment. I am sure that higher budget productions will pop up once the business models are ironed out and revenues become proven.
The key to this is getting the content into the television though. Broadband is adopted widely enough. The technology exists to get it to the computer. But computers are typically not connected to televisions, and watching “television programs” (IPTV programs?) on the computer screen is a less than totally satisfying experience.
Unfortunately there are very few ways to get that content on to the television today. The keys to the kingdom are held by “traditional” PVRs and the big name in that field is Tivo. But Tivo isn’t ready to open the doors widely and even once it does they have made it clear that they want to continue to be the arbiter of content that goes through the network and into their box.
In the medium to long term the market will sort this out and competitive players will crop up either stealing Tivo’s market or forcing them to change to a more open strategy. We’re not nearly there yet though. Perhaps recordable and re-recordable DVDs are the stop-gap solution.
DVD writers are commonly available on personal computers. Recordable DVD media is very affordable. It seems to me that there is a market here for a “content network” to spring up and aggregate existing content and reformat it into DVD-Video format. Imagine getting the week’s Diggnation, commandN, and TWiT in DVD ISO format over bit torrent. All you have to do is burn it and watch. Or perhaps the transcoding happens after you download it by your video podcatcher application.
There are a few ways this model could play out, but it seems like a reasonable interim measure. And of course it would be possible to sell advertising to go into the DVD to make a profit for the content aggregator as well as help the content producers monetize their product.