And you thought I had quit blogging. I was just resting.
My friend
Kelly alerted me earlier today about a new technology from Apple called
HTTP Live Streaming. The linked AppleInsider article goes into great detail about the history of video streaming over the tubes, but I want to focus on a paragraph towards the end of their piece:
What's next? The obvious followup is to add support for HTTP Live Streaming in Apple TV, allowing for HD streams direct from broadcasters, facilitating the ability to only pay for channels you want to watch, skipping around the local cable monopoly while gaining access to content they don't carry.
That's right. HTTP Live Streaming + Apple TV = Over-the-Internet broadcasting. It could totally replace cable and satellite companies. I'm not saying that it will -- those companies will do anything and everything in their power to prevent that from happening. I'm just saying that the technology is there.
AppleInsider floats the idea of broadcasters (e.g. ESPN or MSNBC) bypassing traditional broadcasting vehicles and launching a HTTP Live Streaming feed. Anybody with a web browser could watch the channel in full HD. Anybody with an AppleTV (or any other HTTP Live Streaming-enabled device) could watch the channel on their existing television set -- no cable companies necessary.
More significantly, it would remove the obstacles of entry for startup TV stations. Under the current system, you have to have either a ton of cash or some really serious connections to start a TV station. Time Warner Cable et al. hold the keys to the empire -- you have to somehow convince them to put your TV station onto their channel lineup. But anybody can throw up a web server and broadcast via HTTP Live Streaming. It cuts out the middle man.
Al Gore had a really good chapter related to this in his book
The Assault on Reason. (An excellent, excellent book which I very highly recommend) He talks about how our democracy was healthier before television because the news used to be more interactive. When the country was founded, the major news organizations consisted mainly of people with access to printing presses. You had stuff like
Harpers Weekly, and less formal fliers etc. When newspapers came around, they were a little more removed from the readers, but still allow for a fairly high level of interaction. Heck, even I had a letter to the editor published in the New York Times one time.
Television, however, is totally non-interactive. There is virtually no way to contact a TV personality. It is one-way communication, and we're not involved at all. Also, TV triggers an instinctual reaction in humans that makes you focus your eyes on a moving picture. That is a survival instinct in the wild, but TV uses it to grab your attention and not let up. It triggers that instinct on every frame -- 30 times per second. In addition, TV tends to put your brain in a suggestive state, making you more susceptible to believe what you're hearing than you would otherwise. Reading, conversely, engages the brain and makes you more prone to higher level thought and critical thinking. Obviously, that makes TV a perfect tool to implement an Orwellian state and to kill democracy.
As long as TV is the primary way Americans get their news, democracy is in trouble. The vast majority of our nation's discourse is controlled by a very small number of people. That is why Gore founded his TV station "Current TV" which broadcasts viewer-submitted content.
Ultimately, the true hope for democracy, Gore says, is the Internet. It is far more interactive than anything before it with virtually no barriers to entry (anybody can start a blog). HTTP Live Streaming is just the kind of technology that the Internet can use to start whittling away at the traditional TV paradigm. Think how different the world would be if anybody could start their own TV station.
Let's just say that I don't think that it's a coincidence that Al Gore is on Apple's Board of Directors right now.
