I was pointed toward an article that explains Comcast's interest in buying a majority stake in video streaming site Hulu and probably changing that over to a pay-for service. Because Comcast and the other cable providers and broadcast networks seem to be clueless, I'll do them a solid and clue them in on how television programming is going to work in the future.
The key point to always remember is that information and media is always free. Not because the world is full of cheapskates or because those young punks just want to buck the system, but because humans transfer information freely between each other. Constantly. Every instance of communication between people is a transfer of information and that can never be universally controlled without leakage. Other forms of media, be they written, recorded audio, recorded video, or live streams, whatever it is, exists in a world only a hairs-breadth from our native forms of communication. The dividing line between them is the medium in which they reside. In the ancient days this media was on bulky cartridges, cassettes, or reels of tape or film that required expensive equipment to view or record and wasn't generally available to the average consumer. As technology matures, access to these media forms naturally grows more and more accessible to just about everyone with access to electricity. And even those without hard line access to electricity can pop out a small solar cell array to recharge their iPod or laptop. Media is everywhere and anyone can access it.
I am not advocating world-wide piracy here, I am simply explaining the world we live in. A world in which, the moment a television program is broadcast over the air or transmitted by cable to a residence, someone is on the other end recording it. Once that program is recorded it can and will be encoded into some format that can be transmitted digitally to anywhere in the world. There is no protection possible that can prevent this. So the question is, Mr. Cable Company, do you bury your head in the sand and pretend none of this is real, or do you accept the world we now live in and get creative with your business plan?
Here's how the future of media distribution is going to go down: First, everything will be available on the Web. For free. The living room television will no longer care about over the air signals or digital cable or any of that nonsense. Instead, the TV will be a media portal to web sources. Users will subscribe to these sources (think something like Hulu, but set up for access in the living room similar to Windows Media Center or MythTV or Miro) to get show updates and reminders or set up personalized schedules and playlists. For most users these services will be free and ad-supported. Users will be able to sign up for paid subscriptions to view programs ad-free and get access to whatever interesting premium services the portals can come up with.
If you're thinking ahead, then you've probably realized this means the death of any other service that provides these videos. The broadcast networks will cease to broadcast in traditional terms. They will certainly continue to produce programming, which they will then sell to the portals. So in effect, the portals are the direct customers, the subscribers to the service. The networks are no longer making money on advertising, they make money instead on selling their program to services that then do the distribution for them.
This will also mean the death of traditional cable television. Cable providers will become simple broadband providers and by this time, broadband will be CHEAP and also regulated by governments the world over to guarantee minimum service quality following in the footsteps first laid down by countries like Finland. I expect the cable providers will either have large stakes in these media portals, or just own them outright. I can see it now, the "Comcast Network" is now just a site on the web where people go to get the content they used to access through their set-top boxes and DVRs.
The most significant benefits to the end user should be obvious. Generally free ad-supported access to any program in the world including live news feeds. Access through your television to your personal audio repository that exists out in the cloud somewhere. These would be tracks you have purchased through services like iTunes or Amazon music that get tagged for you to use and access anywhere, be it your TV, your phone, your portable audio device, whatever. They'll all be able to access your personal media stores. This also means asynchronous viewing of programs. No longer do you have to consider a broadcast schedule and be forced to watch at that time... Of course, many of us abandoned this long ago with the introduction of DVRs, but in the future you won't even have to worry about programming those things. You just subscribe to a program and it becomes available to you as soon as it gets posted. The only schedule you have to consider is the release schedule of each program you subscribe to. Of course, you still have to consider live feeds, but those probably run 24/7, think CNN, C-SPAN, BBC News, and so on.
Clearly this isn't all going to happen tomorrow, but I would say it would be a pretty safe bet to develop over the next 10 to 15 years. In the meantime, I have no doubt broadcast and cable networks are going to continue to try and charge everyone for oxygen ignoring the fact that we can pretty much get oxygen anywhere just by inhaling.
Update (2009-10-21): Just found an article about something called Keychest being developed by Disney: "The technology would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices—from the Web, to mobile gadgets like iPhones and cable services that allow on-demand viewing. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions."