The other day I saw an add in the paper. I know. I'm old. I still read newspapers. Anyhow, it was a full page add on the back page of the sports section. This made it pretty high profile. The headline in the add was "Public gets Free TV with no monthly bills". Talk about a blast from the past. The add was for a TV antenna, something you could hook up to your TV so that you could get channels "over the air for free" instead of paying for expensive cable or satellite service. Then it hit me. This "new" service is the way everyone used to get their TV back in the olden days. But this company felt it needed to put an expensive add in the paper to tell people that they could still get TV the way everyone got TV a half century ago. And you can. Over the air TV is still there. Its just that so few people now get their TV this way that lots of people need to be reminded that the option is still available. And, of course, this company is still in the business of selling you the gadget you need to make it work, a new fangled version of the "rabbit ears" antenna of my youth.
This story is an example of technology on the move. But the march of technology is a messy process. And right now we are in a pretty messy place. The "way of the present" (think "way of the future" and the phrase will make sense) is always a combination of the now possible and the way we have always done it. I consider myself pretty tech savvy and my house is a mess. I have all kinds of gadgets that are unnecessarily difficult to use and don't play together well. I am annoyed by this but I believe I can figure all this out if I just take the time and energy to dig sufficiently deeply into the manuals for my various gadgets. But I know lots of people who are completely baffled. And I sincerely believe that these otherwise bright people don't stand a chance of figuring it out even if they did put an appropriate amount of effort into it. They just don't have the "tech" gene I was blessed with so they are doomed to be permanently baffled. It shouldn't be that way. You shouldn't have to be the proverbial "rocket scientist" to get all these gadgets to play nice together.
The first thing I am going to do is to go over a little "how we got here" history. Then I am going to peer a little way into the future to show where I think things are going. I will finish up with a short remark on what I think the chances of my predicted future of actually coming into being. And away we go.
A classic saw has it that "form follows function". And there is a lot of truth to this saw. And recently (e.g. the last 50 years) it has become apparent that what we now call technologists have a much greater impact on history than kings and generals. For most of history historians have worked for kings and generals so it should be no surprise who ended up with top billing. Roads and aqueducts made the Roman Empire possible but I don't know the name of a single designer or builder of either. In the modern era technologists like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have deployed massive public relations operations so everyone knows their names. And they and their brethren will loom much larger than any political or military figure in the shaping of our times. So lets talk about some functions.
I grew up in Seattle. TV rolled out in the U.S. in the late '40s. At the time sending a broadcast quality signal across country was fabulously expensive and terribly difficult. So a single cable was built connecting the east coast (New York) to the west coast (Los Angeles). There was a primitive connection that ran up and down parts of the east coast through New York. There was a similar hookup on the west coast through Los Angeles. So network TV could reach a chunk of the east coast and a chunk of the west coast. But Seattle was too small a market. So it wasn't on the national hookup. So there was a "kinescope" gadget. It consisted on one end of essentially a 16 mm movie camera hooked up to a TV set. Film was shot of a particular TV show, then developed, printed, and thrown on an airplane and flown up to Seattle. The other end of the kinescope consisted of a 16 mmm film projector hooked up to a TV camera. This lash up was used to get network shows on the air on the one station then operating in Seattle. Needless to say there was a lot of what is now called "local origination" going on at the time. And these old kinescope movies ended up stored away in various Seattle garages where they eventually ended up providing most of the material used to study the early days of television broadcasting.
So how was what is now called "the last mile problem" solved in those days? Well TV stations had great big radio transmitters that beamed out a signal that could be picked up in homes for miles around. That was what the technology was capable of doing at the time so that's how it worked. More cables were installed and more TV stations got on the air through the '50s and '60s. We ended up with the "big three" networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) plus a part of a network (PBS) and "independent" stations. Anyone who lived in a medium to large market typically had access to 5 or 6 stations: the local affiliates of the big three, a PBS station, and one or two independents. That was it. You tuned in to whatever station you wanted to at a particular time and watched what they were broadcasting at that time or you turned your set off. And most homes had only one TV as they were expensive. A TV in the '50s cost about as much as a decent used car.
But time and technology marches on. Besides accumulating all those kinescopes of early TV broadcasts that later turned out so valuable to historians, Seattle was responsible for another innovation. Seattle has a lot of hills and these are serious hills. TV signals go in roughly a straight line. TV engineers know this so they built high towers to put their transmitting antennas on. But still it turned out that a lot of Seattle was shaded. There was some hill between you and the station's antenna so you couldn't pick up their signal. The first TV station in Seattle was started as a gimmick to sell TV sets. People wouldn't buy TV sets if they couldn't pick up TV stations. One answer was high antennas on houses. When my did bought our first TV set he had to get a 40' tall antenna put on top of the house to get a picture. A neighbor had to put up a 60' antenna. This is expensive and ugly. There had to be a better way.
So the first TV station started putting a TV antenna on the top of a hill. This could pick up the TV signal just fine. Then they strung a bunch of wire to all the houses in the shadow of the local hill. For a small price (they wanted lots of people to sign up so the made the service cheap) you could hook up to your neighborhood Community Antenna TV (CATV). The name of the service got shortened to "cable TV" and spread like wildfire. And someone decided you could make money with "cable TV" and started raising prices. And that's where the modern "cable" industry came from.
You may have heard of another cable pioneer. His name is Ted Turner. In the '70s people figured out how to put satellites up that could be used to relay TV signals. Originally this was fantastically expensive. But over time the price dropped. Renting a "transponder" is now so cheap that local TV stations do it so they can broadcast a minor sporting event involving a local team. Ted figured out early on while prices were still pretty steep that transponders represented a business opportunity. He owned a not very successful independent station in Atlanta. He rented a transponder and put the signal on it. He then offered it to cable companies for free. At that time cable companies could handle more channels than there were broadcast channels in any specific market. So for the price of a satellite receiver (then too expensive for an individual but cheap enough so a cable company could afford it) they could add a "bonus channel". It didn't matter that the programming was pretty cheesy, it was free and it was at least a little different than what the local stations were offering. Ted could raise his advertising rates for adds on his little Atlanta station enough to recover his costs and make a boatload of money besides. Within a few years Ted was offering a number of channels including TBS and CNN. It made him a billionaire several times over and paved the way for ESPN, C-SPAN, HBO, the 700 club, shopping channels, the hundreds of offerings served up by your local cable company.
This was all the result of the evolution of broadcast TV. Broadcast TV begat cable TV. The combination of cable TV and satellite transponders begat the modern TV landscape. A lot of evolution has taken place in the technical details. Color has replaced black & white. Digital has replaced analog. Hi-Def is replacing standard def. But it's all just improved technology applied to the same basic idea. But there has been a parallel evolution that is starting to be the dominant influence in TV ecology. That is the internet.
The internet started out as a lab project in a corner of the Defense Department called (at the time) ARPA. It was obvious that computers were becoming more and more important to the military and that hooking computers into a network, if it could be pulled off, had the possibility of becoming a game changer. So the DOD funded something called ARPANET. And it worked. A bunch of computer science and electrical engineering types figured out how to network together a bunch of computers. And they did it at the then unheard of speed of 50,000 bits per second. At the time a "fast" modem was capable of communicating at 300 bits per second so this was way cool. The technology kept improving but for a while it seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Various military facilities and research universities were hooked up but it just kind of puttered along under the radar until a bunch of humanities types discovered email.
Email was the first killer application on the net. It turned out to be fantastically valuable to humanities types because they could quickly and easily collaborate on research and publications. Email was much faster and better in every way than snail mail. All of a sudden network usage skyrocketed and the traffic was not driven by tech types. Fortunately, the technology started improving and network speeds started going up, just in time to handle the rapid increase in traffic. And every college and university in the country started clamoring to get hooked up. And then people started clamoring to be able to hook up at home. And the PC came out and it just kept spiraling. ARPANET went public in the '90s. Also in the '90s Tim Burners-Lee invented the concept of a web. You put "web pages" up on a server that can be viewed by a "browser". This made it possible to organize and present fantastic amounts of data to people through an intuitive interface that regular people would figure out.
The design of web pages was very flexible. They could be used to present text. But they could also be used to present other things like still pictures, audio, and video. This opened fantastic opportunities. The most obvious one for the purposes of our discussion is that the internet can be used to deliver video and TV is just video. Technology limited us to a few broadcast video channels in the early days. With cable interties and satellite transponders it became easier and easier to move video around the country. Cable TV wiring enabled hundreds of channels to be fed into a home. But there were restrictions. Some of them were technical. There is only one over the air radio spectrum. There are hundreds of possible uses so it gets sliced and diced up. Only a small amount of the radio spectrum can be dedicated to sending video over the air. It will never be possible to do video "on demand" over the air.
With the cable companies the restrictions are more of a business nature. The days of content being given away to cable companies for free are long gone. Content is a precious commodity and who pays how much for what are now determined by painfully negotiated contracts between the players. And the "players" are the cable companies and content providers. Us subscribers don't get a seat at the negotiating table. As I write this there is a fight going on between CBS and Time Warner Cable about who will pay how much for CBS content on Time Warner Cable channels. And cable subscribers get essentially no say in the eventual outcome. All parties agree that it would be a bad thing if the suckers, excuse me, I mean the subscribers knew the details of the deal. So we all get a choice between various cable "package" options bloated with channels we don't want. The idea is to provide us with an option that is just barely perceived as a good deal. The content of each offering is designed to maximize amount of money flowing into the coffers of the cable company.
Enough history. Let's look at the present. I will take my house as an example. I have a "land line" phone. It is more expensive than other options but I want something that works. The regulatory authorities demand that land line phone companies but a tremendous amount of infrastructure in place so that lots of things can be broken and the phone still works. This is not so true of cell phones, It is definitely not so true of cable or internet phones. I also have a cheapie prepaid cell phone. It costs me a hundred bucks a year. It is way cheaper than my land line. But this is because I don't use it much. But there are a number of situations when it is nice to have. So I have phone redundancy.
I also have a cable. But it's not just cable. It is also internet. Both come in over the same wire. But due to the magic of electronics they behave pretty much like they are separate services. Except when something happens to the physical wire. Then they both go out. And the TV part of my cable service is much more reliable than the internet part. The internet part has gone down when the TV part hasn't a number of times. I don't think the TV part has ever gone down without the internet part going down at the same time. Of course over the air TV is available but I haven's owned a TV antenna in decades so it might as well not be there.
Inside my house I have a "wired" network and a wireless network. All of the wired part of my network is in the same room so I have been able to get away with just running wires along the floor up next to the wall where people don't notice them. The wired part of my network runs at 1 gigabit. That's way faster than most devices need. But it is solid and trouble free. There are three standards for wireless, "b", "g", and "n". "b" is the oldest and slowest, "g" is in the middle, both by age and speed. "n" is the newest and fastest. I run a "g" network. It is best to run only one speed. At work we were having wireless network problems. We finally traced the problem to devices hopping between "b" and "g" for reasons we were never able to figure out. Every time the device hopped it dropped out for a couple of seconds. We fixed the problem by running all the network hubs at only one speed. With only one speed to pick from the hopping stopped and the problem went away. I disabled the "b" capability of my home hub and have never regretted it. I only have one device on my wireless network, a laptop belonging to my renter. Even so, I occasionally have a problem with my wireless network. It can usually be fixed by rebooting something but it is still annoying.
And have I mentioned that I have some wireless handsets for my land line phone. These would stop working if the power went out. But I do have an old fashioned phone that would keep working.
Now let's look at my TV setup. I only have one TV. I have a direct feed from my cable into the TV. This used to work just fine but a component in my TV went out a couple of years ago and it doesn't work any more. But that's ok. I actually feed my cable signal into three devices. One of them is an old VCR. I haven't fired it up in ages and I have reason to believe it doesn't work any more. It is an "analog" VCR so it probably doesn't know what to do with a digital cable signal. When digital came in the FCC required TV and cable companies to maintain backward capability to the old NTSC standard. But I think that has pretty much been phased out now. The third feed is to my TiVo DVR box. The TiVo and the VCR feed into my TV via auxiliary inputs. So I generally watch TV through the TiVo. That's why I don't much care that the direct feed to my TV doesn't work.
As an aside let me note that I have no "cable box"es, and, therefore, no cable remote controls. This is because both my TV and my TiVo have something called a "cable card". (The part of my TV that is broken is the part that interfaces with the cable card). The cable card comes from the cable company and provides the programming that allows the TiVo and TV to accept and decode the cable signal properly. It even unscrambles the scrambled signal for the scrambled channels that I pay to see. So aside from the fact that the direct cable connection to my TV doesn't work, and my VCR doesn't work, and I have no way to "tape" something over the air on my VCR (assuming it is working) from my TiVo, everything is hunky dory. (I note that I could rewire thing so that my VCR could tape from my TiVo but then I couldn't tape from over the air.) I also have an old laserdisc player (think DVD player but a previous generation of technology) and a Blu-Ray player. Both are wired into auxiliary ports of my TV but neither is wired so that I can record things from them to my VCR. (Both have VCR ports but again I would have to disconnect and rewire things to get that to work.)
The latest thing is called "on demand". I don't do on demand but I know others who do. One friend does it using her Comcast remote on her TV that is hooked to Comcast cable through a Comcast cable box. There are various ways to get on demand stuff to play on my PC. My Blu-Ray also has various services I can sign up for. It is hooked up to my wired internet so it has direct internet access. The menu system on the Blu-Ray lets me sign up for and use these services. I have not. My TV is old enough (about 10 years) so that it does not have on demand type features built in.
This is a complicated mess. I have 5 remotes. I use the TiVo one 90% of the time. It is programmed so that it can turn the TV off and on, change the volume, and change the input source. The "channel change" function is actually handled directly by the TiVo. But I occasionally have to use one of the other four remotes for one thing and another. I have noted the lack of interconnectedness. Another thing is feature redundancy. The remotes control the devices they came with but they also want to control something else, typically the TV. I can get on demand stuff a couple of different ways. I have two cable cards because the TiVo needs to decode the cable signal sometimes and the TV other times. Theoretically it would be nice if the VCR was cable card compatible. (I also note that new digital TVs don't seem to come with cable card capability -- why not?) And all the remotes work a little differently so there is a learning curve for each. Why all the complexity?
Part of it is history. I detailed the history of the TV path and the internet path. If you want to drill down there is a history of VCRs, laserdisc/DVD/Blu-Ray devices, of DVRs, of "on demand", etc. In the context of this history the current configuration of each device makes sense if you stick to only the history of that device and ignore the ecosystem the device operates in. And you have a bunch of companies and industries fighting each other to get more than their fair share of the pie. If you don't provide a certain feature or capability in your device then someone else is going to include your base capability as a feature or "add on" to their device. That's how the current mess came to be. Now let's imagine how it could be.
As I have noted above, over the air TV is small potatoes. If it went away completely most of us would not notice. I think there is still a place for local TV stations or more specifically local content. What I am talking about most immediately is the method of delivery. If I can get that local content over a wire into my house then I am getting the valuable part. Historically local TV stations were the vehicle for delivering network content. I don't think this is adding value any more. There are any number of cable channels like USA and A&E that deliver network-like content. I see no reason why I couldn't get the ABC or CBS or NBC "channel" without the content having gone through my local network affiliate. The current model still prevails for what were technological reasons and are now political and financial reasons mixed in with a lot of inertia.
Boiling all this down, I want a "cable TV"-like capability. I want what is local content (local news, sports, "what's happening", etc.) I also want all my cable channels (well at least some of them). And I want a "watch TV"-like experience where I do my couch potato thing and it just comes at me. But I don't need the current delivery system. I certainly don't need the over the air delivery system. But I also don't really need the "cable TV" delivery system either. The internet can do all that without all the cable specific hardware, software, specifications, etc. of the current system. Give me a screen that gives me the same options that my current cable menu gives me and I'm a happy camper. In short, give me the internet part of what the wire that is connected to my house delivers, and a "cable TV" web site, and I don't need the "cable TV" part of what comes in on the wire now. That would save a lot of hardware up and down the line. It would also simplify things tremendously.
On demand is a mess. You have You Tube, Netflix, HuLu, Comcast on Demand, and dozens and dozens of other on demand service providers out there. They all have their own system with its pricing model, passwords, etc. If I know what I want it is very hard to tell where I can get it from. Ideally you would have a small number of providers. Popular content would be available from more than one of them. You could then sign up with the one that provided the best service and the pricing model you liked the best, confident that you could get what you wanted from that provider.
I am even ok with some categorization. Let's say TCM-on-demand had every movie that had ever been made that was more than 10 years old and Hulu-on-demand had every TV show that was more than a year old and Universal-on-demand had every Universal movie that had been released to the theaters between 1 and 10 years ago, and, well you get the idea. But now Hulu has some TV shows but not all. And some are available for free and others require you sign up for and pay for the premium service. And Netflix has a lot of movies but not all movies, not even all old movies. It's just too confusing. Then there are new Netflix shows like "House of Cards". It's the wild west out there. So on demand needs to settle and there need to be a few major players that have much broader and deeper libraries. But let's say that in the next few years there is a big shakeout and we get a couple of on demand services that have broad enough scale that you can confidently sign up for one or a few of them and be confident you will get what you want. Moving on.
What's the defining characteristic of a TV? Historically there was one but not any more. I remember the year the number of computer screens manufactured that year exceeded the number of TV picture tubes. It turns out that a computer screen was just a high quality TV screen (in the early days) and a TV screen was just a low quality computer screen (later). This high quality/low quality differentiation continues to this day. A flat screen TV screen is just a low quality computer screen with different electronics delivering the image. It all boils down to size, resolution, and picture quality. A TV is now just a limited function computer screen. And that's the best way to think of it. What we have are just screens. We have big screens (formerly TVs) on the wall. We have medium size screens on computers. We have small screens on portable devices like smart phones. So what if the thing on the wall is just a big network accessible computer monitor. It might be a good idea to have a network accessible audio system on the floor underneath it. But we can make placement flexible.
The foundational idea is that we have a computer network in our home with devices connected to it. Then we have boxes with capabilities connected to the network. We can use wired or wireless connections as appropriate. And the current network standards (wired LAN or Wi-Fi) are perfectly capable of provided all the functionality we need. Some of the boxes can be of the traditional kinds like PCs, laptops, smart phones, etc. We add some capabilities and we put those capabilities wherever it is most convenient. What is currently a TV would be a limited capability device. It would be a display. It could also have a low end sound system built in if we wish. If we want a better sound system we have one that consists of one or more network components. Perhaps we have one woofer on the floor beneath the large display. We have two medium/high frequency capable sound boxes to the left and right on the side of the room opposite the display.. We have three similar boxes to the left, center, and right of the display (or perhaps built in). Together they constitute a 5.1 sound system. Each unit would receive a separate digital signal across the network, decode it, amplify it and turn it into sound.
We need some more boxes. A critical box is the internet interface. It would connect to wire coming into the house on one side the home LAN on the other side. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs suggested that it is practical for this to run at a speed of 1 gigabit. That would be more than fast enough to handle current and future internet loads, on demand loads, and, in my opinion, "cable TV emulation" loads. 1 GB wired LAN is mainstream now. Speeds are rising on Wi-Fi but I think more improvement (e.g. beyond "n") is needed. But there is every reason to believe that evolution in this area will continue.
That leaves us with the need for boxes with "TV world" capabilities. The first requirement is the most obvious. A box (and one box should be enough - multitask) needs to interface with the cable company. It needs to know what is available (e.g. what feeds has the customer signed up for). On the customer side it would field requests (e.g. I want to see this show or this channel now) and serve up the response (e.g. here's the feed for channel "X" or show "Y"). The other box would be a DVR like repository, essentially a smart disk that would archive streams when they became available and serve them up when their display was requested. Since the processing necessary to feed the video to the wall display (or smaller display or laptop or phone) is modest by modern standards it could be done by both the able box and the DVR box. The same is true of the audio.
Another annoying feature of the modern world is the proliferation of remotes. There is no reason these couldn't all be replaced by software. The software could run on a PC, table, smartphone, whatever. Microsoft standardized driver software with Windows 95. For each video card they wrote a master driver module. This was served by a parameter file that instructed the module about the particular quirks of a specific network card. There is no reason the same thing could not be done with the various boxes I have discussed. A "display" driver would be configured with the characteristics of the particular display in the family room. It would be also configured for the smaller and less capable display in the master bedroom, etc. This would enable true "universal remote" software to be developed. You would load the configuration files for each of the components that needed to be controlled. Then one piece of software on one device could control them all. It could schedule which programs would come down from the "cable provider" at what time, which "on demand" programs would come down from which on demand provider, what should go up on the rec room screen (and be fed to the rec room sound system) now, etc. Actually, since there are multiple members in most families and likely multiple screens, etc. multiple pieces of master control software could be in use on multiple devices. But that is easy to sort out.
All the current "TV specification" devices would be replaced by "network specification" devices. There would no doubt be a very messy transition period. But in the end home networks hopefully will follow the car model. In the olden days (before about 1965) cars were pretty simple to work on and there were a lot of backyard mechanics out there. Then when catalytic converters started showing up cars started to get very complicated. After several decades things have gotten simpler again. Cars are far more complex. But a lot of that complexity can be ignored. All modern cars have a "diagnostic plug". You get a special cable. One end hooks up to your laptop. The other end goes into the diagnostic plug. In this way you can read out the car computer (actually multiple computers). A modern car is just a bunch of FRUs hooked together. A FRU is a Field Replaceable Unit. The computer tells you which FRU is misbehaving. You replace it and you are good to go. And a lot of tune up stuff is now software. You can tweak the performance by updating some table. What this means is that it is now possible to be a backyard mechanic again. You just need a little computer expertise.
Hopefully home networking will follow the same model. In the old days things were simple and if you had a little talent you could do a lot of things yourself. Everything now is a lot more complicated and only delivers a little more functionality. But if we can make it out the other side then things will get simpler again and the capabilities that current setups theoretically deliver will be actually delivered.
I see no technical impediments to anything I have described. All the impediments I see are political/financial. There will be winners and losers. No one wants to be a loser. Corporations are now expert at working the lobbying game in DC. It is easy to put regulatory impediments in front of the necessary changes. Since these impediments would be buried in the fine print of thousand page bills no one will find them until after they have done their work. There is no reason why much of the reconfigured equipment (e.g. "TV monitors" that only accept streaming signals across the network, audio equipment that accepts a network delivered audio signal) aren't already on the market. Universal remote software exists. But the device makers make it hard. They expect the device to receive the same old infrared signals used by current remotes. The hide the specs of those remote signals.
At some point I expect techies to start building the devices I have described themselves using the open source software model. These devices are not so complex that the required expertise is beyond everyone. It's just beyond most of us. The expertise required to build a Unix from scratch was also beyond the expertise of most of us. But it was done. And now Linux is so successful that it has almost completely killed traditional Unix.
