“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini,
chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the
Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”
The
rapid emergence of the consumer electronics and computer companies as
Internet video providers is certain to challenge the control of the
cable, telephone and satellite companies, which seek to dominate the
distribution of digital content to the home.
In the battle for
the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies
are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an
array of content in video-on-demand programs.
But fending off the Internet’s openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago.
A
prototype of one feature of the Microsoft IPTV service, known in the
industry as a matrix channel, allows several baseball games to be
viewed simultaneously along with textual information like player
statistics.
They are companies like Apple Computer, Google,
Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, with all of them beginning to make
available an ever-widening array of video content that looks more like
a world of 5 million channels rather than 50 or even 500.
(extracts only above – full article at the link below)
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What would a world with television coming through the Internet be like? |