Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The HD TV Evolution: Part 7 – Convergence Rules!
Posted by Felix Torres in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
Bill Gates once said that people tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate the impact on the long term. The first part can be seen as a reflection of the natural divide between the tech-savvy pundits and enthusiasts that evangelize new technology developments and the mainstream consumers that need to be “sold” on the new products and/or services. The second part is just good old-fashioned serendipity; human ingenuity finding new uses for a product above and beyond what the inventor envisioned.
As we move into the third phase of North American HDTV, broad deployment, we are starting to see examples of both these effects. Adoption to date has been slower than proponents envisioned, while at the same time HDTV is starting to produce some unexpected effects in the movie industry. Specifically, a call among some content providers for simultaneous theater-and-home release of new movies, which threatens theater operators’ revenue, at the same time that we see theaters adapting the emerging digital-theater technologies for closed-circuit auditorium presentations of live events like concerts and sports matches. It is only a matter of time before theatrical plays from Broadway or the London stage start to appear as special live-broadcast events in multiplexes around the world. Think of it as a form of self-defense: as TV-viewing becomes more like movie theaters, the theaters are reacting by becoming more home-theater-like in the range of content they provide. After all, if digital theater technology allows for the transmission of very-high resolution video content for shared public viewing of movies, the same technology allows for the transmission of other forms of shared-viewing experiences.
Welcome to the age of convergence.
Yes, convergence of computer technology and consumer media has been bandied about for so long it’s practically become an urban legend; everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who swears it is really happening, but nobody can vouch for it on a personal basis. Except that, while everybody has been looking for convergence to come rolling into town in a big revolutionary parade, it has quietly crept into our lives bit by bit in an evolutionary fashion. It’s not here yet, not completely, but enough of it has materialized that we can see it taking shape around us. And when the last few pieces fall into place (cheap HD displays, full digital content distribution, etc.) the resulting impact will far exceed the predictions of even the most enthusiastic evangelists.
Thing is, convergence has a price. If the consumer media industry is going to adopt computer technologies as the core of its business, they have to understand that they are also adopting the computer industry’s economics. Some manufacturers and content providers understand this, others don’t. Similarly, consumers need to understand this same basic rule. As the HDTV business, for one, moves closer to the computer industry, it will perforce have to deal with the same basic economic principles of supply chain management, technology learning curves, component supply competition, and continual technological evolution that rules the PC business.
This is not a pick-n-choose situation - it's all or nothing. The RISC workstation vendors of old (SGI, SUN, etc) failed to learn this lesson. They thought they could keep PC technologies and economic models at bay and leave PCs in the general-purpose desktop computing ghetto forever; that they could both support PCs as clients and at the same time keep them out of the workstation and server space. They couldn’t. Eventually the l’il bitty “under-powered” desktop PCs grew up into the big bully server PCs that are eating away at their markets and are continually forcing the survivors (SUN and IBM, mostly) to run for their lives upstream into the glasshouse domain. For now. ‘Cause already even mainframes are under siege by the commodity hardware products spawned by the PC business. Even their high temple niches are under siege and it’s just a matter of time before the walls are breached once and for all.
The same fate awaits the consumer media industry if they fail to recognize and adapt to the realities of the market that's evolving around us. Much has been made of the threat the music industry faces from online music because of their over-reliance on CD technology and their failure to produce a viable portable digital audio solution internally before the computer industry produced one of its own in MP3s and its kin. That much is well understood by now. More misunderstood is that similar changes are coming to consumer video, starting on the hardware front.
As end-users of this technology, it behooves us all to take a step back and take stock in the market that is taking shape around us so we can make properly informed decisions that suit our needs and our preferences. Because the HDTV market that is emerging is going to be very, very similar to the PC business we should all be familiar with by now. It has been 30 years, after all, since the first PCs came on the market. Most techies out there weren’t even alive when the Altair was first released. The PC business as it now exists is all they know. So if we understand PCs and we adapt and apply some of the basic rules of living in a PC universe to the new realm of HD, we stand a better than average chance of surviving the coming transition to HD.
The “adapt” part, by the way, is because the PC business of today is already a fairly mature business. The products and categories (desktops, laptops, servers, etc.) are well-defined, generally understood by both vendors and consumers, and the various price-points for entry-level, mid-range, and high-end or specialty products are clearly understood. This was not always so. So the PC rules that we can draw upon in the new world of HD are the OLD rules of PC survival from the far ago era of the 1990s.
As we move into the third phase of North American HDTV, broad deployment, we are starting to see examples of both these effects. Adoption to date has been slower than proponents envisioned, while at the same time HDTV is starting to produce some unexpected effects in the movie industry. Specifically, a call among some content providers for simultaneous theater-and-home release of new movies, which threatens theater operators’ revenue, at the same time that we see theaters adapting the emerging digital-theater technologies for closed-circuit auditorium presentations of live events like concerts and sports matches. It is only a matter of time before theatrical plays from Broadway or the London stage start to appear as special live-broadcast events in multiplexes around the world. Think of it as a form of self-defense: as TV-viewing becomes more like movie theaters, the theaters are reacting by becoming more home-theater-like in the range of content they provide. After all, if digital theater technology allows for the transmission of very-high resolution video content for shared public viewing of movies, the same technology allows for the transmission of other forms of shared-viewing experiences.
Welcome to the age of convergence.
Yes, convergence of computer technology and consumer media has been bandied about for so long it’s practically become an urban legend; everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who swears it is really happening, but nobody can vouch for it on a personal basis. Except that, while everybody has been looking for convergence to come rolling into town in a big revolutionary parade, it has quietly crept into our lives bit by bit in an evolutionary fashion. It’s not here yet, not completely, but enough of it has materialized that we can see it taking shape around us. And when the last few pieces fall into place (cheap HD displays, full digital content distribution, etc.) the resulting impact will far exceed the predictions of even the most enthusiastic evangelists.
Thing is, convergence has a price. If the consumer media industry is going to adopt computer technologies as the core of its business, they have to understand that they are also adopting the computer industry’s economics. Some manufacturers and content providers understand this, others don’t. Similarly, consumers need to understand this same basic rule. As the HDTV business, for one, moves closer to the computer industry, it will perforce have to deal with the same basic economic principles of supply chain management, technology learning curves, component supply competition, and continual technological evolution that rules the PC business.
This is not a pick-n-choose situation - it's all or nothing. The RISC workstation vendors of old (SGI, SUN, etc) failed to learn this lesson. They thought they could keep PC technologies and economic models at bay and leave PCs in the general-purpose desktop computing ghetto forever; that they could both support PCs as clients and at the same time keep them out of the workstation and server space. They couldn’t. Eventually the l’il bitty “under-powered” desktop PCs grew up into the big bully server PCs that are eating away at their markets and are continually forcing the survivors (SUN and IBM, mostly) to run for their lives upstream into the glasshouse domain. For now. ‘Cause already even mainframes are under siege by the commodity hardware products spawned by the PC business. Even their high temple niches are under siege and it’s just a matter of time before the walls are breached once and for all.
The same fate awaits the consumer media industry if they fail to recognize and adapt to the realities of the market that's evolving around us. Much has been made of the threat the music industry faces from online music because of their over-reliance on CD technology and their failure to produce a viable portable digital audio solution internally before the computer industry produced one of its own in MP3s and its kin. That much is well understood by now. More misunderstood is that similar changes are coming to consumer video, starting on the hardware front.
As end-users of this technology, it behooves us all to take a step back and take stock in the market that is taking shape around us so we can make properly informed decisions that suit our needs and our preferences. Because the HDTV market that is emerging is going to be very, very similar to the PC business we should all be familiar with by now. It has been 30 years, after all, since the first PCs came on the market. Most techies out there weren’t even alive when the Altair was first released. The PC business as it now exists is all they know. So if we understand PCs and we adapt and apply some of the basic rules of living in a PC universe to the new realm of HD, we stand a better than average chance of surviving the coming transition to HD.
The “adapt” part, by the way, is because the PC business of today is already a fairly mature business. The products and categories (desktops, laptops, servers, etc.) are well-defined, generally understood by both vendors and consumers, and the various price-points for entry-level, mid-range, and high-end or specialty products are clearly understood. This was not always so. So the PC rules that we can draw upon in the new world of HD are the OLD rules of PC survival from the far ago era of the 1990s.
