The Revolution Will Be Televised

Conveniently, there’s a solution, and it’s right under the noses of the TV networks: make TV more like the Internet. In his various Web postings, Cuban has been promoting huge innovations coming in high-definition television, including the arrival of full Web functionality in next-generation TV sets and set-top cable boxes. “If the question is ‘What’s Next,’” he concluded in one, “the answer begins with ‘Watch TV.’” Cuban co-owns a high-definition TV network, and may be accused of self-promotion, but I’m inclined to trust him on this one. This means, as Cuban suggested, embracing TV’s Webby potential: near-infinite choice, the ability to manipulate and share content, deep and meaningful interactivity around professionally produced content, and a savvier, more “open source” strategy about how nonconventional content is allowed onto and promoted on the big screen. New set-top boxes recently announced separately by Comcast and Netflix suggest a strong push to connect TVs to the Web. Web-enabled TV would likely mean a profound loss of control for TV programmers, as the traditional prerogatives of scheduling became increasingly moot, and with them the meaning of “networks,” since most shows would become equally accessible, no matter what network they were affiliated with.

As we move toward a fully on-demand culture (my 6-year-old son literally doesn’t understand why I can’t replay a song he just heard on the radio), TV does need to follow suit, no matter how fashionable that sounds. But it does not have to follow suit on the Internet (or at least not only on the Internet). There is no reason TV itself cannot compete as Cuban’s next-generation version of the Web, offering endless choice (huge stockpiles of movies, entire seasons of TV shows), user editing and sharing capabilities (e.g., sending that Gossip Girl clip you just watched to your friend in Cleveland), playback, storage, and WiFi, whatever. And because the data all flow through the same pipes already, but without the destabilizing influence of the Internet, TV can offer brilliant resolution, even on a flat-screen 60-inch set.

A recent article in the trade publication Multichannel News warned that technical obstacles still prevent realizing this kind of vision, but serious technical problems bedevil Web video, too: as Cuban has been loudly blogging (the emperor has no clothes!), it’s just not satisfying. This means TV has a buffer of a few years to figure out the bandwidth issues, the technical bugaboos, and the business model. But I would sit through ads, and maybe even pay more for cable, if I knew that I had some approximation of a Borgesian library of video content available to me at home—content that I could talk back to, manipulate, and share.

And here’s the final twist. As TV and the Internet converge into something generically known as broadband, the distinctions between the two will soon become nugatory from a consumer point of view. But will this resulting hybrid be more like TV, plus interactivity; or more like the Internet, plus TV? The distinction will be worth billions to whoever gets there first and organizes this mess in a fashion that’s satisfying for consumers. The networks and cable companies, therefore, will need to move quickly to find a way to package the different streams—professional and user-made, broadcast and Internet—into a huge, interactive library, all easily and pleasingly accessible on demand and portable to whatever device people are overpaying for at that moment.

When they do, they can call it Web 3.0, and everyone will want to get it.