I work for a television company. When I started at Comcast three years ago, I was really in the dark about just how competitive television and film would become. Sure, lots of people were beating their chests, rooting for Hulu like the G.E.-owned product was some kind of underdog, but then Comcast bought that. Aside from Netflix’s efforts with streaming video — something I love watching on my HDTV via my Xbox 360 — there weren’t really any other companies really trying to make hay online.
How times have changed. Just as Comcast jumped in the pool with Fancast Xfinity TV, so has everyone else. The basic concept was always simple, but how do you get your television to play nice with the Internet? There are pesky rights issues! That seems to be changing, too. Now that companies like Google and Apple are involved, you can bet that it’s going to be all out war and consumers may come out winners.
But is it too much noise? Let’s talk about music for just a second. Think back about, oh, two years. Remember when every Tom, Dick, and Harry jumped into streaming music online. It was a veritable bonanza. The services may have been wonky and were likely incomplete, but users could cobble together a pretty extensive online music library that as totally legit. Flash back to the present: effective this weekend, the number of full length free streaming on-demand music services will be zero.
Maybe it’ll be different this time and we’ll all be living in a la carte utopia in just a year or two. It’s great that some of the big technology players like Google and Apple are in the mix. You know them for their most products, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that both of them have armies of lawyers who are trying to gain any toehold they can against the big cable providers. Ultimately, it pushes everyone in the right direction and we will all reap the benefits.