Who controls the content? It’s the distributors. It’s the major TV and cable channels. Take a look at what happened at Hulu, the Comedy Channel pulled its popular The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. There’s still plenty of content on Hulu, but it’s long tail stuff, old reruns of once popular shows, etc.
You can now watch HBO online, but only if you are a cable TV subscriber.
The distributors control what you can and cannot watch online.
This is why Apple has described Apple TV as a “hobby” because its a limited platform, its limited to what you have on your computer or that can be downloaded from iTunes.
Will things change? It would be great if everything were online, everything ever created, every film, every TV show, everything we see on cable TV could be just an IP address away from our couch.
But that would be incredibly disruptive since we would only pay for what we wanted and nothing else. We wouldn’t be subsidizing sports channels, for example, if we never watch sports.
Pick-and-watch would dramatically lower our bills. And that’s why we won’t get to that utopian world because the TV and cable distributors don’t want to be disrupted. And who can blame them? I certainly don’t like the way the media industry is being disrupted but I’m not in a position to do much about it. They are.
- Please see: Sam Diaz - Google I/O: Introducing Android Froyo and Google TV
