Saturday, September 25, 2004

BeyondTV - Version 4

An Electronic Programming Guide would be made up of what is on your machine, which can be viewed by subject and date; individual videos could be locked, that is moved out of the download cache (and quota). Download on demand would be available for all old content on the web, thus building up a huge archive of alt-media and keeping it available for posterity.

Plugin’s for digital rights management

  • Microsoft
  • Apple
  • Hollywood
  • Premium TV channels
  • And other 3rd parties

These would allow revenue from advertising and pay per-view, for distribution this would also open up the project to a much more mainstream audience. The mainstream media and software producers will have problems catching up with the P2P technology we are using as they have not invested and do not have expertise in this area, thus if we take a good lead they will have no choice but to play catch up and follow with technically inferior products. The quality of content will probably be low as well, as the better producers will be slow to accept the “open distribution models” that P2P embodies. So the production values of commercial video will be low for the growth period of the project.

Together with the continuing endemic widespread piracy of “high quality commercial video”, conventional media producers will find it very hard to operate in a market where they have little or no control of the scarsity which is at the base of their model for profit in their production and distribution.

We technically outreach them, and commercially undermine them; in this way we attempt to break the current media monopolies.