TV services could bring the Internet to its knees, according to a Reuters report:
"The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.
Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks' high-quality delivery of shows.
Does that mean putting a sidebar of Google AdWords on your TV set, next to popular movies and TV series? I can't see consumers welcoming that idea... Maybe you'd just get AdWords when you search for things to watch. (Find earthquakes! Buy earthquakes on eBay.)
Either way, the majority of Internet traffic is now devoted to file-swapping, so the rest of us are paying for the 1% to 10% who take "unlimited broadband" literally. (See What does 'unlimited' mean?) And that's going to become even more problematical when the emphasis shifts from the current downgraded quality of most pirate movies (700MB to 1.35GB per film) to real DVD (4GB+) or HD quality (15GB+).
It could easily turn out to be another "tragedy of the commons". Is that what we want?
Also, of course, there are no copyright payments, DRM restrictions or advertisements with all this "user pirated content", which means there is very little room for commercial download services. As Variety noted recently, Online movies remain a tough sell: all such services have flopped. So far: "the total number of movies sold online is less than Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest sold on its first day of DVD availability."
Perhaps that's just as well. Amazon saves a fantastic amount of bandwidth every time it sticks a few sacks of DVDs in the post.
