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The future of television

May 2002

Television was one of the great success stories of the 20^th century. It took decades before it was clear what people wanted from it as it gradually became less of a formal platform and more an entertainment medium.

Current technology limits affordable screen area to typically one percent of the field of view, and to just audio visual stimulation. We are quite some way from the Star Trek Holodeck with fully convincing full sensory immersion. Large flat screens will soon hang on our living room walls, though budget constraints will still mean most homes will still have screens less than a metre across for some time. Visual immersion is unlikely outside of goggles until after 2020, by which time we will hopefully be able to afford a small room with fully polymer-screen-lined walls and maybe 3D, with the appropriate bandwidth to drive them with acceptable resolution. In this room, we will be able to escape into our fantasy world, just like Captain Picard.

Polymer screens may eventually win out, but the battle will be fought in various niches between a wide range of screen technologies, plasma and bonded LCD panels being the two strongest current contenders. Screens that are primarily TV screens will have many other uses, especially if they hang on walls. They can act as virtual fish tanks, displays for electronic paintings downloaded from galleries around the world, virtual windows showing real-time views out onto a Bahamas beach, or act as life size video communications panels to allow people to share a cup of coffee across the oceans.

But whatever the display technology, digital TV will certainly be the norm soon, and has already captured much of the market . On the back of digitisation, interactivity, indexing, choice of view and commentary, associated information, and video capture and manipulation will make television more interesting. All of these add some flexibility and information depth, but the biggest advantage of making TV digital in the long term will be its integration into the computer world. The argument over whether computers will be integrated into TVs or vice versa are mostly over. Both have happened as costs have fallen. For example, both are used to watch DVDs.

What is less clear is what will happen next. With digital TV set top boxes having high computing capability, providing internet access, games, email, home shopping and information, what is the incentive for a home without a conventional computer to buy one? By contrast, homes with computers and TVs with their sophisticated set top boxes may still use their computers for the more computery things and TVs for watching TV. There may be a strong cultural split in the market.

Interestingly, although most advances in digital technology have been driven by improving computer technology, one of the most significant changes for the internet may come from the TV world. Digital video recorders are maturing into home media servers, and these will act as a massive data store for all information appliances in the home, especially TV and computer equipment. These machines will happily record TV programmes from satellite and terrestrial TV networks, but are just as capable of being fed by DVDs or local networks. As DVD capacity increases (holographic or fluorescent disks may hold up to half a terabyte of data!), they will be an attractive alternative distribution medium for TV. With smart filters and profiling emerging rapidly, the home media server will be able to provide most of the pages that the user wants to access, so thus will greatly speed up access time. They will have so much storage capacity that they can easily hold most of the really useful and relevant stuff for each of the household members. Real time internet traffic might be reduced so much by such local caching that its performance increases markedly too, so the few sites that change rapidly can easily be accessed quickly too. Such storage based networking is already being developed. Caches may be filled by using spare network capacity as well as periodic updates on ultra-high capacity disks, on the front of internet magazines. Half a terabyte is a lot of web pages.

Indeed it is likely that the internet and TV will simply converge, with TV being just another internet service, with all the search facilities, indexing, chat forums and, most importantly world-wide access to any channel, (obviously subject to local laws, subscriptions etc). This will open up the global TV market while giving people what they want, rather than just what happens to be shown on a few local channels. Computer agents will be able to organise passive viewing to our taste, acting as assemblers for virtual channels. The agent may appear to the viewer as a friendly face with a friendly personality behind it, that may also have responsibility for non-TV tasks too, such as shopping around. With sufficient intelligence, the agent itself may become part of the entertainment, playing live music that it writes in real time, or taking us on a guided teletravel expedition. With adequate indexing and sufficient computer intelligence, it will one day be possible for agents to assemble customised programmes on a particular theme that may not previously have existed.

With an infinite number of potential channels, it will be possible to sit and watch traffic jams in your local town, or remotely sit in at a council meeting, as well as watching any of the many coffee percolators on the internet. Remotely accessing video cameras has many trivial uses, but also allows more useful activities such as allowing parents to check on their children at playgroup. Certainly, community TV is likely to grow.

Surprisingly perhaps, computer games are rapidly becoming a spectator activity just like sport and we may see all the same trappings becoming associated with them, such as premier leagues etc. Watching other everyday activities has already proven successful TV viewing in the many real life docusoaps, and these will evolve well into the internet and digital TV.

However, what these mostly point to is that people are content. When we have catered for our basic survival needs, socialising is the next most important human activity and is the primary driver for many platforms. The internet was originally constructed to allow sharing of scientific information. When it matures we will find that the bulk of human use is socialisation. Whether machines talking to machines will dominate even over this remains to be seen.

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