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The Future of Television: What’s on Next

Bosses in the television industry have been keeping a nervous eye on two Scandinavians with a reputation for causing trouble. In recent years Niklas Zennstrom, a Swede, find Janus Friis, aDane, have frightened the music industry by inventing KaZaA, a "peer-to-peer" (P2P) file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it. Then they horrified the mighty telecoms industry by inventing Skype, another P2P program, which lets Internet users make free telephone calls between computers, and very cheap calls to ordinary phones. Their next move was to found yet another start-up -- this time ,one that threatened to devastate(毁坏) the television industry.
It may do the opposite, as it turns out. The new service, called Joost and now in advanced testing, is based on P2P software that runs on people’s computers, just like Skype and KaZaA、And it does indeed promise to transform the experience of watching television by combining what people like about old-fashioned TV with the exciting possibilities of the Internet. "But unlike KaZaA、and Skype," says Fredrik de Wahl, a Swede whom Mr. Zennstrom and Friis have hired as Joost’s boss," Joost does not disrupt the industry that it is entering. Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, Joost might, as it were, give them new juice. "
That is because Mr. de Wahl and his Joost team, working mostly in the Netherlands, have bravely ignored the totems (图腾) of the Internet-video boom.Chief among these fashions is letting users upload anything they want to a video service -- which might include clips of themselves doing odd things (" user-generated content") or, more questionably, videos pirated from other sources. The celebrated example of this approach is You Tube, which is now part of Google, the leader in Internet search. Its big problem, however, is that it can be illegal (if copyright is violated) and terribly hard to turn into a business.
On February 2nd Viacom, anAmerican media giant, became the latest company to demand that YouTube remove copyright-infringing (侵犯版权的) clips from its website. YouTube has struck deals with some media firms, including NBC、andCBS, to allow their material to appear on its site, and had been trying to thrash out a similar agreement with Viacom. Many observers regard Viacom’s move as a negotiating tactiC、But whether YouTube can make money is unclear. Last monthChad Hurley, YouTube’s chief executive, sketched out plans for generating advertising revenues and sharing them with content providers, but so far his firm has none to speak of.
The Innovation of Joost
Joost is also ignoring the two business models seen as the most respectable alternatives to advertising. One is to make users pay for each television show or film they download, but then to let them keep it. This is the tack chosen byApple, an electronics firm that sells videos on iTunes, its popular online store; byAmazon, the largest online retailer; and by Wal-Mart, the largest traditional retailer, which launched a video-download service this week. The other approach is to let users subscribe to what is, in effect, an all-you-can-eat buffet of videos, and then to" stream" video to their computers without leaving a permanent copy. This is the approach taken by, for instance, Netflix, aCalifornian firm that mostly deliversDVDs to its subscribers by post, but now also streams films.
The reason that Joost is ignoring all of these methods, says Mr. de Wahl, is that none has much to do with the experience of simply watching TV, which most people enjoy. "Unlike the download or streaming approaches, "he says, "TV is not about buying today what you want to watch tomorrow. It’s about turning it on and watching. "And in contrast to the" lean-forward" context of "snacking" on a YouTube clip in one’s cubicle while the boss has stepped out, TV is a longer and