State of Internet TV

 The Cloud knows what you want

This article (TV in the Cloud) is a good companion to the link I posted at the end of my last post.  That article discusses how Google is quietly becoming an online TV powerhouse by directly buying over $100M of their own content for YouTube and supposedly trying to acquire Hulu.

TV in the Cloud is one of the better summaries I've seen recently about the state of online TV recently.  And, I buy Erick Schonfeld's view of social's integration with online TV.  He believes that it will  be useful as a TV guide, showing you what people you know or respect are watching.  This is a logical, concrete and most importantly, likely to be successful step towards integrating social with TV.  But please, no clunky cable-like user interfaces.  It is also worth noting his observation that the TV Industry is still largely resistant to these changes and, importantly, don't seem to understand that online TV is about more than how content is distributed.

If you want to read how that resistance is affecting what you can watch, read this very good article from the Above the Crowd blog about why Netflix changed its pricing structure.  Netflix cracked the code about how to make money with online streaming content when everyone said it was impossible.  Now, everyone (understandably) wants a piece of the pie, even though many of them do not really seem to still understand how to make it work.  What does that mean?  Get used to fracturing in the delivering of content, that is, for the immediate future it seems like you will be looking more places (and paying more providers) for the same type of content you found in one or two portals making it more expensive and more difficult to locate.

Netflix, The Innovator's Dilemma and the Golden Egg