This part of Suite 101 does not want to mingle with broadcast, video, TV, streaming, etc. sections, yet as the time goes by it gets increasingly difficult not to (mingle).
In a "closed" symposium at Cambridge University about "Emerging Broadcast Technology" that I attended, it became apparent that the keyword of each and every speech in this symposium was convergence.
The mediums converge. Internet will be a part of the digital TV experience (and the digital TV will encompass the Internet) to such extent that soon it will be hard to distinguish which one (Internet or digital TV) produced the other. As far as the man on the street is concerned, the TV set will accommodate many new features which, as existing Internet users will know, are derived directly from the Web.
What amazed me most was that the serious talk had to do about content - its management and manipulation to a degree that even technological advancements were giving way to content management and interaction rather than to sound or image "quality." Characteristic example of this is the proposed MPEG4 format. Although it promises many levels of user interaction and advancements in sound and picture quality, when compared to existing MPEG2 format, it's minimal.
My surprise was minimised after listening to the results of this clinical experiment: An independent television company in Britain (Granada, NW England) provided in a small village community all the fancy equipment one can buy for TV viewing and also gave the villagers the opportunity to produce their own content. The people were very interested with the content their friends and neighbours produced but they were totally uninterested about the technology of the equipment. So content is what it is all about.
The Web is currently becoming host to audio content piracy. Many sites worldwide include many files in the mp3 format. This format can contain a five-minute high-quality recording (with the use of a freeware encoder) in 3-4 MB in our hard disk. Hard disks will become the primary storage devices in digital television, but right now in the market one can find mp3 players that include no moving parts, just many megs of memory chips. I am not sure as to whether it's legal to provide direct links to sites that contain mp3 songs but here are two of the best:
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