This should be categorized as “Stating the Obvious.”
At Costco today, I was struck by two things. The first was how cheap the huge, flat-panel HD TVs have become (a gigantic Mitsubishi LCD was $2000). The second was how horrible the picture quality was.
The incumbent video delivery industries are focused on moving to “HD” standards. In the short term, this means “highly compressed with lots of artifacts” - see, for example, Comcast HD. In the very long term, the compression problems may go away as equipment gets better and as more bandwidth is dedicated to HD services. But “HD” standard screen resolutions are pretty well set in stone and aren’t going to change for a long, long time.
On the other hand, in the very short term, display technology will allow much higher resolution displays at ever decreasing cost. Similarly, video recording and digital editing equipment will allow higher and higher resolutions at consumer-level costs. As Internet bandwidth increases and drops in price, it can easily address the video quality problem on all fronts - less compression needed as a full connection is dedicated to one or two video signals, quicker adoption of new, better compression technology as software upgrades are immediately available and expected, and higher resolutions to match cheap, high-quality displays (by leveraging increased bandwidth and improved compression methods). By comparison, “standard” equipment with set resolutions and set video codecs will age very quickly and not very gracefully.
Those who are used to standards staying the same for decades will stick with “HD” and think it’s great. Meanwhile, a disruption should occur - consumer-grade video quality will outstrip the capabilities of “pro” equipment, and that high quality video will only be viewable on “non-standard” systems - ultra-high resolution monitors connected to the Internet, instead of a standard “high def” TV connected to cable or satellite.
Yes, this means that in the future we’ll have ultra-high-visual-quality videos with bad lighting and horrible content a-la YouTube. But it also means that the cable TV and satellite TV services need to move quickly to video over IP to avoid disruption. These days, a data service that is dedicated to providing only video makes about as much sense as running another cable to your house to provide MapQuest service.
I’m stating the obvious - the cable and satellite companies surely see video over IP on the horizon - but hey, stating the obvious is what blogs are for. I’m just doing my part.
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