We Could Be The Peasants, Storming The Bastille Of Media: The Internet TV Tuner

The Internet tuner or something very much like it will do for audiovisual media what the Web did for print - make it immediately accessible from anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Because of the Web, libraries are transforming from repositories of knowledge into centers where people come to be pointed toward online repositories.

The library is evolving into a physically constituted Google. Although some libraries view the Web as a new form of competition, the wisest have also learned how to adapt to the wealth of Internet-based information available through them, adding context to content. The same will be true for Internet-based audiovisual distribution. The world we're heading into isn't an either/or, but a concatenation of "and"s. This and this and this and this and this, ad infinitum.

In that sense, it doesn't matter that there are competitors for this proposed-but-as-yet-still-quite-mythical Internet tuner. In fact, it will work to the tuner's advantage." Unfortunately, Mark Pesce, sees also too much TV and that is why he also adds this evidently striding statements:

"Copyright holders will not release DRM-free versions of their content onto the Internet, because they have already experienced what pirates will do with unencrypted movie files.

While DRM systems can have flexible "policies" which allow for a wide range of possible uses of accessible media files, copyright holders tend toward extreme paranoia with respect to digital technologies. DRM inevitably sacrifices the flexibility of the digital medium on the altar of commerce. Nonetheless, the Internet tuner must have a complete, flexible and strong DRM capability, with a well-integrated micropayments system. Without these two basic architectural components, the Internet tuner would remain a curiosity, lacking the branded content that people have grown to expect from television."

Here where the idea could have soared into higher skies, it splat down on the floor dragged by principles and mechanisms we are likely going to abandon. For such a revolutionary and potentially disrupting idea, there is no home in the past rules and ways of thinking.

However crazy or impossible this may seem to be, the Internet tuner will have meaning only when we will abel to treat and generate content that can be freely re-used and syndicated in a much similar way to the RSS syndicated content approach we are seeing emerge today.