Nicholas Reville on the future of online video

I only just found out about it, but on September 14th Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the makers of the Democracy player for Internet TV, wrote an excellent essay called Openness Matters. RSS Can Help. and subtitled The Future of Online Video. Read it here; did I mention that I think it’s excellent?

Hats off to him for often calling it “television” rather than “video”. Where I live, a “video” is now a physical object (DVD or videocassette), while TV is anything watched on the television set that comes in electronically, including a video-on-demand movie or something recorded on a PVR (e.g. TiVO). Internet content falls in the latter category. Furthermore, the Internet is becoming just another source of TV shows. TiVO has been trialling a “TiVO Video Download” service which includes Rocketboom, and is usable by anyone with a Series2 TiVO box who has hooked it up to a broadband connection. (TiVO isn’t available here in Canada, but I understand that many Americans have it, from watching Sex and the City.) And when Apple releases its iTV next year, we may finally see a commercially successful marriage of PCs and TVs. I look forward to watching Ze Frank on my TV set. Even more I look forward to dropping my cable TV subscription and getting all my television directly from the “publishers” over the Internet. (Someday.)