The Cin­e­matic Inter­net from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At the Intel Devel­oper Forum Wednes­day I was pulled aside and invited to inter­view Eric B. Kim, an Intel senior vice pres­i­dent and gen­eral man­ager of its Dig­i­tal Home Group. Ear­lier in the day I heard Kim give a keynote talk with Patrick Barry, vice pres­dent of TV for Yahoo!

Kim talks about this sig­nif­i­cant new devel­op­ment in the 11-minute inter­view (above).

Watch it on Our­me­dia (QuickTime)

Watch it on Vimeo (Flash)

Intel is one of the few tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies with the lever­age to pull the major media com­pa­nies (Dis­ney, ABC, Block­buster, CBS Inter­ac­tive, Cinequest, Cin­e­maNow, many oth­ers) and adver­tis­ing agen­cies into this new two-way arena. (See the press release.)

Here’s what I think about all this (and I’m most decid­edly not speak­ing for Intel in any way here.)

Kim’s quote that most stuck out for me was this: “We’re bring­ing tele­vi­sion to the inter­net.” Notice what Kim didn’t say: We’re bring­ing the Inter­net to tele­vi­sion, which has been the approach of the big movie stu­dios until now. (Or, until recently, We’re pre­vent­ing the Inter­net from com­ing to TV.) I don’t know whether Kim’s turn of phrase was inten­tional or not — I sus­pect so — but the dif­fer­ence is a sig­nif­i­cant one.

Tele­vi­sion is now becom­ing a part of the Inter­net uni­verse. Not the oppo­site. The Inter­net is not a sub­set of an enter­tain­ment medium.

The Cin­e­matic Internet

Yahoo’s Barry gave a fas­ci­nat­ing pre­sen­ta­tion about what he var­i­ously called “con­nected tele­vi­sion” and “the cin­e­matic Inter­net.” While my col­leagues in the user-created media space often scoff at the notion that peo­ple will want pro­fes­sion­ally made video in the age of YouTube and other video shar­ing sites, I think there’s no ques­tion that peo­ple will want to watch ama­teur con­tent on their TVs and portable devices, but they will chiefly want to watch high-quality video on their plasma and high-definition televisions.

Barry spoke about “enabling the cin­e­matic Inter­net, merg­ing tele­vi­sion and the Inter­net in a way users will love.” He said, cor­rectly, that over the past 25 years “inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion” hasn’t achieved what it should have achieved. It’s been, frankly, a nov­elty (a kind word mean­ing: a bust). And it has failed, in my view, because it has been in the hands of mar­keters and busi­ness func­tionar­ies with no grasp of what serves the needs of view­ers. (“Want to buy the dress Jen­nifer Anis­ton is wear­ing?” Please.)

Barry smartly iden­ti­fied the chief tele­vi­sion val­ues we’ve seen over the past 50 years:

• ease of use
• reli­a­bil­ity
• high fidelity (pro­fes­sional quality)
• enter­tain­ment

He then laid out the con­trast­ing Inter­net val­ues we’ve come to cher­ish — and now are com­ing to expect in our con­sumer elec­tron­ics devices (thank you, iPhone, Archos and other trend-setters):

• per­son­al­iza­tion
• com­mu­nity
• rel­e­vance
• open­ness

Said Barry: “The ethic of the Inter­net, we think, is crit­i­cal to bring to the tele­vi­sion expe­ri­ence. Open­ness is a fun­da­men­tal value of the Inter­net that’s been com­pletely absent from the tele­vi­sion experience.”

Well said.

A Pow­er­point slide drove home this point. Con­sumer elec­tron­ics has evolved this way

• 1.0 ana­log tv
• 2.0 dig­i­tal TV
• 3.0 Inter­net connected

“The Inter­net changes the game.”

Barry described the the “wid­get chan­nel frame­work” in a way that empha­sized its openness:

• open­ness is a huge dri­ver of growth and innovation
• free and fair access for developers
• cre­ates user choice

Open access

The fight is not yet over. We still won’t be able to pro­gram our own Web shows on these devices for a few years (at least I’m skep­ti­cal), despite Intel and Yahoo’s embrace of an open media stan­dard. Com­cast is not yet ready to give up con­trol over the con­tent com­ing into our liv­ing rooms. But we will pre­vail, and fairly soon. Open­ness is a prime direc­tive of the Inter­net, and the stu­dios will be able to hold back the tide for only so long. Now the chal­lenge is to get more high-quality con­tent pro­duced for the Web.

This devel­op­ment was, in the end, inevitable. But it wasn’t always obvi­ous that the Inter­net would win. Fol­low­ing is some con­text of how far we’ve come over the past three years.

The media pow­ers’ grip on con­trol loosens

In my 2005 book Dark­net, I inter­viewed War­ren Lieber­farb, the man respon­si­ble for the DVD. The chap­ter is tem­porar­ily unavail­able on the Inter­net Archive (update: It’s back online here: Hollywood’s vision­ary out­cast), but I think some key excerpts deserve repub­li­ca­tion here:

Hol­ly­wood looks at inter­ac­tive media as an oppor­tu­nity to shop or upsell mer­chan­dise, but the stu­dios get ner­vous about true inter­ac­tiv­ity because they lose con­trol over the enter­tain­ment experience.

War­ren Lieber­farb, the vision­ary for­mer head of Warner Home Video, thinks it won’t be long before we’ll be able to pur­chase and store our  own per­sonal col­lec­tion of movies and trans­port it from device to device, any­where within an extended home domain.

“I see a very, very, very big trans­for­ma­tion that’s going to change the bal­ance of power in media,” he says, choos­ing his words with care. “It will step away from the broad­cast and cable net­works to spe­cial­ized niche pro­gram­ming that will be acces­si­ble through on-demand ser­vices. That is the rev­o­lu­tion. And noth­ing is going to stop this.” …

“All this is going to bypass the broad­cast and cable net­works,” he says. “The whole notion that you sit at a tele­vi­sion at a des­ig­nated time and you tune in to watch what they say you watch—it’s over. It’s going to take a while, but it’s over.”

Just as the Inter­net and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of low-cost dig­i­tal tools have reshaped other media, so the new tech­nolo­gies will trans­form our notion of tele­vi­sion. A few years from now, when you say “tele­vi­sion,” it may no longer be syn­ony­mous with the box in your liv­ing room because you also will be watch­ing it on your hand­held mobile device or tablet PC. “What’s on TV” may no longer be syn­ony­mous with net­work and cable pro­gram­ming because you’ll be able to access video feeds from a wide range of new con­tent providers. When you do watch tele­vi­sion in your liv­ing room, you’ll still wield a remote con­trol, but you may be watch­ing it on a stand-alone dig­i­tal box or one that’s hooked up to a media-center device or wire­lessly con­nected to a PC, giv­ing you the power to pull niche mate­r­ial from a gush­ing fire hose of sources.

“Peo­ple are going to dis­cover that con­tent doesn’t have to be pro­duced by the major media com­pa­nies,” Lieber­farb says. …

Lieber­farb is not say­ing the old order of Big Media pro­gram­ming will be over­thrown by a cabal of camcorder-wielding Young Turks. But he is say­ing that the major media com­pa­nies will no longer exer­cise exclu­sive con­trol over what Amer­i­cans watch on TV.

“There is this atti­tude in the media indus­try that we’re the ones that make the big-time media that peo­ple want. Yet it’s always been dark horses that the estab­lish­ment didn’t see that have cre­ated the changes in the media land­scape. HBO was a dark horse. CNN was a dark horse. ESPN was a dark horse. So were VCRs. And the techno­pho­bia in the media indus­try, the resis­tance to chang­ing busi­ness mod­els, the gut instinct to use their monop­oly power to extract finan­cial benefits—all this will not serve the media com­pa­nies well in the com­ing era.” …

For­mi­da­ble busi­ness inter­ests will oppose a mass roll­out of eas­ily acces­si­ble on-demand media for the pub­lic because it threat­ens their exist­ing busi­ness mod­els, Lieber­farb says. In the years ahead, ver­ti­cally inte­grated media com­pa­nies will use their mar­ket­place dom­i­nance and their clout in Con­gress, the reg­u­la­tory agen­cies, and the courts in an effort to main­tain their role as exclu­sive inter­me­di­aries, as gate­keep­ers of infor­ma­tion and entertainment.

“That’s why I think audio­vi­sual media, avail­able online on demand, will take place from the edge”—here he holds his hands wide apart—“and not from the cen­ter of the media indus­try. Change is not going to come from the media con­glom­er­ates that have too much at stake in pro­tect­ing the sta­tus quo.” …

How to put television’s pieces back together? We need to arrive at a new place of user par­tic­i­pa­tion and inter­ac­tion. The tools are at hand: a con­verged cable TV and Inter­net gate­way that lets sub­scribers pay a small monthly fee (80 per­cent of Amer­i­cans already pay for cable TV or satel­lite) in return for a high-speed free­way ramp con­nect­ing us to hun­dreds of niche video chan­nels cre­ated by entre­pre­neurs, ama­teurs, and inde­pen­dent professionals.

Will the com­pa­nies con­trol­ling the pipes into our houses also con­trol what comes through it? Will they con­tinue to be our visual gate­keep­ers? “No,” Lieber­farb says firmly. “Peo­ple will be able to access any Web sites deliv­er­ing movies and video.”

We are not there yet, but we are get­ting tan­ta­liz­ingly close.

In Dark­net, I also wrote about the Intel vice pres­i­dent who broke fed­eral law (and why the law is bro­ken) — it’s online here.

I wrote about Hollywood’s efforts to lock down dig­i­tal tele­vi­sions with weapons such as “cer­ti­fi­ca­tion” and “renewability”—new forms of copy con­trol that are about to enter the liv­ing room by stealth. It’s online here.

An impor­tant chap­ter looked at how the tech and con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­tries got­ten too cozy with Hol­ly­wood (online here), a dal­liance that this new devel­op­ment sig­nals may be com­ing to an end.

Also: The life and death of Replay TV, the orig­i­nal upstart in the dig­i­tal video wars.

And a hat tip to Intel — because it’s impor­tant for peo­ple to know who their allies are. Wrote this in Dark­net four sum­mers ago:

On the major pub­lic pol­icy issues of the dig­i­tal age, the high-tech indus­try has splin­tered into dif­fer­ent fac­tions. Some hard­ware mak­ers such as Intel, for instance, oppose the law that makes pick­ing dig­i­tal locks a fed­eral crime regard­less of the cir­cum­stances. Intel also filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Eric Eldred and fought gal­lantly in late 2004 against the anti-innovation INDUCE Act. And it hosted a Dig­i­tal Rights Sum­mit to shine a spot­light on the threats posed to innovation.

In just three years, we’ve come a long way. But still have miles to go.

What I like about broadband-enabled tele­vi­sion is that this is no longer a mar­ket­ing con­cept. It’s real tech­nol­ogy — and it works.

The point I think a lot of com­men­ta­tors have missed about Intel’s
efforts in this area is this: per­son­al­ized tele­vi­sion will give us a
large degree of con­trol over our media expe­ri­ence — some­thing that was
decid­edly miss­ing in past exper­i­ments with “inter­ac­tive TV.” You want
to view your con­tent (not NBC’s or CNN’s) on your TV set? Go right
ahead.

We’ve been able to do that — to some degree — by jump­ing through a
num­ber of tech­no­log­i­cal hoops that most peo­ple won’t bother with.
Cin­e­matic tele­vi­sion has the poten­tial to change the game in a way that
other broad­band tele­vi­sion solu­tions (like Apple TV) sim­ply don’t.

Don’t pay much atten­tion to the mar­ket­ing jar­gon: cin­e­matic tele­vi­sion
is a mis­nomer — there’s noth­ing cin­e­matic about your Flickr pho­tos,
Twit­ter feed or favorite sports teams — but it is an impor­tant step
for­ward into the era of Inter­net tele­vi­sion. (This is not your father’s Web TV.)

Related cov­er­age:

USA Today: Intel, Yahoo part­ner on Internet-TV wid­get project.

Yahoo blog: The Cin­e­matic Inter­net is com­ing to a liv­ing room near you.

How much more would you love your TV if you could mon­i­tor your eBay auc­tions, keep tabs on the 5-day weather fore­cast, and check the score of the Giants game — all at the same time you are watch­ing the new sea­son of “ER”?

Yahoo Con­nected TV: Intro­duc­ing the Cin­e­matic Internet.

In a skep­ti­cal post, Matt Gris­wold has this: Yahoo and Intel Unveil “Cin­e­matic Internet.”

Bonus: We got a chance to pre­view some coo­lio gad­gets pow­ered by Intel chips: MIDs (a bit big­ger than PDAs) and Net­books (these are Internet-enabled hand­held devices a bit smaller than note­books) like the Medion by Akoya, the Eee PC, the Acer and the Sharp Will­com. Most of these will first roll out in Europe.

Also, here are some pho­tos I snapped with my cell phone of the doings at the Devel­oper Forum.

Dis­clo­sure: I’m a mem­ber of the recently formed Intel Insid­ers con­sult­ing group.

Cross-posted to Darknet.com.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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