WHAT YOU WANT IS WHAT YOU SEE

The same advantage can apply to digital media content. When media is forwarded, or broadcast, then stored locally, it can be consumed at any time. You can program your local datacaching device—for example, a personal video recorder (PVR) or a PC—to subscribe to content that is of interest, and to create filters to look for specific kinds of content when it is broadcast. You then have a broad selection of content that you want to watch, available on demand, in addition to live synchronous broadcasts and the searchable content of the Internet. Again, it’s a case of WYWIWYS. This fundamental shift is shaking the very foundations of the mass-media empires that have been assembled over the past century. Much of their power flowed from the need for synchronous consumption of media and tight control over the channels of distribution.
In the days when there were only four or five channels, before the home VCR existed, content was fleeting; watching TV was strictly a synchronous experience. And because a handful of programs had to appeal to the masses, the content was typically targeted at the lowest common denominator. These limits on the channels of distribution imposed limits on competition; the mass media evolved into an oligopoly with tight control over distribution and content.
The growth of cable increased programming choices and opened up new opportunities for content creators. But cable franchises were structured as a monopoly, and the industry quickly learned the value of controlling access to these systems. They created new networks to fill up the bandwidth, and restricted access to independent content producers. The gatekeeper mentality was not only preserved, it was strengthened. The concepts behind the Internet created a very different environment for the evolution of digital media. The value of the network is directly proportional to the number of connections, rather than the number of viewers. The Internet supports multiple topologies: many-to-many, many-to-few, and few-to-many. Anyone can become a content creator and distributor on the Internet. If you want to compete with the mass media, however, the trick is in attracting the many. If you only want to reach a highly targeted audience, however, it is relatively easy to succeed. One of the key concepts behind the success of Internet applications such as the World Wide Web is that servers are always on: You can access information on demand. Unfortunately, this is also the biggest problem with the Web. Each thread of information flowing across the Internet backbone is one-to-one; if many people want the same information at the same time, bandwidth is consumed when duplicating the threads. Broadcast techniques such as IP Multicast have been developed for the Internet, but many of the existing routers do not support this protocol. And most consumers do not have the high-speed connections to the Internet that support high-quality video streaming and other forms of rich-media content— yet. Thus, there are significant advantages in using digital broadcast networks (DTV, cable, and DBS) to push popular content to the masses, where it can be stored locally for consumption. In essence this mirrors popular content at the point of consumption—at the edges of the network—freeing up the Internet backbone for other important tasks like transactions, searching, and accessing information that is not for mass consumption. By filtering the content you want from an ocean of bits, WYWIWYS becomes a reality. TEAMFLY