With each day the future of TV gets brighter… The content may not be directly from Primetime, but it’s quality stuff and is a major move from a major player – AOL Time Warner. They’ve clearly been thinking about how to manage things across divisions and have a plan to appease the DVD release teams as well as the online groups. Is this actually corporate synergy from within AOLTW?
The company will offer a changing selection of several hundred episodes each month, rather than providing continuous access to all the episodes in a series, Mr. Frankel said, so as not to cannibalize potential DVD sales of old TV shows.
And in the future, when Warner negotiates with cable networks to syndicate popular programs, Mr. Frankel said, the price will be higher if the network wants it kept off the Internet.
For AOL, the In2TV deal is part of a broad strategy to create a range of video offerings to attract people to its free AOL.com portal. It already offers some video news and sports programs from CBS News, ABC and CNN.
…
AOL will offer a version of the service meant to be watched on a television set connected to a Windows Media Center PC, and it is exploring a similar arrangement to link the Internet programming to television through TiVo video recorders.
For those who want to watch on a big screen, AOL is introducing optional technology that it says will produce a DVD-quality picture. Even with a broadband connection, most Internet video looks grainy at full width on a computer monitor, let alone a big TV set. The new option, called AOL Hi-Q, will require the downloading once of special software, and the program may not start for several minutes, depending on the speed of the users’ connection.
There is a catch. To use the technology, viewers will have to agree to participate in a special file-sharing network. This approach helps AOL reduce the cost of distributing-high quality video files by passing portions of the video files from one user’s computer to another. AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems.
AOL is using file-sharing technology from Kontiki, a Silicon Valley company providing a similar system to the ambitious Internet video program of the BBC. [New York Times]
I had previously suggested the use of P2P networks like Bit Torrent and Kontiki as a way to better ease distribution against demand it looks like AOL is rolling this out to deliver a higher quality buffered stream!! I look forward to giving this a shot as it becomes live… assuming of course it’s not some Windows IE only BS like what Viacom has been offering with MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central.
technorati tags: In2TV, AOL, VOD, Video, Kontiki, Bit Torrent
One Reply to “In2TV? AOL has your fix”