Future of Television

Television as we know it is changing. Even in the last few years with easy ways of recording your programs and watching them later, the experience has changed. In the future television is going to be a completely different experience compared to today's model.

One model that television might become is the Hulu model. That is where television shows are put up for a few weeks to watch on demand streaming them from the internet. There will be no need to tape anything as the content will be available for a certain period of time. Hulu has hinted that they may add a subscription service for the shows. Instead of paying a cable company for television, you may end up with an on demand system that works much like Hulu. These can be supported by the advertisements that are in them just like it does on television. This is one option for the future of television especially as broadband and internet speeds get faster.

Other future options might be torrents. Torrents are typically seen as shady and illegal. There is nothing illegal about torrents as you can have legal content as well as illegal content downloaded via a torrent.

Currently networks are having a hard time fighting illegal torrents. People tape the show, strip out the commercials, and put them online. With certain shows like Lost millions of people watch the torrent version of the show. In the future networks might take advantage of this and try to make some money off this. They could release the official torrent with some commercials in it. Most people would probably download the legal version because the illegal one isn't worth losing your connection of being sued to just skip a few commercials in the content. This is a very easy way to distribute content without worrying about bandwidth issues since torrents share bandwidth with users versus using a server.